What were these B-town celebs doing dancing for Trump?

Live from New Jersey, on Saturday night, Donald Trump claimed he is “a big fan of Hindu”. For a fleeting moment, we were stumped. After all, The Hindu is often perceived as tilting towards the Left. How is it, then, that Trump, whose presidential campaign has brought the Right-wing fringe into the mainstream, is a big fan? As it turned out, the Republican candidate was simply referring to India and not to the newspaper.

At Edison’s New Jersey Convention and Expo Center, Republican Hindu Coalition (RHC) hosted “Humanity United Against Terror”, a charity event for the benefit of “victims of terror throughout the world with particular emphasis on Kashmiri Pundits and Hindu refugees from Bangladesh”. It’s about an hour from Asbury Park, immortalised in the title of Bruce Springsteen’s debut album.

For decades, the heartland rocker has been the voice of blue collar White Americans, many of whom, in a strange turn of irony, have now gravitated towards Trump.

Springsteen’s Born in the USA has been co-opted by many conservative politicians – most famously Ronald Reagan, which elicited a response from ‘The Boss’.

At Saturday’s charity event, the misunderstood anthem made an appearance, not the first time it has been used at a Trump rally. Springsteen, needless to say, didn’t – as far as the Republican nominee is concerned, Springsteen has made his views clear, most recently in a recent interview to Rolling Stone, in which the singer-songwriter said “the republic is under siege by a moron.” 

For the RHC, though, it is Trump who is ‘The Boss’, never mind allegations of sexual assault. The coalition’s founder-chairman, Shalabh “Shalli” Kumar, shrugged it off as “locker room banter” while talking to Indian news channels like NDTV and CNN-News18. It was the same line of defence as Trump himself, who gave the explanation to multiple media outlets. The one to India’s very own Times Now, though, was overshadowed by the interviewer, Newsmobile editor-in-chief Saurabh Shukla, calling Trump a “real man” twice.

That wasn’t the only occasion when the American presidential nominee was trumped by someone from India – or as Trump likes to call it, Hindu. At RHC’s charity event, Trump was the keynote speaker. The star attractions, though, were celebrities from Bollywood and further down south — including but not limited to Prabhu Deva, Malaika Arora and Shriya Saran. The song and dance included two grooving couples being ‘rescued’ by ‘Navy Seals’ from ‘Jihadists’ wielding lightsabers (Jedi green and not Dark Side red for some reason), and a Michael Jackson impersonator, apart from Born in the USA. And there were videos by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and Anupam Kher, the latter on the plight of Kashmiri Pandits.

We at Newslaundry were curious about what the celebrity participants thought about Trump’s political views – on immigration, on Muslims, on women. What did they feel about being part of the event in the light of the recent sexual assault controversy? What about Kher, who was not in attendance – did he give his consent for his video to be used? We tried to get in touch with the actor but could not get through. This piece will be  updated once we get a response from him.

Those at the event and in Twitter, could not get enough of the bizarre. There was, of course, Trump on a lotus – red, white and blue, not saffron. There were flyers accusing Hillary Clinton, Sonia Gandhi and NGOs for trying to pin the blame for the 2002 Gujarat riots on Narendra Modi but finding buffalo bones instead of mass graves; one of the sources mentioned is NewsX. There were placards saying: “Trump for faster green cards”. And then there was Trump, shifting India’s Parliament to Mumbai.

At least he didn’t Bangalore it.