Follow Us
Washington, October 27
“The Indian and Hindu community will have a true friend in the White House. We will defeat radical Islamic terrorism,” said Republican Party nominee for President of the United States Donald Trump’s new ad on Indian-American TV channels.
Trump also borrows a variation of a slogan Prime Minister Narendra Modi used during his campaign in India. “Ab ki baar, Trump sarkar,” he says in the ad. It means “This time a Trump government.” The ad splices together footage of his speech from an event that he attended with Bollywood stars organised by the Republican Hindu Coalition with pictures of Prime Minister Modi and of the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, reported BuzzFeed News.
(Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd)
The ad opens by wishing viewers a ‘Happy Diwali’, one of the biggest festivals in India. It closes with Trump saying, “We love the Hindus. We love India,” before the disclaimer saying it’s paid for by the Trump campaign.
Shalli Kumar, an Indian-American donor to Trump and chairman of his Indian-American Advisory Council, told BuzzFeed News on Wednesday evening that the ad was running on all Indian-American channels 20 times a day. He declined to disclose how much the campaign is spending on the spot.
Kumar and his wife have given nearly $ 9 lakh to a joint fundraising committee benefiting Trump and the Republican National Committee.
“We wanted to reach out to Hindu-Americans to let everybody know that he loves Hindus, he loves India and he is looking forward to getting that message out that he identifies with Hindus,” Kumar said.
It opens with the Diwali message because “if he’s doing an ad at this time, it would be impolite not to wish Happy Diwali,” Kumar said.
Asked which vendor had produced the ad, Kumar responded that the Indian-American Advisory Committee put the ad together. “We had most of the footage because it was taken from the event itself. We just took footage from there.”
Kumar said he helped Trump practise the Hindi slogan for the ad. “He said this sentence about 15 times. He spoke better than David Cameron did when he did the same thing in 2015.”
Trump’s campaign, which has not publicly announced the ad, did not immediately respond for comment. ANI
2
5