Kumar was inhabiting a memory from his youth, when as a sixteen-year-old in 1965, he stood on the roof of his parents’ home in Amritsar, a city in the northern Indian state of Punjab, in the thick of a war between India and Pakistan. His neighborhood was enveloped in darkness, and he was shouting at the sky, waving an Indian flag, as enemy planes thundered overhead.
Kumar, an electronics business tycoon in Chicago, who likes to be seen exclusively in black suits with a brooch carrying his initials, became a fixture on Capitol Hill six years ago, and emerged in July as one of the largest individual donors to the Donald Trump campaign, contributing $898,800 dollars for the cause of Hindu Americans. He wears gold-rimmed aviator eyeglasses and a beard like that of Narendra Modi, the Indian Prime Minister who represents a Hindu nationalist political party.
In August, weeks after Kumar pledged his contribution to Trump, I watched Kumar appear on the Newshour, an Indian TV news show that has been described as Fox News on Steroids. Arnab Goswami, a self-righteous and short-tempered anchor, bellowed over panelists whose heads were trapped in little floating boxes onscreen. Goswami asked how Kumar expected India to have a close relationship with the United States under a Trump administration, if the presidential candidate planned to ban roughly 180 million Indian Muslims.
“The problem here is we are taking a statement out of context. I met the gentleman. I met him for forty-five minutes. I had a heart-to-heart talk with him. You just watch RNC. Why would Muslims be participating in his nomination process? There were Muslims in the RNC presidential nomination. So this entire thing, which is blown out of proportion…” Kumar said.
“What is blown out of proportion?” Arnab asked.
Earlier that evening, Kumar pitched Trump to the audience, arguing that conservative values were Hindu values—free enterprise, libertarian small government, fiscal discipline, family values, and a strong foreign policy.
In his speeches, Kumar spoke with an air of solemnity, as if he were standing on the pinnacle of self-made success. He liked to tell his story with a narrative arc: he was born in a lower middle-class family of freedom fighters; at the age of twenty, he moved to the United States to study electronics engineering; six years later, he founded the AVG Group, a electronics manufacturing firm, where he amassed his fortune.
After the last presidential debate, Kumar based himself in Florida, a swing state where the Indian American population grew by eighty percent between 2000 and 2010, according to census data. Part of Kumar’s strategy was about optics—getting Eric Trump to visit a Hindu temple there, for instance. And part of it was about generating paranoia. Last week, Kumar approved an advert that accused Clinton of sanctioning military aid to Pakistan and blocking the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visa to the United States. A doomsday voiceover stated that Huma Abedin, Clinton’s aide, was of Pakistani origin, and that if Clinton came to power, she would become chief of staff.
“People are already paying attention to Hindu Americans. In fact, Hillary came to the table a little late,” he said. “If this election comes down to a few thousand votes, then it definitely will be credited to the Hindu vote.” He went on to describe his plans to create a city named after Ronald Reagan in south India.
At one point in our conversation, a stranger sauntered to our table in the basement cafeteria. He was taking a break from calling voters in swing states on behalf of the Trump campaign.
Published on November 7, 2016 on Harper’s.