When Conditional Solidarity Becomes Class Betrayal

When Conditional Solidarity Becomes Class Betrayal - How Removing Agency From Usha Vance Exposes the Slippage From Political Critique Into the Dehumanization of Indian Americans

The difficult conversation Indian Americans must have is not optional: when communities normalize anti-Indian racism, they hand the white supremacist a double validation. That validation is social and political - it strengthens structural narratives that keep whole groups second-class.

Too many on the Indian American left default to an easy, dismissive frame: if you don’t accept every Democratic orthodoxy, you are accused of “acting superior to other South Asians.” That smear flattens difference into a moral shortcut and refuses to account for class, caste, color, and political homelessness. Indian diaspora communities are heterogeneous — Caribbean, Bangladeshi, Nepali, Sri Lankan, and more — and a majority describe themselves as politically homeless precisely because neither the Democratic establishment nor the conservative right has effectively addressed the upward sweep of anti-Indian violence and dehumanization.

 Picture: Hindustan Times

Elica Le Bon captured this rot when she said the movement often looks less like “advancing people of color” and more like advancing only those people of color who parrot a particular view. This is not anti-racism; it is conditional racism — a political badge that demands ideological fealty in exchange for visibility. It is performative diversity rebranded as moral clarity.

The left’s failure isn’t abstract. It is concrete and deadly. Where was the same moral uproar over Janhavi Kandula — an immigrant student run down and treated by authorities as if she “had limited value”? Where were the outraged columns and protest vigils on the scale we saw for George Floyd or Breonna Taylor? When a temple in Utah bled and a congregation cowered, was the party apparatus vocal enough? Too often, the silence of prominent Indian Democrats functions as a precedent: if they, with platform and influence, do not speak, why should algorithmic America, or institutions, care?

This is also about gendered and racialized erasure. The trope of equating a woman of color with her husband — reducing her voice to a mirror of a man’s — is antique and evangelical in origin, but it survives in modern political punditry. When Democrat supporters erase a woman’s agency, they replicate conservative violence under a progressive banner.

So to the Indian Democrats: when you claim that critics “act superior to other South Asians,” you should examine whether your silence and selective outrage are mirror images of that charge. Are you — by omission — communicating that Indian lives matter less? Because the lived reality is that race, culture, and skin color, not party registration, are what attract hatred. Criticize Usha — hold her accountable — but do so without amplifying xenophobic rhetoric that denies Indian lived experience.

Accountability without introspection is theatrical. If Usha Chilukuri once identified with Democratic ideals and later shifted, that should trigger a question: where did your community fail her? Where did an apparatus that claims to champion marginalized people fail to protect one of its own? We must demand more than calls for performative diversity. We must insist on structural solidarity that treats Indian lives as equal in value — whether in red districts or blue ones.