From Confused to Confident

By Vidya Kurella

An old adage says that girls adopt their father’s political views—maybe because politics has been male-dominated or because women belatedly received the right to vote. My personal history is a little different; my father got the right to vote in the United States when I was a child, but by the time I gained the right to vote at age 18, my father had started to adopt my political views.

1992 was a very important year in my life—I turned 18, went to college, and voted for the first time. It also began a political dialogue between my father and me. That fall, I watched the presidential debates with keen interest, and learned that my father was a Republican.

Since he'd become a citizen, my father voted Republican, claiming he liked their tax policies. We always watched the evening news together and discussed world events, but I hadn’t yet developed a political consciousness and never wondered about my father’s views. It seemed that he was more focused on knowing what was going on rather than having an opinion about it. When I asked him about issues like abortion, affirmative action, welfare and the death penalty, he didn’t really have much to say. As a college freshman, I was still developing my views on these subjects, and I was surprised to find that these social issues hadn’t played a role in my father’s political choices.

After a lot of discussion, my father and I both voted for Bill Clinton that November. Like many young people, I was impressed by his appearance on MTV and his casual demeanor. I had also just lived through my first war (the Persian Gulf War) and preferred a president who wasn't a war hawk. My father, I think for the first time, considered many social issues that he'd never thought about before. It was the beginning of our fascination with the Clintons.

That summer, I worked for Senator Carol Moseley-Braun (D-Illinois), the first African American woman to serve in the United States Senate. The senior senator from Illinois was Paul Simon, a veteran Democratic politician and a very public supporter of Indian Americans. My father was a fan of Senator Simon, in part, because of this. While I liked Senator Simon and his distinctive bowties, I was ecstatic about working for the first African American female senator.

I learned a lot that summer. Aside from opening the mail and putting together the press clips, I learned about the various services senators provide their constituents. More importantly, I saw a lot of unhappy people—like a woman who came to the senator’s office hoping she could get help to receive Social Security checks. Many people of color came hoping that the senator would understand their plight. This was my introduction to identity politics—the idea that people who share an identity (race, gender, etc.) see things the same way.

The next summer, working for free was no longer in the cards, so I opted for summer school. But, it wasn’t just regular summer school—the University of Pennsylvania launched its Penn-in-India program. Surrounded by other South Asian American friends from college, I experienced our homeland anew. We learned about India’s changing economic policies and her impending entrance into the global economy. India was entering the international scene as a power player, and United States-India relations became a popular subject. This was also the first time I got to see some of India’s worst slums—in Mumbai. I got a glimpse of what life was like for millions of people who may or may not gain from India’s new economic policies.

Although I was a student of international affairs and a product of a bicultural upbringing, I had never really integrated my political beliefs with my cultural heritage. As India entered the world stage, I couldn’t avoid that any longer. For seemingly inexplicable reasons, people started asking me about my views on India’s economic policies, export/import ratios and politics. To be quite honest, I didn’t have opinions on those things—was I supposed to? Just because my parents were Indian didn't mean that I was automatically conversant in Indian politics, did it? I didn't think so, but apparently, a lot of others did. I was really just happy that the Indian textiles flooding the market resulted in people viewing Indian clothing as no longer weird. Of course, today, you can find kurtas at H&M.

As I pursued my education in the liberal arts, I continued to learn about different people and different places, and began to develop my own ideas about how the world should work—my own political consciousness. I also became acutely aware of my life of privilege: the suburban upbringing, the Ivy League education, a summer backpacking trip through Europe and all the other trappings of upper-middle class life.

My junior year, I spent a semester as a (don’t laugh) White House intern. This was before being a "White House intern" raised the specter of impropriety. My father was beside himself with pride. All the uncles and aunties started asking me to do things—they treated me like I was their personal representative in D.C. All of sudden, they were interested in politics? Not really, they were just interested in changing the effects of government on their lives—whether it be malpractice litigation, visa processing or tax reduction.

I survived President Clinton’s charms and continued to develop my opinions on various political issues. Clinton’s passion for helping the less fortunate was contagious, and I got infected. However, I didn't agree with everything he did. While I became an avid supporter of free trade and am staunchly pro-choice but anti-death penalty, I also discovered a soft spot for taxation and spending policies. And, I really wished that we could've helped the people of Rwanda.

While I became a loyal Democrat early in life, I didn’t become anti-Republican until much later. From what I remember as a child, President Reagan wasn’t so bad. And, Daddy Bush had done a pretty good job too. Since my father hadn’t expressed judgments on the politicians of my youth while we watched the news, I did not have any anti-Republican baggage. Sometime after I signed up to work for Janet Reno at the Department of Justice but instead found John Ashcroft at the end of my chain of command, things started to change. From his stance on the death penalty to his views on immigrants, everything Ashcroft supported contradicted my personal views.

As I became increasingly more liberal, the political dialogue between my father and me took an interesting turn. Bobby Jindal, a current member of the United States House of Representatives, ran for Governor of Louisiana in 2003. By any measure, Jindal was a successful young person. He was also an Indian American and a Republican, and my father wrote a check for his campaign. I couldn’t fathom why. For years now, my father and I had been talking about the different issues facing this country and how the Democrats and Republicans were handling them. We had even talked about my frustrations at the Department of Justice. I thought he had become a full-fledged Democrat—not that he ever said that.

I decided to educate myself about Jindal. I even considered attending a fund-raiser being hosted by some acquaintances in D.C., despite being an avowed Democrat. Before I spent the money to be in the same room with Jindal, though, I did a little research. It turns out that he is conservative—even by Republican standards. His "no abortion, no exceptions" policy violated my pro-choice stance, and I disagreed with his positions on school choice, Medicaid and tax reduction (it would help the wrong people). I was appalled that my father was supporting him.

I challenged my father’s check-writing, and my father pointed out that it was important to have Indian Americans in office. I couldn’t disagree with that, but did he really want Bobby Jindal in office? Jindal didn’t run on a pro-India platform, nor did he support my father’s now well-developed commitment to social issues. He was just…brown. My father admitted that he didn’t really know what Jindal stood for. So I looked back on my experience with Senator Moseley-Braun and realized that I chose to support her because she was the first African-American female senator. At the time, I hadn’t given much thought to her policies, goals or qualifications. My father was following the same path: he wanted to support the first ever Indian American governor, not because of who he represented or what he believed in, but because he was Indian American. When I looked at Bobby Jindal, I saw a staunch conservative that I disagreed with on nearly every issue. My father just saw a brown face like his own. I talked to my father about Jindal’s views, and I could see in his face that he was torn. He struggled with a question that to me had an obvious answer.

When President Bush ran for re-election, he tried to court the Indian American vote. He even spoke at an event hosted by Indian-American doctors. My father, a doctor, decided to go. Here I was losing sleep that Vice President Al Gore was going to lose the election, and my father was going to fund-raisers for President Bush! What went wrong? Evidently, my father was concerned about various professional issues such as the rising costs of malpractice insurance, the costs of healthcare and funding for the Veteran’s Administration—issues that affected him directly. While I would rather do just about anything instead of being in the same room with President Bush, my father was paying money to learn about the issues that affected him personally.

South Asians in this country are politically split. Some vote Democrat and some vote Republican. And, some will undoubtedly vote brown. Some suggest that immigration is a South Asian issue and others suggest that health care, racial discrimination, education and various social issues are more important. As South Asian Americans increasingly engage in American politics, we will be seeing more brown candidates, running as both Republicans and Democrats. They will all champion the causes they believe in. And, they should be elected based on the positions they take and the voices that they promise to represent. I wish them well and hope that they serve all their constituents well, including the brown ones.

Politics is a funny thing. They say you get more conservative as you grow older. I think you just get wiser: my father voted for John Kerry in 2004. When I decided to leave the Department of Justice, my father empathized with my frustrations, and like many Americans he is frustrated with the situation in Iraq. He is still an avid supporter of the Clintons, and we still talk about politics—but he doesn’t ignore reality, as I sometimes am wont to do. He still takes advantage of every opportunity to express his views to politicians of any stripe. Having a lot of compassion for those who are less fortunate, he is committed to issues that matter to him and has learned to educate himself about them. I’ve learned that from him. Maybe it is true that girls learn about politics from their fathers.

Vidya Kurella is an attorney who is currently serving as a mediator with the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

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