Ajaypal Singh Banga, whose turban marked his Sikhism in gatherings of the highest echelons of US and international business, was born in Pune in western India to a family that has roots in Jalandhar in Punjab. He received his bachelor’s degree from St Stephens College, Delhi and a postgraduate qualification in management from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He had worked for Nestle, PepsiCo and CitiBank before landing at MasterCard, where he worked his way up from chief operating officer, to president and chief executive officer, and finally to executive chairman.

India has lampooned Pakistan as having a “Pavlovian response” for raising Kashmir regardless of the topic under discussion at the UN.

Caste discrimination as a cultural and social phenomenon is practised in India and other countries, even beyond South Asia, by members of many religions, including Christianity and Islam.

A sign of the growing political involvement of Indian Americans is that in the 2020 general elections over 300 from the community ran for city, state and federal offices, Rangaswami said.

The index also cited what it asserted was India’s “displacement by the United States and China as a top investor and trade partner for several South Asian neighbours in recent years”.It noted that the US displaced “India as a top investor in two South Asian economies: Bangladesh and Nepal”.  Pakistan ranks 15 on the Index, Bangladesh 19, Sri Lanka 21, and Nepal 25.

During her visit to Pakistan, she had gone close to the Line of Control and complained that Kashmir was not “being talked about to the extent it needs to in Congress but also with the administration”.

Although the US and India have been drawing closer together, India's apparent neutrality in the Ukraine war and its continued purchase of oil from Russia remains a sticking point, although Washington's diplomats gloss over it.

Harmeet Kaur Dhillon, who immigrated to the US as a child, drew national attention when she said a Sikh prayer at the opening of a session of the Republican National Convention in 2016 – the first time a non-Abrahamic religion figured in a national party convention. Her Sikh religion has come up in the campaign for the chair with accusations that there has been a whispering campaign about her faith.

India has been diversifying its defence sourcing and purchases from the US have increased ten-fold between 2016 and 2021, according to the Stockholm Peace Research Institute.

A Republican lawmaker has praised the contributions of Indian Americans, who he said pay 6 per cent of taxes despite being 1 per cent of the population, as a model community who “represent some of the best citizens we have in America”

A Doha-based Taliban official Ahmad Yasir taunted Pakistan in a tweet reminding it of the surrender of nearly 100,000 of its military personnel to India during the 1971 Bangladesh War.

Despite the growing importance of New Delhi-Washington relations, the post has been vacant for two years after Kenneth Juster, who was appointed by defeated former President Donald Trump resigned

TRAC provides a breakdown by languages spoken by those whose asylum cases are pending and Punjabi speakers, who could be from India or Pakistan or elsewhere, numbered 21,961. There were 6,770 Hindi speakers, 6,315 Bengali speakers, who could be from India or Bangladesh or elsewhere, and 376 Tamil speakers, who could be from India, Sri Lanka or other countries.

The Sikhs suing the Marine Corps were supported in court by several organisations, including the Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty and the American Islamic Congress

Before going to Washington, Zardari-Bhutto had made personal attacks on India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi in crass terms at a news conference at the United Nations. Earlier, India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar had described Pakistan as the “epicentre of terrorism”.