Sunday’s celebration of Indian community gets more political
Howdy, Modi!
The name sounds so Texas, doesn’t it? Like “Howdy, partner.”
Organizers of a massive celebration of the Houston area’s Indian-American community came up with this catchy slogan to honor India’s prime minister, Narenda Modi, who will headline the Sunday event at NRG Stadium.
They probably didn’t anticipate that the event would become controversial when they began planning it in July. Modi is India’s most popular leader in decades and has been welcomed by political and business leaders during his past visits to the United States. This will be his first trip to Texas, and it’s no wonder that state and local leaders wanted to extend to him the traditional cowboy greeting.
In early August, though, things became a bit more complicated. Modi abruptly revoked the constitutional autonomy granted some 70 years ago to Jammu and Kashmir, the country’s only majority-Muslim state, and sent security forces to the region. The crackdown is ongoing. And this past weekend, the White House announced that President Donald Trump, who has expressed an affinity for Modi, would be appearing alongside him Sunday.
So Trump will be addressing an estimated 50,000 people — a gathering that will look quite a bit different than the Make America Great Again rallies punctuated by his divisive rhetoric.
Texans might be rightly anxious that the president will, say, reminisce about the Trump Taj Mahal casino that he built in Atlantic City in 1990 before it became mired in bankruptcy; we
should also anticipate that video footage from “Howdy, Modi!” will end up in a commercial for the Trump 2020 campaign.
It’s worth noting, however, that political drama isn’t what the event’s organizers had in mind.
“Everything’s bigger in Texas,” said Rishi Bhutada in late August, when I met him and “Howdy, Modi!” organizer Jugal Malani for lunch at Bombay Brasserie in Houston’s Galleria area.
At the time, it was a rightful brag: after several weeks of planning, some 50,000 people had RSVP’d for the event, including 30,000 from the Houston area, a hub for Indian Americans.
The event will begin with a 90-minute cultural program, and is intended to honor the bilateral relationship between Texas and India as well as the Indian-American community.
“India and Houston are close friends and partners,” Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner tweeted in July. “I was proud to lead a trade delegation to India last November, and look forward to Prime Minister Modi’s historic visit to our city!”
Malani declared that the event will be “the largest-ever gathering of Indian-American and friends of India, with diverse representation from the region and across the country.” He described it as a “community summit.”
Malani, who immigrated to Houston in the 1970s, holds Modi in high regard. So does Bhutada, who was born in Texas and traces his interest in politics to his years on the high school debate team. Over lunch recently, I got the impression that these two Texans were, in a sense, capitalizing on the opportunity presented by Modi’s plans to visit New York City and address the United Nations General Assembly.
“We can celebrate only when we all come together,” explained Malani. “You have to have some common theme. So he is the common theme.”
Malani credited the prime minister’s charisma with the tremendous response he and the Texas India Forum received from the Indian-American community after announcing plans to welcome Modi to the Lone Star State. Some 620 groups signed up as “Welcome Partners,” and more than 1000 individuals offered to be volunteers. Malani added that he has been pleasantly surprised to receive calls from would-be donors. Bhutada added that the IndianAmerican community was looking for a chance to showcase itself as well as the prime minister.
“We’re not just doing it because we’re all out to talk about Modi, we’re doing it because we’re out to talk about ourselves,” said Bhutada.
“I don’t think there’s ever been an event pitched talking about the success of the IndianAmerican community. Not in a broad scale way,” he continued. “There’s conferences, and things like that, but you don’t see anything with 50,000 people.”
Still, Modi, a Hindu nationalist, remains a controversial figure — as does the American president who will join them.
Critics have pointed to Modi’s checkered record on human rights as chief minister of the western state of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014, and his embrace of Hindutva, a right-wing nationalist ideology.
Sajjad Burki, one of the organizers of Friends of Kashmir, told me Monday that he expects 10,000 people to gather outside the stadium to protest Modi’s appearance. And he was dismayed, and puzzled, by the fact that “Howdy, Modi!” will be attended by so many state and local elected officials, from the state’s two Republican U.S. senators, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, to Democratic members of Congress such as Sylvia Garcia, Al Green, and Sheila Jackson Lee.
He said he didn’t understand why political leaders would be keen to share the stage with Modi, given that their presence might imply support for his crackdown on Kashmir, or his ideology more generally.
“You’re going to attend a rally by a politician whose views are so extreme that no one in this present world would want to live by them,” Burki said. “Why would you want to do that?”
The answer may lie in the fact that the event wasn’t conceptualized as a Trump rally, or a pep rally for Modi, or a political event, per se. It was meant to be a chance to celebrate the IndianAmerican community, which has done so much for this city and state — even before it was recognized as a potential force in Texas politics, including for the all-important elections in 2020.