When MAGA activist Laura Loomer railed against “third-world invaders from India” coming to America at the close of last year, her comments sounded like fringe rhetoric.
But following the worst rupture in U.S.-India relations in a quarter century this summer, a fresh wave of anti-Indian sentiment has swept across the new right — fueled by anger over outsourced jobs, prejudice and envy of America’s highest earning ethnic minority.
But the recent turn against India and Indians also owes to another problem hiding in plain sight: severe underinvestment in building the institutions needed to sustain the rapidly growing U.S.-India partnership.
Indian Americans are uniquely suited to address this challenge at a time when a stronger U.S.-India relationship is the best chance to counter the momentous threats each faces from China.
On the face of it, the idea that American civil society is unprepared to support U.S.-India relations is counterintuitive.
Indians are now the second-largest foreign-born nationality in the United States after Mexicans, and the largest foreign source of college students in America today. It would be hard to avoid people-to-people encounters with Indians and Indian Americans even if you tried.
Yet the lion’s share of this exchange goes only one way, and very few resources are devoted to helping the two nations understand each other.
The number of American students who study in India is pitiable, even controlling for college students’ perennial desire to backpack across Europe in study abroad programs. In the 2022-2023 academic year, India trailed even Ghana, South Africa and Ecuador in receiving American students for study abroad.
Hindi is the world’s third most spoken language behind English and Chinese but ahead of Spanish.
A query of the Modern Language Association’s Language Enrollment Database shows Hindi was studied by a paltry 1,700 American university students in the most recent year for which there is data, dwarfed by languages with a fraction of speakers, like Korean, Russian and Modern Hebrew.
English may be spoken by much of India’s elite, but the English Proficiency Index, an independent survey, finds that English penetration in South Korea, Russia and Israel all still outstrip India.
Whereas East Asian study centers are standard fixtures of American universities, South Asian equivalents are rarities. Although Washington think tanks are bursting with experts on Europe, the Middle East and Asia, the world’s most populous country and soon-to-be third largest economy is covered by a small clique of insular experts.
The existing gap in institutions is part of the reason why India and the United States are infamous for letting preventable misunderstandings sabotage severely-needed cooperation in everything from tech, to trade, to defense.
This institutional deficit is no longer sustainable — not only because of rising anti-Indian hate domestically, but also because no bilateral relationship is more critical to addressing the defining geopolitical challenge of our era, as China poses grave threats to both India and the United States.
There are proven models to work from to fix the problem. Though the United States’ close friendship with Japan and Germany looks predetermined today, it was anything but evident in the wake of mass bloodshed on opposite sides of the Second World War.
Regularly convening business, political and media elites through American philanthropic-funded organizations like the American Council on Germany and the Atlantik-Brücke proved transformative in the case of Germany, as did the Japan Society and the House of Japan for Japan.
Although American public support for Israel today is rapidly deteriorating, a constellation of Jewish American efforts to strengthen U.S.-Israel ties had been highly visible for decades.
A politically diverse ecosystem of dedicated Jewish American publications has refined networks of thought on the bilateral relationship. Programs like Taglit’s Birthright Israel have turbocharged people-to-people ties by offering fully paid trips to Israel for Jewish Americans to educate themselves on the country’s culture and politics.
The Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University and the Schwarzman Scholarship in Beijing were both established to develop elite bridges between great powers in the midst of rapid geopolitical transitions. Both have been highly successful in developing well-placed leadership networks between cultures.
It is high time that India had its own much-needed equivalents to these initiatives.
All Americans have the duty to build the civil society needed to propel the U.S.-India partnership forward, but Indian Americans are singularly positioned to lead that effort. In addition to their inter-cultural skills, Indian Americans’ remarkable economic success gives them the resources needed to catalyze these initiatives.
Most importantly, their remarkable track record demonstrates that Indian Americans can bring the tenacity, intelligence and work ethic needed to transform the U.S.-India bond, should they take up the challenge.
Bill Drexel is a fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Strategy and American Statecraft where he focuses on technology competition and U.S.-India relations. Neeraja Deshpande is a writer and editor.