Sikh American Politicization and Multiracial Coalition-Building in Suburban Chicago

A TURBAN IN A WHITE, REPUBLICAN HAYSTACK: SIKH AMERICAN POLITICIZATION AND MULTIRACIAL COALITion-BUILDING IN SUBURBAN CHICAGO Jaideep Singh Introduction The electoral political participation of South Asian Americans, including Sikh Americans, has historically been limited by such factors as citizen- ship, language, and a lack of understanding of American political norms. Despite their limitations in participating in elections in the United States, South Asian Americans have been distinctly political actors since their arrival in significant numbers in the early 1900s, albeit primarily in their homelands. The revolutionary activities of the members of the Hindustan Ghadar Party offers a prime example of this phenomenon. The Ghadar Party assumed the extremely ambitious and formidable task of trying to set India free from the colonial rule of the British Empire, while operating in a foreign country on the other side of the globe. However, the organizational success of the Ghadar Party has never been repeated in the United States. South Asian Americans have been and remain far too divided along ethnic boundaries—as demarcated by religious identity, language, geographic and/or national origin, and caste—to form a cohesive political bloc. This stems from the fact that there are far more diverse ethnicities in India itself, than all of Europe. In marked contrast to most modern South Asian American political organizations, the Ghadar Party was able to unite people of immensely differing backgrounds, beliefs and loyalties behind one common cause, perhaps its most remarkable accomplishment. Due to this remarkable ethnic diver- sity among its constituency, the Ghadar Party remains one of the most unique Asian American organizations ever formed. As a result of the tremendous cleavages within the South Asian Ameri- can community, they have largely remained on the sidelines of American electoral politics throughout their history. Even in the post-1965 years, as South Asian Americans have become among the wealthiest ethnic groups in the nation, they have remained largely outside the realm of the electoral process. Until the past few years, few South Asian Americans have 130 jaideep singh run for elected office, and far fewer have won. With their minimal political presence and small population until recent decades, the position of South Asian Americans in Asian America is well symbolized by the man- ner in which Dalip Singh Saund has largely been forgotten. Among the least talked about—and certainly least celebrated—heroes in American history is the first Asian American elected to the United States Congress, Dalip Singh Saund.1 The one hundredth anniversary of his birth occurred in 1999, and it passed virtually unnoticed. Congress- man Saund earned Master’s and Doctoral degrees from the University of California, Berkeley in the 1920s, and was among the leaders in the national struggle to overturn the racist legislation that denied immigrants from South Asia the right to become naturalized American citizens. Due to the racist societal prohibitions on his occupational choice at the time, Dr. Saund was forced to take a job as the foreman of a cotton picking gang after completing his Ph.D.2 Becoming a citizen in 1949, three years after the passage of the Luce- Cellar bill which gave immigrants from India the right to naturalize, Saund jumped into American politics and had a truly exceptional career. As a result of a vigorous grass roots effort, he was elected a judge in 1952, despite the racial taint that hung over the campaign.3 Remarkably for his time, or any other in American history for that matter, he was elected to Congress in 1956 from a district with almost no Asian Americans; this in the pre-Brown versus Board of Education segregation era. Despite his pioneering accomplishments, Dr. Saund remains a virtual non-entity in American history. Until 2008, Congressman Saund was the only South Asian American to occupy such a prominent political office—and it has been over five decades since he left office. He remains the only one to do so without converting to Christianity. In recent years, however, an increasing number of South Asian Ameri- cans have run for elected political office, and taken prominent consulting positions on the staffs of a number of high-profile, elected Caucasian poli- ticians, poising themselves for promising futures in the political arena. In 1990, there were fewer than half a dozen South Asian Americans working 1 I want to thanks Kim Geron, Shawn Schwaller, and Oki Takeda for their insightful comments after reading portions of this chapter, especially Dr. Geron who improved a large chunk of the manuscript when the chapter was in unfinished form. 2 Inder Singh, “Congressman Saund Model of Political Participation,” India Journal, Sep- tember 24, 1999, p. A5. 3 Ibid..

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