India leader’s visit offers little respite for only Indian-American congressman

WASHINGTON – Preparations are underway for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to speak at a rare joint session of Congress next week – an event made possible in part by the nation’s only Indian-American congressman.

Rep. Ami Bera, a Democrat from California, is one of the members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee who convinced House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., to host the speech.

Bera should be celebrating his achievement. Instead, the beleaguered lawmaker is troubled by a re-election campaign that has been under scrutiny after his 83-year-old father, Babulal Bera, admitted in court that he’d broken campaign finance laws to bolster his son’s career.

The younger Bera also has been entangled in a controversy surrounding donor swaps that were made between his campaign and the campaigns of California Rep. Scott Peters, a Democrat, and senatorial candidate Rep. Patrick Murphy, a Florida Democrat.

In May, an accountability group and Lori VanHamersveld, a Sacramento Republican, filed separate Federal Election Commission complaints that allege Bera mishandled campaign money and took part in “an intricate donor swap shell game.”

He’s also the target of a National Republican Congressional Committee campaign to sap his support in Tuesday’s California primary. Among the topics of committee emails sent to reporters in the past three weeks: “Why Ami Bera Doesn’t Want You to Take Him at His Word” and “Ami Bera Wants to Bring Terrorists to America,” the latter a reference to Bera’s vote to close the controversial detention facility at Guantanamo. The measure had the support of just 162 other lawmakers, including three Republicans.

“My district is probably one of the most competitive districts in the country,” Bera said. “So I can’t control folks who are going to attack me. So what I can control is showing up, serving the residents in Sacramento County, the people that I work for, you know, and being readily available. I’ve not hidden from talking to the press.”

On Capitol Hill, Bera appears unshaken. He goes to the House of Representatives floor to vote on bills. He cordially interacts with other lawmakers in the hallways.

They don’t ask pointed questions. He doesn’t offer any awkward answers. His battle remains internal, and outwardly he focuses on the upcoming Modi visit. The prime minister will travel to the United States on Tuesday, the same day Bera’s constituents will vote in the California primary. Modi is expected to address Congress at 11 a.m. Wednesday. The results of Tuesday’s voting already will be known. While Bera and Republican Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones are the only contenders and will face one another again in November, the outcome should provide some indication to the Bera campaign of how he will perform against Jones in the fall.

Trade has more than doubled between India and California while Bera has been in office, according to California Chamber of Commerce statistics. That’s partly a result of a decline in India’s restrictions on foreign trade and investment.

Bera and his co-chair on the Congressional Caucus on India and Indian Americans, Rep. George Holding, a North Carolina Republican, formally requested the joint session to hear Modi in an April 19 letter to Ryan. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Edward Royce, a Republican from California, and the committee’s senior Democrat, Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, also signed the letter.

For them, Modi’s address to Congress is another building block in the short history of the improved relationship between the United States and India.

“On the economic front, a lot of U.S. companies are doing business in India,” Bera said. “They want to see India do the market reforms that make it easier for us to sell our goods and services over there.”

Significant trade barriers remain, including high tariffs, requirements about the participation of local Indian businesses in companies and worries that India doesn’t do enough to protect foreign companies’ intellectual property.

Bera said he remained hopeful about the future relationship between the countries. He expects Indian-Americans to help build those ties. That’s why he invited National Spelling Bee standout Snehaa Ganesh Kumar, a Folsom Middle School eighth-grader, to be his guest at the joint session of Congress.

“As a son of a Gujarati who immigrated here in the 1950s, who was born and raised as a lifelong Californian, it’s now a chance for me to kind of inspire the next generation,” Bera said, referring to his father’s home state of Gujarat in India, which is also Modi’s birthplace. “I’ve always said my legacy is not anything that I’m going to do, but what the next generation can do.”