Washington: It’s a first and therefore a landmark in the annals of Indian-American history. It must be recorded.
US President Donald Trump gave a pardon to Dinesh D’Souza, an Indian-American conservative convicted of campaign finance fraud – he used straw donors to funnel $10,000 to a Republican candidate in 2012. It is a kind of felony for which Indian immigrants have shown a special affinity over the years.
But D’Souza is the first Indian-American to receive a presidential pardon for his crime. It’s a statistical milestone – by being one of only six to get Trump’s love, he represents 17% of the total. That’s significant because Indian-Americans are barely 1% of the total US population of 325 million.
Look at it another way – D’Souza as the only lucky Indian to be among the select group of 20,000 granted presidential pardons since George Washington has registered the community at .01% in the honour roll. That’s not nothing.
Since our excitement for Indian-American achievement knows no bounds, we give a little space to D’Souza too. OK, not alongside Spelling Bee winners or Silicon Valley innovators, but in the other register – the one for operators who twist themselves into pretzels to get noticed, say outrageous things especially about race in the US and go far right to get close to power.
With D’Souza’s pardon, Indian-American diversity in Trump’s circle is now more apparent: D’Souza is Christian, Shalabh ‘Shalli’ Kumar, who got Trump to declare his love for India at a campaign rally, is Hindu, Jasdip Singh, one of the few invited to the White House when Trump issued an executive order protecting religious freedom, is Sikh.
Shalli Kumar seen with Donald Trump. Credit: Reuters
Missing from the charmed circle are Indian-American Muslims – they haven’t managed to breach the wall.
A grateful D’Souza thanked Trump for restoring his “American dream” which had been under somewhat of a cloud – the cloud of a five-year probation after serving an eight-month sentence in a half-way house (a mild house arrest) and paying a $30,000 fine.
But that’s not the only dishonourable thing D’Souza has done. The good man was forced to resign in 2012 as president of the evangelical King’s College in New York following a report that he shared a hotel room with his “fiancée” while still married to his “all-American” wife of 20 years. D’Souza – don’t laugh – was attending a Christian Values Conference in South Carolina during the said episode.
“I had no idea that it is considered wrong in Christian circles to be engaged prior to being divorced, even though in a state of separation and in divorce proceedings,” he wrote on the Fox News website and attacked his critics as un-Christian.
You might almost feel sorry for his professed innocence of the world’s wicked ways, if he weren’t an academic with an oeuvre of 20 books. Yes, he writes a lot.
It doesn’t matter that critics panned most of them as some of the worst propaganda, a national disgrace, pseudo-intellectual, insensitive, a parody of scholarship and on and on.
But he is an intrepid warrior on the right in the US’s culture wars between conservative and liberal values. D’Souza was among the first to throw daggers at the idea of political correctness on university campuses way back in the 90s with his book Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus.
He derided “Women’s Studies” and “African American Studies” departments as needless and “ethnic cheerleading.” The western canon was already complete, declared the brown pundit with William F. Buckley Jr., the granddaddy of modern American conservatism, presiding.
D’Souza thinks women demanding equality are “feminist whiners,” and African Americans – well – what do they know about racism? He, on the other hand, wrote a book titled The End of Racism in 1995. Here’s a “gem” from the book: “The American slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well.”
Defending his book, D’Souza claimed it was the “virtually parasitic reliance of African Americans on the government” and their inner city culture of violence and broken families that are responsible for their plight. They should just pull themselves up because, well, racism has ended.
The election of Barack Obama in 2008 seemed to totally unhinge D’Souza. He spent time tweeting racist insults comparing Obama to a ghetto kid, going into the deepest and ugliest corners of the American right.
His polemical documentary 2016: Obama’s America was described variously as a “nonsensically unsubstantiated act of character assassination” and “fear-mongering of the worst kind.” It made the case that Obama inherited “anti-colonial” and “Third World” views from his father – a man Obama last saw as a ten-year-old – and is therefore unpatriotic and a clear and present danger to the republic.
His book Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party accompanied by a similarly shoddy and hyper-partisan documentary and then The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left a year later ensured that serious critics stop taking him seriously.
While attention was growing on a number of police shootings of unarmed and innocent blacks, D’Souza offered this on Twitter: “H’m white cops never seem to shoot Koreans, Chinese Americans or Asian Indians—could it be because…” He didn’t complete the sentence.
Oh, the distance Indian-Americans have travelled! From Dalip Singh Saund, the first Indian-American and the first Sikh American elected to the US Congress who fought for the rights of South Asians to become US citizens, to D’Souza, all privileged and smug, who just goes, ‘meh’ to the struggles that went on before he arrived from Mumbai.
The loony right is thrilled to have a dedicated brown immigrant to argue their side but mainstream conservatives are no longer D’Souza’s automatic fans. They find him too politically incorrect.
Seema Sirohi is a Washington DC-based commentator.