A major trend that I have been following this past year is the growing political awareness among South Asians aka desis.  Like others, I  noticed there was an increased involvement from the desi community during the 2009 US Presidential elections. Not only was there an increase in the number of desi candidates running for elections at various local and state levels, but there was also a clear spike in the number of people involved in election campaigns of the candidates. What was clear was the involvement of the desi community at the grassroots level. In a way the desi community had come of political age in the 2008 elections as one political observer put it.

Interestingly, for the first time there was a National Asian American Survey that tried to capture the political attitude of the Asian American community in the US, including South Asians.  I say interestingly because since 1948 the University of Michigan has been tracking the attitude of the American voter in their seminal American National Elections Study. (I had to crunch data from this election study during my graduate days).  In 1960 a landmark book was published titled “The American Voter,“(another staple book from my graduate days) that basically said that American voters vote on partisan basis and often their political allegiance to a party is inherited from their parents. So, if your parents were Democrats, you were likely to vote for the Democratic party, and if your parent were Republicans, you tended to vote for the Republican party. Of course, since then there have been tectonic shifts in the way Americans vote and the famous line that Southerners tend to vote for Democratic candidates is no longer valid as many researchers have pointed out.

In the intervening years since The American Voter was written there has been a  marked change in the demographics of the country. A significant change is the increase in the number of immigrants from Asian countries. How Asian Americans voted was a bit of a black box for many and there were hardly any studies on their political attitude and behavior until much later (think the Clinton Administration).  Many early South Asian immigrants had one foot planted in the US, and the other foot planted in their former homeland and and therefore their involvement in the US political system tended to be minimal. Fast forward to the 1990s and you see a whole different picture of the South Asian community. The involvement from the desi community witnessed a steady increase and by 2008 that involvement was clear and evident.  This spike in political awareness and involvement was not confined to the South Asian community, but clearly evident in the larger Asian-American and Latino communities.  So in a way it was  timely then that the first National Asian American Survey published in 2008 highlighted the political attitude of the Asian community for the first time. One of the key results of the survey was that South Asians tended to predominantly support the Democratic Party.

Curious to understand the political awakenings of the desi community in the US, I talked to a series of people both in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. For instance in mid-2008 there was a clear divide among the desi Democratic voters. Some overwhelmingly supported Senator Hillary Clinton, while some were supporters of Obama. Long before the Obama mania hit the local desi community in Silicon Valley there was Mani, who strongly believed that Obama was going to  sweep the elections. This, when the thinking at the national level was that Senator Hillary Clinton stood a strong chance at winning the elections.

While it was clear that the desi community’s involvement in the US elections was significant, it was only after the elections that the full impact of their involvement became clear. The number of South Asians appointed by President Obama’s administration was far more when compared to the previous administration. Who were these appointees and what brought up the change was the topic of an article  that I wrote in the May issue of Open magazine (pp.30-31). While the story distilled the essence of my research, there was an interesting backstory that I did with Deepa Iyer of SAALT. I will have that backstory as a blog post in the next few days. One of the interesting threads from that conversation with Deepa was the number of desis, who are lawyers but involved in the political arena. Deepa herself is a lawyer, who is devoting her time and energy working with a grassroots organization.

Desis were not only involved in the US political process, but were becoming involved in the Indian political process. Inspired by the Presidential elections, there were some desis (read new and recent immigrants from the 1990s) that were looking for meaningful ways to contribute to India. One of them was the soft-spoken engineer turned activist Selvam Velumurugan of Seattle.  About a couple of years ago Selvam made a conscious decision to move from the technical field and instead use his technical skills and expertise in helping build a civic movement in India. Through his eMoksha organization Selvam has worked on a bunch of interesting projects, and is currently involved in building a web portal for the upcoming elections (September 2009) in Maharashtra, India.  During the 2009 General Elections of India Selvam was part of the VoteReport India, and a Q&A that I did with him from that time remained unpublished. I will be posting that unpublished post shortly.

For every Deepa Iyer, Mani or Selvam Velumurugan there are many, many desis whose silent contribution in kindling the political awareness among the South Asian community goes unrecognized. The power of one does count as Selvam is demonstrating through his work. Often, we take for granted and forget what it takes to maintain and sustain a democratic system.