Indian American political action has been percolating for years. As professionals, mostly doctors and engineers, they spent their first decades working hard and ensuring Ivy League educations for their children. (More than 60 per cent of Indian Americans have college degrees.) Now they are established, law-abiding and wealthy median family income is nearly $70,000, a prime source of human and financial capital for Washington.

They are present everywhere in the US, both geographically and professionally. Indian doctors were given US visas in the 1960s and ‘70s, provided they practiced in underserved states such as Tennessee, Missouri and Nevada, and they have been quietly building relationships with leaders in those states. Motel owners in Texas, Illinois and New York have long cultivated ties to Democrats such as Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Tech gurus such as Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, are politically active in California. So are the US-based alumni of the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology, many of whom are Silicon Valley millionaires.

Professionals such as Rajat Gupta of McKinsey & Co. have penetrated the upper echelons of global management consulting and finance. The number of Indians on Wall Street doing everything from investment banking to trading is staggering. An estimated one-third of the professionals in the money-making derivatives industry, yes, those geeky PhDs working on complex algorithms and econometric models are of Indian origin. The bridges to Bangalore from Silicon Valley were built by Indian American engineers and entrepreneurs.

All these native-born Indians — 90 per cent of the Indians in the US are first-generation emigres — and the cream of India’s crop came together to help the passage of the nuclear deal.

... contd.