Money Talks
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ON 27 MARCH 2013 , Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Aaron Schock and Cynthia Lummis—three Republican members of the United States Congress—touched down in Ahmedabad. In the travel disclosure form that McMorris Rodgers later submitted to the US House of Representatives Committee on Ethics, she reported that the delegation came to India to discuss “trade relations with the state of Gujarat” and “mutual security concerns resulting from global terrorism.” Their sponsor’s organisational interest in the trip was for “American congressmen and business leaders to first hand experience the culture, traditions and values of India and develop a deeper understanding and friendship between the two peoples.” This sponsor was the Indian-American businessman Shalabh “Shalli” Kumar.
Fifteen hours after their arrival, McMorris Rodgers, Schock and Lummis sat in Gandhinagar, the capital of Gujarat, for their first meeting with Narendra Modi. At the time, Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat at the head of a Bharatiya Janata Party government. Newt Gingrich, a former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives and Kumar’s longtime associate, phoned in to the meeting with Modi and vowed to advocate for him in Washington, DC. Over the course of ten days, the group visited various BJP officials, businessmen, and chambers of commerce in three cities. They went to many tourist sites, including Hindu temples. They did not visit too many sites connected to Islam and none connected to Christianity, nor did they meet any members of the Indian National Congress, the party in national power at the time. Clearly, this trip was about Modi.
Modi faced widespread criticism for his administration’s inaction during the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat. During several months of rioting, mobs killed over a thousand people and displaced around a hundred and fifty thousand more. In the following years, several police officers and BJP politicians stated that Modi gave express permission to loot and riot. Modi dismissed all such charges as politically motivated.
Three years after the pogrom, Modi applied for a diplomatic visa to the United States, hoping to address an association of Indian-origin hotel owners and business leaders. Groups such as the Indian American Muslim Council and the Coalition Against Genocide lobbied the US Congress and state department to bar Modi from entry to the United States. On 18 March 2005, the state department denied Modi a visa. Leaked diplomatic cables from the US embassy in Delhi that year indicated that the US government considered him to be an unreliable demagogue, and predicted that the BJP leadership would soon sideline Modi in a bid to protect the US-India relationship.
The decision incensed Modi and his allies. To date, Modi is the only foreign official ever denied a visa to the United States for violation of religious freedom. The BJP co-founder LK Advani called for pro-Modi rallies throughout India to “awaken the nation, so that no one ever dares to treat it as a pushover.” Modi’s supporters variously referred to the decision as an insult to India, its Constitution, and the concept of human rights.
It was Kumar’s organisation, the National Indian American Public Policy Institute, which organised and bankrolled the US legislators’ trip to meet Modi. According to the House Ethics Committee, members of the US Congress are prohibited from participating in any multi-day trips that are planned, organised, requested or arranged by lobbyists or foreign agents. Technically, there was no wrongdoing—NIAPPI was not, and is not, registered as retaining any foreign agents or lobbyists. Kumar and the legislators framed the tour as a “cultural trip.”
In truth, however, Modi had not gained any broader goodwill in the United States. The US administration, under Barack Obama, continued to shun Modi for nearly a year after the visit. Then in February 2014, two months before a national election that Modi was heavily favoured to win, the US ambassador to India, Nancy Powell, ended the US government’s effective boycott of Modi with her first visit to Gandhinagar. The United States only lifted Modi’s visa ban after he ascended to the office of prime minister.
Because the Indian media repeatedly characterised the legislators’ trip as a formal overture from the US government, the trip delivered what Kumar set out to achieve: a huge win for Modi’s optics. Modi himself characterised the event as a visit from a congressional delegation, an American endorsement of his business acumen and what he touted as Gujarat’s economic miracle. The Economic Times reported that a “high-profile American delegation” extended an invitation for Modi to visit the United States. Firstpost observed that McMorris Rodgers promised that the legislators would cooperate with the Obama administration to restore Modi’s standing and overturn his visa ban. The US embassy in Delhi declined to comment.
When I spoke to him last year, I asked Kumar why he organised the trip. “I had developed a relationship with Nitin Gadkari, who was the BJP president,” Kumar told me. “Gadkari said, ‘One thing you could do is, if you bring a congressional delegation here, Congress can’t talk as much about him having a visa ban.’” While the trip may have slightly burnished Modi’s international reputation, its far-greater achievement was shifting domestic perception in India of his global reputation.
Kumar claims extensive ties to the BJP, having been friends with many current ministers in the Modi cabinet when they were far less prominent. When speaking to me, Kumar said that Nirmala Sitharaman travelled to the United States in 2012 to support his anti-Pakistan bill, and stayed at his home for ten days. Sitharaman, then just a BJP spokeswoman, is now the finance minister of India. Kumar also counts among his friends the current minister of external affairs, S Jaishankar, and the Indian ambassador to the US, Taranjit Singh Sandhu. Kumar describes himself as the Indian state’s proxy on Capitol Hill. “Whenever India needs some legislation, they know who to go to, because they can’t get it themselves passed,” he told me. “They should have a foreign lobby arm, but they don’t. Stop the gift of F-16s to Pakistan? Ok, go to Shalli Kumar.”
By 2013, Shalabh Kumar was a member of Overseas Friends of BJP. At the time, OFBJP
