Walking in Cleveland: What Happens Outside the Republican National Convention, and Why Some Indian Americans Are Voting Trump
On 17 July 2016, a father and a daughter sat across the dining table in their 1920s-built American home in a quiet neighbourhood in Cleveland, and discussed the United States’ Republican Party’s presidential nominee Donald Trump. “I just don’t understand how you can vote for a man who has this kind of outlook on humans,” Radhika Balasubramaniam, an Indian American, said to her 80-year-old father, Balu. “I had a drunk girl come up to me last week and say, ‘I hope you are not here to bomb us. I can’t wait for Trump!’” she recollected. “I have never heard this kind of speech. What he is bringing out in people really scares me.” “It’s not like I don’t care,” Balu responded. “But I know nothing will happen.”
About 15 kilometres from their house, at the Quicken Loans arena in downtown Cleveland, the Republican National Convention (RNC) would begin the next day. Delegates of the Republican party from each state in America would gather inside this sports arena to choose the party’s official nominee for the upcoming presidential election in November.
I had reached Cleveland early that morning and directed by my Indian-immigrant network, landed at Balu’s doorstep, looking for a place to stay. Balu and his wife Gomathi are prominent members of the Indian American community in the city. Their home is a hub for Indian immigrants—even strangers like me—and artists travelling through the state. I was in the city to cover the convention, or rather, the outside of the convention, by walking the beat. Over the next four days, presidential hopeful Donald Trump would be formally named the Republican candidate for president, winning the votes of at least 1,237 of the 2,472 delegates—the minimum requirement to secure the nomination—at the RNC. Meanwhile, I’d notice outside that anti-immigrant, anti-Islam and anti-women sentiments were reaching disquieting crescendos.
Balu’s politics piqued my interest when he stopped by the basement, where I was staying, to help work the television. “Fox News is on 202 and CNN is a couple of channels over. The rest is garbage,” he said. I spent the rest of that day sitting near his rocking chair to understand how the Indian-born Balu became a card-carrying Republican.
Balu and Gomathi were among the first Indians to settle in the Cleveland area. He had reluctantly moved to the United States in 1969, on his family’s insistence, to pursue a PhD in Economics. One day, he found a crumpled flyer in the student centre, advertising a vacant position with the City of Cleveland and urging anyone with an economics background to apply. As a student in his mid-thirties in an America rocked by anti-Vietnam war protests and worried that they would stall his education, Balu, who had earlier worked with the Planning Commission in India, applied. He was offered the job soon after, and accepted it.
Gomathi arrived from India on Christmas day in 1970 with Radhika’s elder sister, then a five-year-old, clinging to her leg. While her husband went to work at City Hall under Cleveland’s first black mayor Carl Stokes, Gomathi befriended mothers she met at her daughter’s primary school. “I made friends with a Filipino, a Greek and an American mother. We agreed to meet once a week and teach each other about our respective cultures, which is best done through food,” she told me.
In the early 1970s, Balu became involved with the American Nationalities Movement, a Cleveland-based group that was started in 1959. The group lobbied for nations such as Poland, Hungary and Lithuania, which were seen as countries “trapped” behind what was then the Iron Curtain, a political border that separated the former Soviet bloc from the western nations before the decline of communism. It was his friends from the movement who urged Balu to join the Republican Party.
“If I was opportunistic, I would have joined the Democrats as they were the stronger party in Cleveland. But I am an economist and that influences my politics,” he told me. “I felt the Democrats were all about social issues and I was comfortable with the Republican value system that promoted hard work. It made sense to me as an Indian. We’d come here and work hard,” he said. Radhika agreed that her father’s politics were linked to his views on economics. “When you hear Republican politicians speak today, they never really talk economics. It’s all about their views on abortion and gay marriage,” she said. “But when you speak to my dad, he never comes across as someone who is against those social causes.”
Unlike her husband, Gomathi usually votes Democrat. When Barrack Obama was running for president, Gomathi and their daughters forced Balu to vote for Obama too. Radhika told me that, based on the candidate in question, both she and her mother had voted for Republicans in the past. “It’s a comfort level thing,” she explained over text later. But with the national elections, too much was at stake. “You are talking about supporting a person who promotes hate against immigrants. Immigration is how we are here today,” she argued over lunch on the first day.
The next morning, I reached downtown Cleveland at 9 am, a few hours before the convention kicked in. The streets surrounding the Quicken Loans arena were unusually serene; the only people to be seen were journalists. Many of the cafes and restaurants a few blocks from the arena had been converted to makeshift newsrooms: the Washington Post had taken over a restaurant; and Twitter, a café. The news channel MSNBC had set up a stage from where it was broadcasting live. Soon, the lanes filled with attendees, protestors and—perhaps more in number than any other group—the police. Over the two days I spent there, in addition to law enforcement officers from Ohio, I spotted personnel from Highway Patrols of Kansas and California, as well as cops in cars, on bikes and on horseback. Hundreds of demonstrators—anti-Trump protestors, Black Lives Matter activists, members of the Westboro Baptist Church—gathered everyday in and around Public Square, Cleveland’s free-speech zone. The crowd was mostly white—the black Americans I saw were either residents of Cleveland manning their businesses in the area, protestors or police officers; brown faces, Indian or otherwise, were even harder to find.
That morning, I also stopped by the America First Unity Rally at the nearby Settler’s Landing Park, on the banks of the Cuyahoga River. Although not an official convention event, the rally was reportedly sponsored by various pro-Trump organisations such as Citizens for Trump and Students for Trump. Different avatars of Trump supporters took the stage one after another, and spoke against whoever they believed the enemy was—the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, or illegal immigrants. Later that day, I brought this home to Balu. I told him that the high-strung virulent speeches had alarmed me as both a foreigner and a person of colour. He was ready with an answer. “People should understand the dynamics of American politics. Trump has to work with Congress so there are checks and balances on what he can do after he is elected,” he said.
I was not convinced. So, I posed the question about Trump’s anti-immigrant remarks to Subba Kolla, an Indian American and a national delegate to the convention from the state of Virginia. I met Kolla on 19 July, the second day of the convention, while he was on a stroll outside the arena. “Sometimes being a part of the immigrant community, if you don’t know the actual details you feel a little sensitive,” Kolla said. “Donald Trump is talking about illegal immigrants. He is not against immigration as a whole. America was built on immigration.”
Kolla came to the United States from Andhra Pradesh about 20 years ago, to take up a job in a tech company. He has been an active member of the Republican Party for the past seven years. Like the party’s nominee, he, too, is in real estate. “Republican Party is the natural fit for majority of Indians,” he told me. “We are traditionally conservative. We believe in hard work and we believe in low taxes, good business opportunities, and traditional marriage.” But Kolla’s aphorism does not ring entirely true. In the past, research has shown that of the Asian groups in the country, Indian-Americans were the most heavily Democratic—about 65 percent.
Kolla showed me selfies he had taken with the other Indian-American delegates inside the arena, including the California delegate Harmeet Dhillon, who led the opening prayer on the second night of the convention with a Punjabi prayer. “I really think Indian Americans should show their strength,” Kolla said. “We were 10,000 back in the 1920s, now we are 3.5 million. We need to give more importance to political roles so we can protect our wealth and our families. Otherwise someone will take our decisions for us, and we will bark inside our homes,” he told me. “It’s better to assimilate with mainstream American politics quickly because our kids and our investments will be made here.” Kolla told me that, in his home state Virginia, he had been working to raise support for Trump. Compared to the rest of the state, “Northern Virginia is more educated, more sensitive,” he said, and that the Republican party was finding it a little hard to raise support there because of “Trump rhetoric.”
Though Trump was not their first choice, both Kolla and Balu seemed ready to make do with him for the sake of their party. “I supported Marco Rubio to begin with. He understands the problems faced by immigrants, he is well educated and is from the younger generation,” Kolla said. Like many other delegates, Kolla signed a petition stating that if his preferred candidate was out of the race, he would support the party’s official nominee. “It’s a united stance against Hillary Clinton,” he told me. Balu, too, it appeared, opposed Clinton. “I think his vote is against Hillary and is not for Trump,” Radhika told me.
At the convention, the anti-Clinton sentiments were at a fever pitch—and undeniably sexist. I saw dozens of people sporting badges and t-shirts with harsh messages against Clinton: “Trump that Bitch,” said one; “KFC Hillary Special: 2 Fat thighs, 2 small breasts…left wing,” said another.
But for all his support for Republicans, Balu’s views are at odds with his strong opposition to the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. During lunch on the first day, he told me, “Modi promotes sectarian views. His policies drive Muslims and Christians away.” I wanted to argue, but Balu had already moved on to other topics. I took a second helping of the food and decided to let him have this one.
Correction: The sentence, “He was offered the job soon after, and accepted it,” earlier included an incorrect salary figure, which has been removed. The Caravan regrets the error.