Ashwin Madia: Taking notice

Washington, Oct. 31: Touch up artists are in great demand in Minnesota and photoshops around the state capital are doing good business four days before America goes to the polls.

Opponents of Indian American Ashwin Madia are touching up his photographs on the US election trail to make him look darker than he is and then campaigning to defeat him next Tuesday on the ground that Madia has the “wrong demographics” to represent the largely white voters in a Minneapolis suburb.

The state Republican party leaders are openly arguing that Madia is not “one of us” and that electing this Democrat to the US House of Representatives would go against the racial composition of his Congressional seat.

Madia’s is a compelling story in the US Congressional election that has been largely shadowed by the intense interest in Barack Obama, especially after chances rose in recent weeks that a black man may actually be the next President of America.

With Bobby Jindal no longer in Congress, there is a distinct possibility that next Tuesday, Madia may be elected to become the only Indian American in the next US House of Representatives. If elected, Madia will be only the third person of Indian origin to serve in the US Congress.

Madia is an unlikely candidate to represent the largely white electorate in a Minneapolis suburb. He is also an unlikely Indian American.

Just 30, he is one of very few Indian Americans to have served in the US army marine corps, that too in Iraq.

His father is a microbiologist and his mother is physio-therapist. The couple emigrated from Mumbai to the US before their son was born with only $19 in their pocket. But the Madias gave little Ashwin a good education. The family moved from Boston to Plymouth in Minnesota, where Ashwin attended school. Later he graduated from the University of Minnesota and obtained a law degree from the New York University School of Law.

He then joined the army and went to Iraq as a lawyer for the marines. When he returned home, Madia joined a law firm in Minnesota, but politics beckoned him, especially after the time spent in Iraq when the war was tearing the American society apart.

At the Democratic National Convention in Denver in August, where this correpondent met Madia, there were whispers that he was once a Republican and that he continues to be one by inclination and temperament.

But his first hand experience of the mess the Bush administration had made of Iraq and the way Republicans had given up their long-held positions on fiscal discipline, made Madia drift towards the Democrats.

Yet, the decision to run for Congress from Minnesota’s third district was a daredevil act as no Democrat has won this seat for 48 years. It opened up when veteran Republican Jim Ramstad, who held it for nine terms, decided to retire.

Even a few months ago, no one gave Madia any chance of winning because the man the Republicans chose to replace Ramstad is a veteran in Minnesota politics.

For this reason, efforts by Indian Americans to get Madia a prime time speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention in Denver were rejected by the party’s national leadership. Madia’s opponent next Tuesday, Erik Paulsen, the Republican leader in the Minnesota legislature, is everything that this constituency would normally go for.

Paulsen is a social conservative, a business analyst by profession who also has a proven record of balancing the budget in the Minnesota legislature. And he is white.

But with the economic meltdown sinking the Republicans in many seats, Madia’s fortunes have turned.

When Madia succeeded in raising $700,000 and then almost $1 million on his own for the election in the second and third quarters of 2008 respectively, the Democratic national leadership sat up and took notice. They have now allotted $1.5 million for TV advertisements in his district.

Worried that Madia may win in an upset next week, the Republican national leadership has committed as much as $850,000 against him in the final days of the campaign.