The TOI correspondent from Washington: US vice-president JD Vance’s journey from Hillbilly Elegy to Nixon eulogy on Thursday involved — while being married to an accomplished Indian woman — praising a former American President who was not only a notorious India-hater but who also denigrated Indian women in the vilest terms. Standing before an appreciative audience at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library while promoting his new memoir Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, Vance attempted something many historians have long warned against: making the 37th President, the only one in US history to resign in disgrace from office mid-term, sound less like the patron saint of political scandal and more like an unfairly maligned visionary.“I’ve always liked Richard Nixon,” Vance declared, describing the crooked president as a “political genius” whose reputation is enjoying a deserved “renaissance.” Watergate, he argued, would barely survive a modern news cycle. “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story,” he said, maintaining that the notion it could topple a presidency seems “crazy” by today’s standards.It was an extraordinary sales pitch, not so much for his book but for Nixon himself. Vance even saw in himself a likeness of Nixon: Young senator, vice president, best-selling author, and perpetual target of the media. “It kind of sounds like JD Vance,” he joked.Outside the Nixon Library, critics wondered whether this was nostalgia or historical revisionism. Among the sharpest responses came from former Obama adviser David Axelrod, who called Vance’s remarks “mind-boggling” while reminding Americans that Watergate involved far more than an embarrassing burglary: Nixon’s aides authorized the break-in at Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters, attempted to use the CIA to obstruct the FBI investigation, maintained a White House-controlled slush fund, weaponized the IRS against political opponents, and orchestrated a cover-up that sent senior administration officials, including the attorney general and the White House chief of staff, to prison. Nixon himself was captured on his secret tapes participating in the cover-up before resigning in disgrace.Others suggested that Vance had inadvertently made a different point altogether: that the sheer volume of modern political scandals and controversies has lowered America’s outrage threshold. Columnist David French quipped that Watergate would indeed be a 12-hour story today — not because Nixon was innocent, but because contemporary politics has normalized egregious behavior that once shocked the nation.For Indian readers, however, Vance’s Nixon revival — at a time ties with New Delhi are sketchy at best — comes with particularly awkward historical baggage. Nixon’s hostility toward New Delhi was recorded in declassified White House tapes, preserving an astonishing catalogue of racial slurs and personal abuse directed at India, Indians, and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi during the 1971 Bangladesh crisis. Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger repeatedly referred to India Gandhi as an “old witch” and a “bitch,” and Indians were dismissed as “slippery,” “treacherous,” and “bastards.” Nixon described Indian women in deeply offensive and sexist terms that remain among the ugliest remarks ever recorded by an American president about India.Those personal prejudices coincided with policies that decimated US-India ties. Even as Pakistan’s military under Gen. Yahya Khan carried out a genocide in East Pakistan that sent millions of refugees into India, the Nixon administration tilted decisively toward Islamabad, dispatching the US Seventh Fleet into the Bay of Bengal to bully New Delhi during the conflict.India ultimately prevailed militarily, Bangladesh was born, but Nixon’s Pakistan policy became a lasting source of mistrust in Indo-US relations, a sentiment that is currently resurfacing given the Trump-Vance declaration of love for a country and its military that New Delhi accuses of perpetrating terrorist attacks on India.
