The people over at South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection (SAMAR) are pretty upset by the election results to say the least. Here is an article by Vijay Prashad who is the Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT.

Four years ago, Bush’s Brain Karl Rove swore that he would not rest until the four million Evangelicals who did not vote then would turn out yesterday. And they did. They came in droves. They told those who did the exit polls that the issue that brought them to the franchise was not their own unemployment or under employment, or even the loss of their family members in a war of choice. They came to vote for “moral values.”

After Rove told participants at an American Enterprise Institute seminar in 2001 that the goal of the Bush re-election campaign would be to make sure that all 19 million Evangelical Christians voted, his team hired Ralph Reed to take charge of the effort. Reed, the veteran of the Christian Coalition, mobilized his contacts and his good looks and went after the withheld votes.

I think this is going to be the chief finding when the post-mortem of this election is completed. All the issues we so vehemently debated all these months were rather irrelevant when it came down to what ended up swaying this election. Mr. Prashad makes his feelings on the subject quite clear as he ends,

Progressives are loath to offer a frontal criticism of the theocracy that has overtaken the South and the Midwest — where under the command of tolerance we have to endure the intolerance toward women and their bodies, toward gays and lesbians, towards anyone who does not fit the compass of the “moral values” mass-produced by the established churches. It is time to throw off our forbearance and open a direct debate on the suppression of rational argument in favor of theocratic bigotry.

Homophobia elected Bush. Misogyny elected Bush. Unreason elected Bush.

Jindal elected to Congress: 33-year-old Bobby Jindal was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Louisiana in yesterday’s national election. As expected, Jindal won decisively with 78% of the vote. Several challengers split the remaining vote, with no one else getting more than 7%. Jindal follows Dalip Singh Saund, a California Congressman in the ’50s, as only the second South Asian American ever elected to Congress.

Aside from being of Punjabi origin, Jindal and Saund’s stories differ markedly. Saund was a progressive lettuce farmer who attended UC Berkeley, while Jindal is a conservative Rhodes Scholar who attended Brown and Oxford. But they both persevered in the face of electoral disappointment: Jindal recently lost a close race for Louisiana governor, while Saund won a race for a judgeship but later had to re-fight the campaign:

Saund ran for his friend’s office and won. But because he had only been a citizen less than a year, he was barred from taking office. A petition signed by twice the number of people who had elected him did nothing to help his cause… Two years later, he again ran for the judgeship and won despite anti-immigrant bashings made by his opponent who had tried to incite the public with sayings like “Hindu for Judge.”

Other elected desi politicians at the state legislature level include Nikki Randhawa-Haley and long-serving doyen Kumar Barve.

Previous posts on Jindal: 1, 2, 3, 4

My mom was lazy and didn’t register in time (plus she was afraid she would be called to jury duty). My brother was lazy and didn’t secure an absentee ballot in time. Is the brown turning out? From Rediff.com:

South Asians, including Indian Americans, turned up in unusually large numbers to vote in New York City, reflecting what observers say is a nationwide trend in the 2004 presidential election.

“I have not only taken part in election, but have been an observer for many years. I have never seen such huge number of people from the South Asian community standing in queue to cast votes,” said Morshed Alam, former NYC School Board member and commissioner for the city’s voter assistance commissioner. “This is just unbelievable.”

That’s what I like to hear. Continue reading →

Editors note: The image that was originally here has been taken down for copyright reasons. It was a picture of an elderly Indian woman holding up a sign that said “The Time is Now.”

South Asians for Kerry just sent me an email with this picture. The sign looks doctored to me. The election fraud has begun. I wonder what the sign originally said. Apparently this woman tends to “get around.”

Most voters are wary of campaign promises. Perhaps the most famous broken campaign pledge in recent history was the senior Bush’s “Read my lips. No new taxes.” It might be a good idea to make note of the campaign promises being made right now as well, to see if any of them come to pass. From IACFPA:

“John Kerry and John Edwards will not tolerate threats, violence or discrimination against the Muslim-American community,” he said in a press statement, adding that top Democratic Party leaders “recognize the many contributions that Muslim Americans have made to our nation,” assuring them that Kerry would favor immigration laws.

“They will offer a reform bill in the first 100 days of a Kerry-Edwards administration that allows immigrants to earn legalization, encourages family reunification, and strengthens our border protections,” Khan maintained in what is sure to become a “Kerry-watch” in a post-election scenario.

What else do they pledge to do?

Currently, most Muslim Americans and civil rights advocates have opposed the Patriot Act. “Both the leaders support efforts, such as the bipartisan-sponsored Security and Freedom Ensured (SAFE) Act, to amend the Patriot Act to set reasonable limits on access to library, medical, and other records containing the sensitive, personal details of the lives of law-abiding Americans and on the conduct of so-called “sneak and peek” searches, Khan insisted, pointing to Kerry’s former job as a prosecutor. Kerry, he said, knows that “racial profiling is nothing more than ineffective law enforcement and must be prohibited.” He and John Edwards, Khan said, “support End Racial Profiling Act, which would ban racial profiling and require federal, state, and local law enforcement to take steps to end and prevent racial profiling,” and that both are working to strengthen hate crime laws. Both, he noted, “have led the fight for the Workplace Religious Freedom Act which will ensure that no American is forced to choose between the job they need and the faith that sustains them.”

Indians flocked to former PM Indira Gandhi’s bungalow in Delhi today on the 20th anniversary of her assassination (thanks, Sapna):

Indira Gandhi lived in the 1,300-sq-ft bungalow on the leafy and wide Safdarjung Road for nearly 20 years… “Till 1971, this must have been the smallest house of any prime minister in the world,” says the memorial’s curator Vijay Puri Goswami.

On display is Mrs Gandhi’s blood stained and bullet pocked sari, bringing back memories of her violent end. Two bodyguards pumped 16 bullets into her when she was crossing a leafy pathway from her residence to the office for an interview with Peter Ustinov. The grassy pathway has now been covered in marble and covered with crystal. A sheet of clear glass marks the place where she fell to her assassin’s bullets…

Visitors also flock to see her wedding sari, which was woven from yarn spun by her father Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India… There are gifts from international leaders: a silver and onyx lacquer plate from Ho Chi Minh, a crystal memento from Yasser Arafat.

India: always on the right side of history. A new report on the anti-Sikh riots has been pushed back by two months:

Some of those responsible for the violence had been, and still were, members of the governing Congress Party… Seven government-appointed commissions which had investigated the massacres were either whitewashes, or had met with official obstruction… Up to 1,000 people are thought to have died in riots which erupted across India in the days following her murder, as Hindus took their revenge on Sikhs who were blamed for the assassination.

Despite the tyranny of Gandhi’s rule, it’s a macabre memory for a ghoulish day.

A desi mother from Philadelphia was picking up tickets for her family at a Bush rally when she was ejected because her ride from work had a Kerry bumper sticker. Simi Nischal was picking up tickets for her husband Narinder, their son and daughter:

“The lady came in and said, ‘Who’s Simi?’ ” Nischal tearfully recalled Wednesday night, adding that she identified herself and was then refused tickets to the rally and escorted from the building.

Shortly after that, a man wearing a Bush-Cheney T-shirt confronted Nischal in the parking lot and told her to leave. “He was so rude, he made me feel like a criminal,” Nischal said. “I said, ‘That’s not fair, you are losing a supporter.’ [And he said], ‘We don’t care about your support.’ “

Nischal said onlookers cheered and laughed at her as she left the property. But that wasn’t the end of the insult, she said. She said another co-worker took her back to the gristmill to try to clear up the confusion, but she was again refused tickets…

Nischal said her daughter has been learning about the political process at school and has been a Bush supporter. She even picked up papers for her daughter to volunteer for the Bush campaign right before she was kicked out of the gristmill, she said.

Elections are ALWAYS about money. Getting to know your candidate properly before Tuesday’s election includes gaining knowledge about who supports them monetarily. It just MIGHT be that your candidate is beholden to some special interest that you should know about. As an example here is a list of who got the top donations from the U.S. India Pac.
Looking at a reverse example, here is a list of who is giving money to candidate Bobby Jindal in Louisiana’s Congressional race.

You can use this website in order to follow the money in your own district.