It was a pretty bleak day when MMS, shorthand for prime minister Singh, was to get his ceremonial welcome. Hordes of desi hacks, cased at the North Gate by surly, stolid, security types, shuffled in one by one. Some of them were cursing the excruciating US security procedure under their condensed breath as they shivered in the damp cold outside. Little did they know that later in the evening, a couple of tawdry socialites would gatecrash the state dinner.
One journo, who happened to be a Muslim, was held up that morning because there was some discrepancy in his name as submitted to the White House and as it appeared in his passport . A small feat of imagination, and perceived discrimination, was sufficient to spin a story that a Muslim had been denied entry to the White House because of his religion. Small problem: The occupant of the White House was a black man who bore the middle name Hussein. The story would have carried so much more punch had the resident been Bush. Besides, one of the gate-crashers later that evening was named Tareq Salahi.
Likewise, as MMS and BHO were jaw-jawing inside, across the White House in Lafayette Park (Washington DC's Boat Club/Hyde Park/Demonstration Central), a motley group of Sikhs, formerly known as Khalistanis, was demonstrating against the Indian state. At more than 25 protesters, it was the biggest Sikh separatist demonstration in Washington DC in years, their numbers having dwindled to single digits in recent times. Maybe they needed to drum up more numbers to counter the fact that the current prime minister of India is a Sikh.
Really, if you think about it, that is one hell of a story. Two democracies, both led by leaders from minority communities. Who would have thunk? It was only 25 years ago that we saw a massacre of Sikhs (mostly in the capital at that) which threatened to sunder their ties to Mother India. Less than a decade later, a Sikh was the country's finance minister, and two decades later, he is the prime minister.
Meanwhile in the US, a skinny black guy whose name seems to echo two of US's biggest enemies (Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden) gets elected to the White House after only two years as a senator. Can there be a better political emollient than democracy?
There aren't many countries in the world where this can happen. Certainly not in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, or in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan - two countries that partnered to give the world Taliban and their dark, nihilistic view of the world.
In fact, a few days before MMS came a-visiting, the Obama White House had hosted a celebration of the birth of Guru Nanak, something the US president pointedly mentioned during his pow-wow with Singh. That was as much a tribute to the Sikhs, among the earliest Indian immigrants to the US, as it was to MMS. The first Sikhs arrived in the Pacific Northwest more than a century ago. Today they are part of the American mosaic as much as they constitute the fabric of India.
Someone else recently found how much Sikhs had integrated in America under unusual circumstances. India's external affairs minister S M Krishna was in New York couple of months back when it turned out that one of his US Secret Service detail was a third generation Sikhni from Yuba City, California . If she hadn't fessed up, she could certainly have been mistaken for a Latino - especially since she could speak Spanish. A month after that episode, Yuba City, which has the largest concentration of Sikh population in the US (estimated between 5 and 10 per cent) had elected the first Sikh mayor in its history.
So the next time president Obama meets Singh, guess we should expect him to greet the prime minister with "Sat Sri Akal". Are we a couple of great democracies or what?
