Title: Indian-Americans
use cash to aid 'motherland'
Author: Ben Barber The
Washington Times
Source: http://www.washtimes.com
Indian-Americans, who
now hold 40 percent of high-tech jobs in Silicon Valley and the Washington
area, are pouring money into political campaigns and helping change the
shape of U.S. relations with India, where President Clinton will
visit next month.
The growing clout of
Indian-Americans, who collectively earned $60 billion in California's Silicon
Valley last year, is partly responsible for a recent tilt in America's
foreign policy away from Cold War ally Pakistan and toward India, officials
and analysts say.
"Like all Americans participating
in politics, American-Indians are now sufficiently mature to advocate for
their motherland much as the Jews became capable advocates for Israel,"
said Rep. Gary Ackerman, New York Democrat and chairman of the 118-member
Congressional Caucus on India and Indian Americans.
Of an estimated 1 million
Indian-Americans nationwide, about 80,000 to 100,000 live in the Washington
area, mainly linked to high-tech corridors in Virginia and Maryland.
Indian-Americans contribute
both to Democrats, such as Mr. Ackerman and President Clinton, and
to Republicans, such as Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Senate
Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms of North Carolina.
Mr. Helms, a staunch
backer of anti-communist Pakistan when it hosted anti-Soviet Afghan refugees
in the 1980s, now tends to view India with a newfound sympathy and understanding,
congressional sources say.
Mark Lagon, Mr.
Helms' senior foreign policy aide, said Wednesday at a Georgetown University
forum that the United States should drop sanctions on India, imposed after
Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests in 1998, but he did not offer such largess
to Pakistan.
Swadesh Chatterjee, president
of the Indian-American Forum for Political Education, has met with Mr.
Helms and, according to congressional sources, opened him up to a new view
of India.
During the Cold War,
India was both anti-Western and a big Soviet arms customer. It has
since begun to reform its quasi-socialist economy, and the United States
has become its main trading partner.
Some U.S. strategic
thinkers also find India increasingly valuable as a long-term counterbalance
to the growth of Chinese influence in Asia.
Indian-Americans, who
have only recently begun to feel at home enough to become politically active,
were briefly frightened away from activism after scandals involving foreign
contributions to Mr. Clinton's 1996 re-election campaign, a congressional
source said.
Indian-American lawyer
Lalit Gadhia was sentenced to three months in jail after he admitted funneling
money from an Indian diplomat into U.S. political campaigns.
Chinese government cash was also suspected of being laundered through Chinese-Americans.
However, those scandals
have since faded, and the profile of Indian-American political activity
appears to be increasing in a long-term trend apart from U.S. election
cycles. Indian-American businessmen, for example, met with White
House aides Thursday to discuss joining the president on his March 19-26
trip to India. Mr. Clinton will include a one-day visit to
Bangladesh sandwiched between longer stops in India, but has not yet announced
whether he will stop in Pakistan.
A prominent Pakistani-American
Thursday told The Washington Times that Mr. Clinton, in an effort to prop
up pro-Western forces in Pakistan, would make a brief stop at Lahore airport
at the end of his trip to India.
This was denied by Deputy
Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, who said in an interview, "The decision
has not yet been made."
Pakistani officials also
disputed a report in The Times on Wednesday that the U.S. Secret
Service was against a presidential visit to Pakistan because it believed
Muslim militants had infiltrated Pakistan's Inter Service Intelligence
(ISI) agency.
"I can deny that ISI
is infiltrated by extremist groups," said Zameer Akram, deputy chief of
the Pakistan Embassy. "Senior administration officials apologized .
. . for the leak [to The Times]," Mr. Akram said.
About 300,000 Indian-Americans
work in high-technology firms in California's Silicon Valley, where they
earned $60 billion last year, Stanford University economist Rafiq Dossani
told a forum at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)
Thursday. They are beginning to funnel their incomes, which average
$200,000 a year, into southern India's high-technology boom, already surpassing
its export industry as a source of foreign cash, he said.
Nationwide, Indian-American
income averages $60,000, according to the 1990 census, higher than any
other Asian immigrant group.
The Silicon Valley Idian-Americans
are owners and managers as well as technicians, and they are creating more
than 15 percent of high-tech startups, Mr. Dossani said.
They are also turning
their economic clout into political force, Mr. Dossani said. They
are urging Mr. Clinton to grant additional work visas to Indian software
workers, an issue likely to be on the agenda of Indian Prime Minister Atal
Behari Vajpayee on Mr. Clinton's visit to New Delhi.
A source linked to the
congressional Caucus on India said that when militants from Pakistan attacked
Indian troops in Kashmir last spring at Kargil, the Indian-American community
lashed out with its new political clout.
"On Kargil, the Indian-American
community was fired up," the source said. "They flooded the congressional
offices with faxes, e-mail, telephone calls and personal visits."
The House International
Relations Committee later passed a resolution blaming Pakistan for the
events in Kargil.
Michael T. Clark,
executive director of the U.S.-India Business Council, said that the Silicon
Valley Indians are following a much larger wave of political activity by
Indian-Americans across the country who have contributed to political candidates.
Indian-Americans were
at first divided into groups based on their origin in India but are gradually
forming larger associations.
"We are not as well organized
as AIPAC [the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee]," the congressional
source said. "We do not know who is giving what to who and when.
At the moment, we do not even have a real Washington office or presence."
An important test of
Indian-Americans' growing clout is the effort to separate India's relations
with America from those of Pakistan.
Mr. Talbott noted
that there was strong support in the administration for "delinking" India
and Pakistan and allowing a decision on a trip to India to be made independently
of one on Pakistan.
"We believe both countries
when each wants to be treated in its own light," Mr. Talbott said
at the CSIS forum Thursday. "Very much in that light the president will
make his decision on his itinerary."
