How many Indians make for “too many Indians” in the United States? One more than all the others in the room? Or even just one more than the only other Indian in the room?Many years ago, a housemate selection interview in a campus town in America snowballed into a legal squabble and even a distress sale of the house over a question like this. A graduate student who had rented there for a long time insisted that his Indian housemate could not get any more Indian tenants lest the Whites be overrun, as he rather explicitly insisted, not realising it was against the law to do so.AdvertisementAlso Read | C Raja Mohan: In Iran war, US midterm elections are the new frontNow, questions like this are discussed by otherwise seemingly nice American people in places like Texas, where years of online campaigns and complaints about Indians “stealing jobs”, shopping in shops, winning spelling bees, and cheering in football games, have become the face of what was once optimistically called “Making America Great Again”.The 2026 US midterm elections may be unfolding around several major issues not unfamiliar to American voters in the past, such as wars and fuel and food prices. But never has the numerically minuscule Indian American population found itself the subject of existential doubt in relation to its future as it has now.It would be an exaggeration to say that anti-Indian racism will be a key issue on which votes are cast in most of the national or local polls. Nor will the relatively small numbers of Indian-descent voters make a significant impact, perhaps except in certain pockets. Outside the Indian-American diaspora and the Indian media, there is little urgency or awareness about the recent rise in anti-Indian racism. Notwithstanding the fact that there has been some coverage in mainstream media of incidents like the narrowly averted mass shooting at a major Hindu temple in Illinois, the fact remains that anti-Indian racism is not seen as a “thing” for everyone to profess concern about, unlike the protests against the “Muslim Ban” in 2017 or the Black Lives Matter revolutionary zeal of 2020.AdvertisementIn the competitive world of attention for identity-based claims for not just pain and struggle, but just about almost anything, Indians, India, Hindus, are not even in the running. Yet, Indian Americans try so hard to argue on social media that everyone, even Italian and Irish Americans, faced their share of problems in the past. It is comforting to think it’s just every immigrant community’s rite of passage, before the right to arrival, or acceptance, presents itself.Meanwhile, one has to live through it, or out-vote it. That seems to be the approach, and no one can fault besieged immigrants for feeling this way.But what would a MAGA defeat in the midterms, even if it does happen, mean for Indians, for America? Will the genie, as they say, go back in the bottle? Or will another group of motivated actors find in the tropes that have been manufactured around the “Indian American” a useful arsenal to demonise, dehumanise, and disenfranchise once again? A scapegoat that wears the coat that fits without so much as a fight is the most convenient scapegoat of all.you may likeThe core issue is that Indians in America haven’t confronted the reality of their lot here: that they have no collective control over anything, starting with their image. For a highly visible, and some might say audible, community, we have neither strategy nor ideology, nor story, nor voice. We are status-conscious (with each other), but image-oblivious (beyond each other). We put our best feet forward into schools and careers, but we have never understood that chanting “we can be more American than you Americans” is not exactly endearing, once it stops being amusing.This is not to say that it is all a failure to self-represent. The resistance to change in the representation establishment is monumental, be it media or academia. But without the effort and the investment in creativity and self-representation, the Indian American will continue to remain, in politics, as in culture, mostly inconsequential. To put it another way, it is time to stop being just the machinery (or worse, a performative mercenary), and start thinking of what it means to be missionary. America can use an altogether new American Dream, and not just a claustrophobic Indian parenthesis in one of its declining old ones.The writer is professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco