Nikki, Priti, Vivek, and Rishi
Bad identifications with colonial aggressors
Jyoti M. Rao
My heart sinks as I watch Harmeet Dhillon drape a gossamer shawl over her head to offer Sikh closing prayers on the second day of the Republican National Convention, her devotions wafting straight into the unadulterated scorn of the right-wing. It would be mere moments before the racist social media comments arrived. A few days later, Usha Vance would stride onto the stage to introduce her husband; she, too, would find her new friends predictably hostile. What are these brown women thinking, participating in such an ongoing travesty? They leave me flummoxed and somaticizing, inducing a perpetual headache with what I can neither comprehend nor bear. More generally, the rise of prominent right-wing politicians of the South Asian diaspora—Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy in the United States; Rishi Sunak and Priti Patel in the United Kingdom— leaves me sputtering with a flurry of questions I can barely formulate: How? Why? What happened? Their easy malice fills me with misery.
Although I am troubled by all politicians who align themselves with malevolent power, Nikki, Vivek, Rishi, Priti, and others like them, get under my skin differently. I suffer because I can recognize and identify with the experiences, past and present, that have mangled their psyches. These politicians are of my cohort; I can picture growing up with them, can envision similarities in the gatherings we attended with our families when the South Asian immigrant community in the United States was small, and we were encouraged to think of all Indian American kids of our generation as siblings. I readily imagine their childhoods— experiences of racism and alienation clenched in one tiny hand, cultural riches in the other, finely balanced while walking the lonely tightrope of being a third culture child. Siblings share histories to varying degrees, but their future paths may diverge sharply. Such divergences can form irreconcilable schisms, especially when harmful inheritances result in siblings who grow up to be perpetrators like these hard right politicians. Disoriented and beset with disenfranchised grief—pained and shamed by affiliations I did not choose with these siblings I cannot abide—I turn to my associations for help.
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One morning, when I was eleven years old, I woke up before the rest of the household and went downstairs to find one of our newly arrived houseguests, a man in his seventies visiting from India with his wife, writing at the dining table in the early light. I wished him good morning and sidled up shyly, curious about what he was doing. “Oh, hello,” he said to me in the Received Pronunciation. “I say, it is a lovely morning, is it not?”
On the paper in front of him were three tidy columns: the first a long line of what appeared to be global locations, followed by two columns of numbers. He explained that he was writing the longitude and latitude of every major port city from memory: “Just keeping my mind in tiptop shape!”
Tall, gentle, dark-skinned, and hard of hearing (what he termed “stone deaf”), he would emerge every morning redolent of Yardley English Lavender soap and talcum. Rarely did a day pass without his delivering a poem by Kipling or T. S. Eliot, in a voice and intonation I now associate with the British Broadcasting Corporation. When he spoke about male acquaintances, he would refer to them as a “jolly good fellow” or a “rather likeable chap.” Mysteriously, he sometimes sang inscrutable lines about life at sea which I gathered were sailor ditties. Very occasionally, one would see evidence of a startling repository of indecorous and oddly constructed jokes, some with references to American actresses I’d never heard of (“What’s the difference between the Panama Canal and Mae West? The Panama Canal is a busy ditch and Mae West is a dizzy b****”).
He also recited from memory extensive passages of esoteric Sanskrit poetry and, several years later, undertook literary translations of lyrics from my favorite classical musical works, translating them from Telugu to English. He gifted these to me in looseleaf pages, handwritten in blue ballpoint ink. To my enduring chagrin, I was confused then and remain uncertain now about how we were related. I believe my father was distantly connected to his wife’s sister’s husband. As was typical for an otherwise unclassified male relative, I called him “uncle” in English, though given his age, I could have called him “grandfather.” Here, I will refer to him as CM—Chanda Mama—in honor of the South Asian tradition that the moon is the uncle of the people.
This gentleman—and indeed, he called himself a gentleman, saying, “As a gentleman, I would conduct myself in a manner befitting one”—was born in British colonized India and spent the early part of his adulthood as a marine engineer. During the 1930s, he trained intensively on a ship called the Dufferin, named after a Lord Dufferin, who, after a stint as governor general of Canada and presiding over the British occupation of Egypt, was rewarded with leadership of the Viceroyalty of India in 1884. CM credited his training on the Dufferin not only for his technical skills, but also for instilling the values that led to his heroism at sea during and after World War II, for which he was later awarded a national medal. Among his teachers on the Dufferin was “an old sea dog,” eventually known as Captain Sir Henry Digby-Beste.
Shortly after his training and apprenticeship, CM was on the SS Malda, a merchant vessel enlisted to “His Majesty’s Duty” during World War II. The boat came under heavy fire, hurtling CM several feet into the air before plunging him deep into the sea after his lifeboat suffered a direct hit. CM spent the night on a small island populated with snakes, hyenas, and other perils, having rowed there on a barely floating raft. He was badly burned and had lost much of his hearing permanently. Some of his fellow engineers died horrible deaths, including Paddy Davies, the last survivor of four Irish brothers, three of whom had already died in the war. Invoking Irish neutrality and refusing to be involuntarily conscripted into fighting for the Crown, Davies was aboard the Malda to return home when he was sliced by steel plates sent flying from shellfire.
The desert island CM found himself on is an apt metaphor for the colonial subject. Indeed, he and his fellow cadets seem to have been primed to cope with such marooning with an anthem they were taught aboard the Dufferin:
“We are on the road, we are on the road, to anywhere.
With never a heartache, with never a care,
Got no home, Got no friends,
Thankful for everything the good Lord sends,
We are on the road, we are on the road, to anywhere,
And every milestone seems to say,
The road to anywhere, the road to anywhere,
Will lead to somewhere someday.”
Coming after my rumination about Indian diasporic right-wingers and the cephalalgic feelings they elicit, my association to CM reveals a personal question underlying my need to write about these politicians. It is a question I now recall asking frequently as a child when meeting other Indian people: “How are we related?”
Quite unconsciously, I stated in my description of CM that I do not know my precise relationship to him. I wrote that I am “confused” and “uncertain,” trying on both uncle and grandfather before invoking the moon as a relation of last resort. I note that this ignorance causes me chagrin. Similarly, I don’t understand my precise relationship to these politicians, but must reluctantly acknowledge that I perceive some connection, one not easily shaken off. I am saying something deeper here, I think, about the feeling of inscrutability that accompanies traumatic intergenerational legacies—it is our shared ghosts that tie us. CM, these abhorrent right-wing politicians of the Indian diaspora, and I are related through our common ghostly ancestry. These are the ghosts that rise up from the mass graves that colonialism digs for the cultures it buries alive. In the clinic as in life, we are tempted, over and over, to obscure, to turn away with a shrug, rather than persist in facing these specters. I have been tempted, over and over, to abandon this project rather than do the work it demands of me.
“These are the ghosts that rise up from the mass graves that colonialism digs for the cultures it buries alive.”
CM’s story is emblematic of countless colonial subjects whose bodies and psyches, cultures and countries, were cut, burned, deafened, infiltrated, regulated, and sometimes killed by British power. These legacies of colonial violence and discipline live on intergenerationally, especially in the form of melancholic identifications, blurred by defenses against clear reckoning and twisted by perverse forms of coercive relatedness. The Dufferin song inscribes the stateless, aimless, ally-less, yet grateful position of the colonized subject, setting expectations of endless displacement without the heartache of mourning. The somewhere we find ourselves in is the British-American sociopolitical landscape, where politicians like Nikki Haley, Priti Patel, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Rishi Sunak wreak havoc with the power they have secured, sending people seeking asylum on the road to anywhere without a second thought. My sputtering inquiries now take discernible shape: How have colonial histories and contemporary racism shaped these politicians and their politics? What psychological mechanisms are at work in creating these postcolonial subjects bent on cruelty and barbaric in their embodiment of colonial logics at the expense of human dignity? How are these politicians psychoanalytically intelligible?
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Extractive colonialism is an economic practice that is centered on unlimited taking. Like other forms of abuse, it is unconcerned with those from whom it takes and indifferent to the consequences of such taking. For Sándor Ferenczi, the Hungarian psychoanalyst who wrote about the sexually abused child’s relationship with their adult abusers, tenderness is sought through identification with those who overwhelmingly aggress upon us, taking what they want on their own terms. This identificatory process, driven by terror and helplessness, is so thorough that we begin to anticipate the aggressor’s desire, to become who they wish us to be, and to see ourselves through their eyes, even taking on their guilt for harming us. It is a compliance so complete that it is no longer compliance because we have lost ourselves and become one with the aggressor, thinking their thoughts and feeling their feelings. We may take flight into a hypercharged use of intellect, listing the longitudes and latitudes of the globe, as a bulwark against what we experience in the physical world. Rather than attempting to change our overpowering and bewildering environment, we succumb and alter ourselves, practicing forms of self-effacement and even self-annihilation. The external presses into us with such force that we can no longer distinguish outside from inside, self from other. We become, like CM, colonized.
Much as Sándor Ferenczi faced intense opposition to his honest appraisal of the ravages inflicted by the realities of sexual abuse, many find it difficult to contemplate the intensely traumatogenic qualities of colonization, still covered over in the obfuscating language and trappings of benign civility. Especially in the case of the British in India, one is left with vague impressions of tea and biscuits served on punctual trains, rather than the realities of subjugation enacted through every vehicle imaginable.
British colonialism in India began with the mercenary project of the British East India Company (EIC). As economist Thomas Piketty writes, the EIC was “charged with exploiting vast regions of the world,” existing solely to generate profit for its financial backers. This historical moment saw the emergence of highly porous boundaries between public functions and state-sponsored private business interests in Europe, allowing the EIC to act with both power and impunity in India. It did so by freely sacking cities, committing countless acts of murder, larceny, and sexual assault. EIC functionaries drank a toast “to the corpse of India” after defeating and killing the South Indian ruler Tipu Sultan, whose riches were pocketed after his death. William Dalrymple calls the EIC the first major multinational company, one so aggressive in its tactics and expansion that it was deemed too big to fail when its profits faltered, resulting in the first massive government bailout of a commercial concern in 1773.
By the time the British Raj was established in 1858 following the pivotal Sepoy Rebellion, colonization was characterized by unrelenting cultural mutilation; theft by all available means; orchestrated famine; the enduring, manufactured fractures of divide et impera; and the most ruthless forms of racialized dehumanization and violence. In the mid-1800s, Charles Dickens wrote that the “savage” should be “civilized off the face of the earth” and elsewhere expressed a desire to rule India to do his “utmost to exterminate” the Indian race. In her volume Colonial Terror: Torture and State Violence in Colonial India, Deana Heath builds on the scholarship by authors such as Jordanna Bailkin and Elizabeth Kolsky, who have carefully examined forms of racialized, often legally sanctioned physical violence, both “quotidian” (everyday assaults, such as those in Bailkin’s remarkable study of so-called “Boot and Spleen” cases, often lethal to the possessor of the colonized spleen) and “exceptional” (massacres and violent pillaging of homes and cities) forms of violence that characterized the colonization of India.
Kolsky writes about the pervasiveness and severity of white violence against Indians, almost all of which was facilitated by putting white colonizers above the law in a fashion reminiscent of plantation life. She describes a 1796 case in which three Indian women had their noses, ears, and hair cut off, their genitals mutilated, and their feet bound in iron chains. The perpetrator of the heinous crimes, an indigo planter named William Orby Hunter who employed the women, was fined a small fee and set free. Kolsky writes that although “the archive is replete with incidents of Britons murdering, maiming, and assaulting Indians—and getting away with it—white violence remains one of the empire’s most closely guarded secrets.”
Important to the legacies we face today, some of the everyday violence enacted upon Indian people in the name of colonial authority was undertaken by other Indians, particularly members of local police forces. Many of these police officers were kept in a state of impoverishment even as they were used as local agents of colonial enforcement. Heath elaborates that the British largely overlooked Indian police officers who tortured or otherwise harmed other Indians, as their violence helped enforce the fearful submission that aided colonial domination. In 1854, when local police brutality in Madras became impossible to ignore, the British commission investigating blamed the violence on the purportedly inherent flaws of the natives, using terms that resemble current Republican descriptions of brown immigrants: “the character of the native when in power displays itself in the form of rapacity, cruelty, and tyranny.” In contrast, and demonstrating the psychoanalytic concepts of splitting and projection, Heath quotes Dufferin—the viceroy after whom CM’s training vessel was named—gushing that the British colonial overlords in India were incomparable in their possession of exemplary traits: “ingenuity, courage, right judgment, disinterested devotion to duty, endurance, open-heartedness . . . loyalty,” and general superiority. As Heath notes, these narratives served to justify British rule in India and earned admiration from the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, who, around the time of CM’s birth, described the colonial occupation of the subcontinent as “one of the most notable and most admirable achievements of the white race during the past two centuries.”
A buried piece of history, central to the politicians I will turn momentarily, involves a startling quid pro quo plan floated around the time of World War I: in exchange for Indian soldiers fighting for Britain, German colonial powers in East Africa would, once overthrown, be replaced with Indian proxy colonizers. German East Africa was to be handed over as a protectorate by the British to the Indians as a sort of apprenticeship in colonization. The racialized negotiations were intensely intricate at this time. Before 1914, a “colour bar” prevented Indian troops from fighting against white European combatants, which might have upended the racial hierarchies upon which colonialism depended. About 1.3 million South Asians, including children, fought in WWI; many died in the trenches in Europe. In interregnum East Africa, middle class Indians began to be perceived as intermediaries and potential helpers in the so-called civilizing mission, which served as a cover for ongoing profiteering. Poorer Indians were brought to Africa as indentured servants, haphazardly racialized as further from whiteness. While India was never established as a colonial regent in East Africa, many South Asians, including Rishi Sunak’s maternal grandfather, were employed by the colonial administration. They occupied an uneasy status, subordinate to white settlers yet “superior” to Black Africans and Indian laborers in an engineered racial and class hierarchy that persists and repeats in the politics of Indian diasporic politicians today.
What are the psychic implications of these entangled histories of colonial compliance and complicity via subjugation and traumatic fragmentation, reverberating as they do through the political and economic life of the present? How do the co-constitutive structures of racism and capitalism work together to set the stage for contemporary right-wing politicians of the South Asian diaspora? How can we make sense of this perpetuation of violence, enacted first by the colonizer and now by the (once) colonized? To consider these matters, we must take a closer look at the main actors.
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Priti Patel: Patel’s grandparents left the Indian state of Gujrat for Uganda during the colonial era, and her parents escaped persecution in Uganda to settle in the United Kingdom in the 1960s. At the tender age of 19, Patel joined the Conservative Party, unironically citing Thatcher as an inspiration. She later became home secretary under Boris Johnson from 2019 to 2022. She is notorious for having piloted a callous plan—especially disturbing given her own family’s experiences of violence and displacement—in which asylum seekers in the UK would be summarily sent to Rwanda for “processing,” without hope of repatriation to the United Kingdom. Patel has publicly commented on slurs being used against her as a child and being “racially abused in the street.” In 2021, a UK man served a brief jail sentence for making a Snapchat video targeting Patel with racial epithets and other racist content, echoing colonial era sentiments: “As a white man, I won’t be listening to people of color because they are no good in positions of power.” Despite her personal experiences of racism, Patel’s political agenda compelled more than 30 BIPOC Labour Party members of parliament to write to her, imploring her to reflect on how her public comments served “to gaslight the very real racism,” especially anti-Black racism, that remains prevalent in the UK.
Rishi Sunak: Sunak was the first British Indian prime minister of the UK and served as a former cabinet minister under Boris Johnson. The Economist described Sunak as “the most right-wing Conservative leader of his generation.” Voted out in July 2024, Sunak was by far the wealthiest prime minister, with a net worth of approximately $830 million, largely supplemented by his wife’s shares in a multinational tech company (a corporate structure whose virulent ancestry Dalrymple traces to the British East India Company). Sunak has aligned himself with the far-right Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, sharing hardline anti-immigrant and refugee policies. With the enthusiastic assistance of Suella Braverman, his on-again, off-again home secretary, Sunak dedicated his term as prime minister to implementing Patel’s Rwanda plan, even after multiple courts objected on the grounds that Rwanda cannot offer safety and is thus an unfit place to send those seeking it. Like Patel and Braverman, Sunak’s grandparents were born in British India and migrated to East Africa, and his parents sought safety in the UK in the 1960s when much of East Africa became dangerously inhospitable to ethnic Indians.
Even while he remained bent on deporting refugees of color and attacking immigrants, Sunak was called a racial slur by a member of the far-right Reform party shortly before he stepped down as prime minister. In response, Sunak noted that he was “hurt” and “angry,” yet he seemed to have no insight that his right-wing colleagues remained unconcerned by the hurt and anger their white supremacist belligerence routinely causes. In his statement, Sunak displaced his outrage in the direction of his daughters, complaining to journalists that they “have to see and hear” him being called an “[expletive] [slur].” While he abbreviated the expletive as “effing,” he chose to repeat the slur commonly used against South Asians in the UK, delicately reported by the BBC as a “racist term.” Sunak defended his decision to repeat the slur, stating, “I do so deliberately because this is too important not to call out clearly for what it is.” However, by leaving both “this” and “it” unspecified, he did not clearly call out anything. While Sunak chose to repeat the slur, he did not use the word racism, a word so charged for these politicians that they disavow it, even at the expense of their reality orientation.
Vivek Ramaswamy: Onetime Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is one of the few politicians wealthier than Sunak. With an estimated net worth of nearly one billion dollars, he believes in the unbridled pursuit of money as a source of pride and national unification. Much as British conservatives have asserted that nobody should feel apologetic about colonialism, dismissing attempts to teach colonial histories as part of a “woke” agenda, Ramaswamy says: “Stop apologizing for capitalism. We should embrace capitalism.” Throughout his campaign to be the Republican presidential nominee, Ramaswamy pandered to the MAGA base, attempting to out-Trump Trump. He has trumpeted himself as “anti-woke,” disavowing the existence of systemic racism, advocating for the militarization of the southern border, vowing to deport American-born children of parents who are undocumented, and proposing English-only voting ballots—a measure that would likely violate the federal Voting Rights Act. When Ohio-born Ramaswamy had Ann Coulter as a guest on his podcast, she said, “I agreed with many, many things you said [during your campaign], in fact probably more than most other candidates when you were running for president. But I still would not have voted for you because you’re an Indian.” Following his encounter of Ann Coulter’s explicit racism, Ramaswamy reverted to a strategy of colonially inspired obsequiousness, going so far as to say that he respected Ann Coulter for “having the guts to speak her mind,” something he notably could not do himself lest he lose his “antiwoke” credentials
“Aligning oneself with the colonizing gang holding the weapons and keeping the loot has lasting material advantages. However, the psychological gains of such a strategy are unstable.”
Nikki Haley: Nikki Haley was born in the United States the same year as Patel, 1972, to parents who immigrated from Punjab to Canada, and then to the United States in 1960. Her paternal grandfather was a commanding officer in the British colonial army. Haley, who ran for the Republican presidential nomination, was the first person of color to serve as Governor of South Carolina and was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under Trump, where she withdrew the U.S. from the United Nations Human Rights Council, apparently because of the Council’s concern for Palestinian lives. When stepping down as UN Ambassador, she plainly hinted at her desire to earn more in the private sector than she would as a public servant, writing to Trump that she expected him to appreciate that moving “from government to the private sector is not a step down but a step up,” calling into question her personal understanding of her entire career in politics. She earned $2.3 million dollars from just eleven speaking engagements in 2022. Within a month of Haley taking up her position in the Trump administration, Indian immigrant Srinivas Kuchibhotla was murdered in Kansas by a gunman yelling, “Get out of my country.” His family members linked the hate crime to Trump’s incendiary diatribes. Haley endorsed Donald Trump at the Republican convention in 2024, apparently overlooking his numerous insults directed at her and tacitly condoning his contemptuous disdain and aggression toward immigrants like her parents, as well as women like herself. Haley has faced several overtly racist comments and campaigns. She was called an expletiveenhanced racial slur alongside President Obama by one of her own Republican state senators and has spoken of being racially bullied as a child, facing “discrimination and hardship” with her family. Nonetheless, she calls American racism “a lie” and could not bring herself to utter the word “enslavement” when asked about the reasons for the Civil War.
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I have written this essay as an act of inquiry, recollection, mourning, and protest—a grappling with these wayward peers of the South Asian diaspora. To steady myself, I have reached for an improbable fantasy. In it, each of these politicians find themselves on an analyst’s couch (we might consider what sort of analyst would be able to help and how such an analyst might be trained). There, slowly, they will speak to someone who can hear past their talking points and will patiently wait for the collapse of their hostile bluster. Over time, long-held rigidities will flex and bend—a thawing. Perhaps they will learn to cry, and when they do, they will receive more than the glass of water and exile that Nikki Haley says her parents offered her in such moments to toughen her up. Their psyches will begin to mobilize, and they will eventually learn to engage dynamically with the pain of their own wounds—wounds inflicted by the splintering legacies of colonization, the losses inherent to immigration, the searing experiences of racism, and the tormenting identification with internal figures that delight in deprivation and hatred. Eventually, they will take responsibility for their aggression, their acquisitiveness, their cynicism, their projections. Creative possibilities may occur to them. They might cease to powerfully persecute the already persecuted and counter the further impoverishment of the already impoverished. Moving beyond the libidinal economies of colonizer and colonized, they may powerfully offer themselves up as sources of caring solidarity and security against precarity.
Identification with the aggressor is not the only option for a postcolonial subject. Around the time I found CM at the dining room table, I formed another memory. In it, I am at a New Year’s Eve party with my family when my eye lands upon a small lapel pin featuring a rainbow. It is worn by a middle-aged man who had immigrated from India to the United States in the late 1960s. His face lights up when I ask him about his pin. “This,” he says proudly, “is from the Rainbow Coalition, started by Jesse Jackson.” For the next several minutes, he gives me discourse on the antiracist, equal opportunity politics that could be possible if we South Asians joined hands with other people of color and workers. “That’s what a coalition means,” he says, beaming.
Indian Americans lean largely left, with 68% identifying themselves as Democrats, a party that chose Kamala Harris to be at the top of its ticket. The degree to which Vice President Harris could overcome the colonial legacies she inherited from her Indian and Jamaican forebears remains to be seen. The cultural influence of Black civil rights activism, with its emphasis on self-determination and racial equality, may have had an ameliorative effect on her. Yet, she behaved much like her counterparts on the right. On her first overseas visit after becoming Vice President, she went to Guatemala bearing not assistance but a simple message of unwelcome: “do not come.” The Biden administration passed asylum restrictions to make American speaking time even under the carefully curated conditions of the Democratic National Convention. She may still believe that her public office requires alignment with and unbridled pursuit of American imperialism, a close cousin of British colonialism.
Examples of progressive South Asian politicians abound; Representative Pramila Jayapal is chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The National Coalition of South Asian Organizations (NCSO) has a progressive justice agenda and is comprised of a robust collection of organizations nationwide. Yet, even among politically progressive groups who have overcome colonial legacies enough to be united in their goals of economic, racial, and social justice, other intragroup inheritances must be confronted. NCSO’s coordinating agency, South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), is currently in what they call a “chrysalis,” with the primary goal of coming to a comprehensive analysis of caste oppression. To this end, they have acknowledged that their agenda has been dominated by caste elitism and “other privileged South Asian community urgencies.” The first U.S. legislation that would have explicitly banned caste discrimination was vetoed in 2023 by Democratic governor Gavin Newsom in California. Newsom vetoed the bill after it passed the State Assembly and State Senate vote nearly unanimously, and over the pleas of hungerstriking activists including the awe-inspiring U.S.-based Dalit civil rights leader Thenmozhi Soundararajan, executive director of Equality Labs. Among those who lobbied Newsom to kill the potentially groundbreaking civil rights legislation were right-wing Indian Hindu groups and corporate interests, living out their identifications with the colonial aggressor by supporting the rights of the powerful to protect their privilege and oppress with impunity.