Nikki Haley’s political comet soars ahead of her India visit

When Ajit Randhawa’s daughters Simmi and Nikki entered the Little Miss Bamberg school pageant in the small South Carolina town in the 1970s, the community was confused. They elected only a white queen and a black queen, and the Randhawa kids, immigrant children from Punjab, were neither. Undeterred, five year old Nikki, short for Nimrata, belted out the Woody Guthrie epic ‘This land is your land, this land is my land, from California to New York Island,’. That little girl, now the 42-year young governor of South Carolina and a rising star in the Republican leadership firmament, will embark Tuesday on a ten-day visit to the land of her parents with the eyes of both her hosts and her constituents trained on her. Nikki Haley is used to such attention. All her life, particularly after he political debut, she has been identified as the other. One electoral rival called her a ‘raghead,’ a reference to the Sikh turban her father still wears.