Sunday, January 12News and updates from Kashmir

Indian and Pakistani Diaspora Rally Together for US Election 2020

Shekar Narasimhan, Indian-American investment banker, recalls that he was at the White House for a party but the mood quickly turned sombre. He says everyone fell silent as details of the horrific attack emerged – 20 children, all under the age of 10, and six adults died in the shooting.

It was also on that day that Mr Narasimhan first met Dilawar Syed, a Pakistani American. This is something Mr Syed and Mr Narasimhan hope to change through their organisation.

It’s unclear which way Pakistani Americans are leaning, but over 70% of Indian Americans plan to vote for Mr Biden in the upcoming election, according to the 2020 Indian American Attitudes survey. This suggests that the community will largely vote Democrat as always.

In the US, the two communities are part of the same South Asian diaspora and often work together during political campaigns. Indians and Pakistanis are often seen as being at loggerheads because of strained relations between their respective countries.

India and Pakistan also share a complicated and contentious history. Independence from the British in 1947 was accompanied by a bloody partition of the subcontinent.
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Millions died in the religious violence that followed.

Since then, the nuclear-armed neighbours have fought two wars and a limited conflict over Kashmir. Both countries claim the Muslim-majority border region, which remains the biggest bone of contention between them.

This is despite the headline-grabbing friendship between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Mr Trump. Last year in September, they appeared together in Houston at an event named “Howdy Modi”, where Mr Trump declared: “You have never had a better friend as president than President Donald Trump”. In February, Mr Trump visited India, where he addressed a crowd of over 100,000 in Mr Modi’s home state of Gujarat.

Many other Americans, they view the economy and healthcare as the two most important issues. But according to the survey, Indian Americans “do not consider US-India relations to be one of the principal determinants of their vote choice in this election”.

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