From: sunder@grusin.crhc.uiuc.edu (Srinivas Sunder)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.indian
Subject: Re: Democrats are Indian, Republicans are Pakistani :-)
Date: 27 Jan 1993 23:13:34 GMT
Organization: Center for Reliable and High-Performance Computing, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Distribution: usa
NNTP-Posting-Host: grusin.crhc.uiuc.edu

Vijay Sadananda Pai says:

|> I never mentioned Republicans arming Pakistan ... If India
|> loses Kashmir or Punjab, you can be sure it'll be because of a UN
|> or US resolution sponsored, at least in part, by Pakistan or
|> the Pakistan lobby, as appropriate. [You're right that
|> I didn't mention the Pakistan lobby in my first post, which you
|> quoted from; however, stuff did come up about it in

Yes, and we'll deserve it if that is indeed the reason. By any
estimate, the number of Indo-Americans here has to be much much
larger than the number of Pakistani-Americans or just plain old
Pakistanis for that matter. If they are able to make themselves
heard better with the power-that-be, it will be only because we
as Indians or Indo-Ams haven't had the brains to pull together 
and make our case to them. Don't blame them. You, dear sir, have 
helped us find the enemy - and it is us. For example, the fact 
that there are many rich pro-Khalistan dudes in Ca. has meant that 
they have been able to buy up Congresscreatures like Wally Herger 
and ex-Rep. Dannemeyer. Why haven't the Silicon Valley Indians been 
able to counter it? Or the huge Indian community in NJ done anything
there? 

|> subsequent posts of this thread]. That's just the way
|> international politics works with respect to South Asia.

You haven't been keeping up. That's how it WORKED during the
Cold War, when the US armed Pakistan. I can't blame them 
for it - India was for all practical purposes, a bastion of
socialism, to be wrapped up in the "warm" embrace of the Soviet
Bear, Come The Revolution(tm). Now, that the Cold War is over,
the US and India have already conducted Naval excercises together
once, and will soon be doing Army and Naval excercises together.
For the same reason (i.e. Cold War over), Pakistan has been shafted
in re military aid, and damn nearly got declared a terrorist state
by the US State Dept. They still might, if they don't prove that
they do not sponsor terrorism in Punjab and J&K in 4 months. 

Of late, things have warmed up between India and the USofA. But,
that's more a reflection of geo-political realities than of 
anythung constructive that the Indian community here has been able 
to do.


|> If you want to interpret it as meaning that Republicans will
|> arm Pakistan, then go right ahead ... I thought the phrase
|> "taken away" strongly suggested that it was not done
|> in war...
|> 
|> I suppose if anything in that statement was inflammatory, it
|> was to Indian-Americans who voted Republican (specifically
|> anyone who could support Pat Buchanan), which was more or
|> less the point. 

One could just as well say that someone who voted Democratic in 
Illinois in 1986 was voting for Lyndon LaRouche (one of his boyos
got nominated for a Congressional seat, prompting the Gubernatorial
candidate Adlai the 4th to pull out in disgust and run as an indep.),
or for the Dems. in Ca. in 1978(?) was a vote for the White Aryan Resistance
(Tom Metzger ran as a Democrat for Congress from there). Or that a 
a vote for a Chicago Democrat of any sort until 1992 was a vote for the 
black racist and anti-semite Gus Savage (who, by the grace of his foul 
tongue, was defeated by Mel Reynolds in the primaries last March).

Your point in re Pat PukeCannon is probably on the right. Your
problem is that you make a point of identifying a party with its
extremists. Both parties in this country are basically centre-right
and centre-left. Southern Democrats resemble Republicans; East-Coast
Republicans look like Democrats. There are fruitcakes everywhere, and
occasionally, they grab centre-stage and manage to mouth off some 
nonsense before someone grabs them by the hand and hustles them off-stage. 
That happened to the GOP this year. It happened to the Democrats in 1972 
(the infamous McGovern "People's" Convention). You'd be better off 
analyzing each member one by one. 

When you do that, you wind up with ideological extremes like Jesse Helms
and Howard Metzenbaum both on the anti-India bandwagon (with Helms, it is
probably residual bitterness over the fact that India voted against the US
more times than the USSR in the UN; with Metzenbaum, it is the result of 
skillful and one-sided lobbying by Khalistanis and Kashmiri-separatists).
On the pro-India bandwagon, names are scarce, reflecting the lack of any
effective lobbying by Indians. The only thing we have going for us is that
we are a "democracy," prompting a number of people who believe that that
means Paradise to overlook some rather skillful, if exaggerated descriptions
of excesses that Indian Police/Army forces might have committed in Punjab
and Kashmir. And you can be damn sure that there's no Indian out there 
countering this with pictures of civilians slain by terrorist bullets (funded
by Khalistanis) or blown up by transistor bombs (supplied by Pakistan).

-- 
Srinivas Sunder                                         sunder@crhc.uiuc.edu

If my employer shares these views, I'd be most surprised.
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