Special Forum on “Locating Nikki Haley in Sikh Discourse”

Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture and Theory

Edited by Anneeth Kaur Hundle, Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Irvine and Rishi Ramesh Gune, Doctoral Student in Culture and Theory, UC Irvine

Submissions Due: October 1st, 2024

Publication: Rolling Basis

On March 6th, 2024, Nikki Haley suspended her Republican Presidential campaign and left the Republican Presidential primaries after a series of major losses on Super Tuesday.[1] Mainstream American political pundits had anxiously presented Haley, who had wide-spread appeal to moderates, as the most significant challenge to Donald Trump internal to the party. Despite practices of White American assimilation, her defeat revealed the very real limits of racial and gendered inclusion in American Presidential politics, as well as Haley’s own negotiations and intimacies with the far Right. As a former member of Trump’s cabinet, Haley has more recently indicated her support for the 2024 Trump campaign.[2] She has also demonstrated her support for the right-wing Zionist Netanyahu government and the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, and especially the US-backed Israeli military siege of Gaza that began after October 7th.[3] The military siege and bombardment  has led to the killings of thousands of Palestinians, and is described by scholars and legal experts as a genocide.[4]

Much has been written about Nikki Haley in the mainstream popular press. While some journalistic accounts construct Haley as a deracinated figure and as racially White, others present her as Indian American. Still others make note of her Punjabi ethnic and Sikh religious heritage, her marriage to a Southern white military officer and conversion to Methodist Christianity. They observe her successful political career as South Carolina governor, serving from 2011-2018, and as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations serving in the Trump Cabinet from 2017-2018.

Notably, even the few existing scholarly accounts have been unable to work through the complexity of her biography as she leverages her identity and positionality–especially race (Whiteness and South Asian-ness/Indian-ness) and religion (Sikhism and Christianity), but also gender, class, caste and sexuality, and discussions about race and immigration in the US. Shambuka (2021), for example, locates Haley on a continuum of other, problematic “Indian American” (primarily Hindu American) politicians who have performed liberal-democratic values in the US (a depoliticized and neoliberalized Black Lives Matter project, for example), but actually support political projects of Hindutva in India, what they describe as the rise of “Hindutva Democrats.”[5] In this essay, Haley is alternatively positioned alongside a historical tradition of culturally and politically conservative right-wing South Asian American politicians, including the likes of Bobby Jindal and Dinesh D’Souza. Although her Sikh heritage is mentioned, it is conflated with Hindu identity, reflecting the ways in which South Asian and  Asian American Studies scholars often collapse Hindu and Sikh identities. Historically, this Hindu-Sikh conflation is related to the very real intimacies between and among Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs (in relation to landscapes of religious conversion, kinship and a shared sacred, cultural and linguistic ethos), as well as Hindu and Sikh estrangements from Muslims, especially in the aftermath of the Partition of Punjab in British India. Postcolonial violence and Hindu-Sikh conflict in the Indian Punjab; religious and scholarly contestations over the intimacies and distinctions between Hinduism and Sikhism as spiritual traditions; and most recently, the ways in which the Indian *officially* secular, yet Hindu majoritarian state, the BJP and the Hindu right have discriminated against minority religious traditions or treated Sikhism as a minority sect of Hinduism, have all shaped discussions and new scholarly directions on the Sikh diaspora and global Sikh Studies. In an Asian American studies context, the conflation between Hindus and Sikhs is grounded in the ways that the earliest Punjabi Sikh migrants (alongside Hindus and Muslims) in the American West were constructed and racialized as “Hindoo.”

This special forum on Nikki Haley, born Nimrata Randhawa, seeks to more rigorously contextualize the rise of Haley in the American public sphere and within American politics in relation to global Sikh, transnational Punjab and Sikh Studies discourse. What kinds of questions does Haley raise about the condition of global Sikh diasporas, transnational Punjab and the Sikh American diaspora specifically? About religion and secularism, class, caste, race, gender and sexuality? How do Sikh and Punjabi communities, Sikhism, and the practice of Sikhi become constructed and represented through the figure of Haley–and alternatively, how do they become foreclosed? How has the Indian Punjab, the diasporic homeland for most American Sikhs, become represented or foreclosed? What does the figure of Haley tell us about the current political moment in the US, and what does she reveal about processes (and practices of) US/American exceptionalism and nationalism, imperialism, settler colonialism, White supremacy, secular and Judeo-Christian hegemonies and Islamoracisms, and their relationships to the formation of colonized identities, subjectivities and practices? How can we locate her within shifting terrains of what Puar (2007) and Povinelli (2011) describe as processes of “neoliberal multiculturalism”--the deployment of normative contours of race, gender, class and religious positioning for immigrant groups and their inclusion–and to what Hundle (2023) has most recently described as “neoliberal multiracial facism”?[6] How have, and how should Sikh American and Punjabi communities (and others) respond to the political ascendance of Haley as not necessarily an exception–but potentially as a new norm on the far right? How might the progressive Sikh intelligentsia, grounded in a critical race and critical secular re-thinking of the Left, as well as feminist, queer and anti-caste orientations, respond? What kinds of spiritual, political, ethical possibilities and imaginaries of liberation–de-territorialized from nation and empire, and grounded in a Sikh and Punjabi ethos--might be deployed as a counter to the imaginaries and machinations of the Right, as embodied by Haley?

The Sikh Formations editorial board and special forum editors invite short provocations and preliminary reflections that place Nikki Haley in global Sikh, transnational Punjab and Sikh Studies discourse (1500-2500 words maximum). We invite contributions that center Sikh and Punjabi identities within transnational feminist, critical ethnic studies, Asian American and South Asian American studies formations and other disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields. Commentaries that are grounded in primary sources, including media artifacts and other sources of evidence,  are especially welcome. Please email submissions directly to the forum editors at ahundle@uci.edu and rgune@uci.edu. 

Some additional possible topics for consideration include:

●      Haley and race and religion. How has Haley strategically deployed racial identifications and the practice of racial  passing in the US–from changing her name to identifying as White in official paperwork in 2001 to strategically discussing the racism her Sikh immigrant parents experienced in South Carolina? What might these practices reveal about the Punjabi Sikh experience and negotiations of White supremacy and anti-Black racism, especially in the American South? How does Haley negotiate Sikhism and Christianity? What are the conceptual relationships between race and religion in the US and Punjab, and enduring histories of Sikh-Christian/colonial encounters? What does Haley’s embrace of Whiteness and Christianity reveal about landscapes of Islamo-racism in the US and in the modern Indian nation, as well as Sikh-Muslim relationalities, both before and after 9/11?

●      Haley and race and class. How has Haley deployed narratives of immigrant class mobility and model minority discourses in the context of late neoliberalism and racial capitalism in the US? How are investments in Whiteness and anti-Black racism and anti-Blackness shaped by labor-capital relations and class status? By settler colonial logics?

●      Haley and gender and sexuality. How does Haley negotiate white American heteropatriarchies? How does she represent  Southern, White-proximate, White-passing, cis-heterosexual femininity and womanhood; or alternately “Indian American” womanhood in the public sphere? What kind of gender and sexual politics does Haley represent? Imperial/nationalist/white feminisms? How are these gendered expressions also shaped by race, religion, caste and class? How might these practices depart from conceptualizations of Sikh and Punjabi womanhood, femininity and feminisms?

●      Haley and the transnational politics of race and caste. Although Sikhism is rooted in an anti-Brahmanical and anti-caste ethos, caste structures have remained intact via historical and colonial transformations of the zamindar system, hierarchical labor-capital relationships in rural Punjab and urban centers, the circulation of racial theories (Aryan racial theory and martial race theory) and the practice of colorism. Thus, caste-based practices and prejudices continue, even as they are disavowed, and at times, resisted. How do caste hierarchies resonate with racial and class hierarchies, and how might we trace these connections transnationally in relation to Haley’s dominant caste status, and across transnational Punjabi Sikh and the Christian Southern US  landscapes?

●      Haley’s relationship to the complexity and diversity of Sikh American communities in the US, including her use of anti-immigration rhetoric. How have diverse Sikh communities responded to Haley, especially in consideration of the ways that turbaned male Sikhs have been racialized and subject to Islamo-racist violence and disproportionate hate crimes since 9/11 and the ascendancy of Trumpism? Have they identified with aspects of her politics and celebrated her presence in the American public sphere? Alternatively, how have they disidentified with and disavowed her? How might these perceptions and practices  be grounded in class (elites versus working-class Sikhs in the US), as well as Sikh American participation in progressive and social justice organizing in the US?

●      Haley’s diplomatic and political relationships to the Indian nation and the Modi/BJP government in the context of Sikh minority religious precarities.  How does Haley negotiate the Hindu Right’s and/or majoritarian bias and prejudice towards the Sikh religious community/desires to co-opt Sikhism into the Hindu fold? Histories of anti-Sikh violence?

●      Haley’s politics in relation to Sikh diasporic political activism and modes of surveillance, securitization and transnational repression. How is the US imperial state alternatively perceived as a site of political freedoms and safety  from India-based repression for politically-active Sikhs, as well as a purveyor of imperial, geopolitical and settler-colonial based violence against vulnerable minorities, as exemplified by the rise of Haley (or not)?

●      Haley in Sikh and Punjabi immigrant context. How might we locate Haley in Sikh and Punjabi immigrant histories in the US and contestations over citizenship and other forms of  political and legal inclusion and exclusion in the US, from Bhagat Singh Thind to Dalip Singh Saund?

●      Haley and the comparative analysis of the South Asian political class and far right. How do Haley and other South Asians advance imperialist, neoliberal capitalist and far right projects in Western liberal-democracies and Hindutva in India (including individuals like Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman, Priti Patel in the UK)? How does Haley open debate concerning  early modern Sikh traditions of political and spiritual warfare, as opposed to the contemporary militarization and participation of Sikhs in nationalist and imperialist projects, from India to the US?