Many Indian-Americans I know nurse some resentment toward Haley and Jindal. It is a complex feeling. Part of it is the generic loathing of inauthenticity that bedevils many leaders — like Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush. The religious conversions, the nicknames, the immigration stances: It all seems a little too convenient, too calculated. But in Haley and Jindal’s cases, the feeling is deeper. When Nimrata Randhawa, born to Sikhs, becomes the Methodist politician Nikki Haley, and when Piyush Jindal, born to Hindus, becomes the Catholic politician Bobby Jindal — and when they are the only Indian-Americans who make it to the governor’s mansion — it confirms unuttered suspicions: that the road to brown political success is not via colorblindness but rather via the simulation of whiteness. You worry that certain correlates of whiteness — Methodism, guns, the name Nikki — are needed to compensate for your lack of the actual thing. You fear that figures like the two governors, far from euthanizing the demographically doomed idea of America as a synonym for whiteness, may actually be keeping it on life support.

And then, on Tuesday night, Haley gave her speech. In a party now dominated by Donald Trump’s proposed Muslim-banning, Ted Cruz’s “I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark” carpet-bombing threats and Marco Rubio’s “out of place in our own country” nativism, Haley’s words arrived like a cleansing rain: hopeful, inclusive, magnanimous and conservative all at once. She instantly became a Pope Francis for the G.O.P. — a heretic in tone, not in doctrine. And there are times, as the pope seems to understand, when a new spirit breathed into an institution can become its own kind of doctrine.

Haley sounded the necessary Republican notes about the exceptional nature of the country: “The freest and greatest,” the “last, best hope on earth.” But in her words was a theory of American history that went deeper than the a priori “we’re the best” peddled by many of her colleagues. She said her state’s past, like the country’s, wasn’t only “rich” but also “complicated” — an unmistakable allusion to the racial hatred that has proved especially indefatigable in South Carolina. Our history, she said, “proves the idea that each day can be better than the last.” It is a view in which America wasn’t born perfect and corrupted by time, but born corrupt and perfected by time.



When she lamented a “broken” American political system that had lost the public trust, she blamed her fellow Republicans alongside Democrats — an even-handedness that earned her criticism from some G.O.P. talking heads. She alluded to tolerance for homosexuality when she said her party would “respect differences in modern families.” She called a white man a “terrorist.” And back when that terrorist, Dylann Roof, murdered nine people at a prayer meeting in Charleston, Haley famously seized the political moment to remove the Confederate flag from the Statehouse grounds — a feat that Issac Bailey, a longtime journalist in the state, measured against Ben Carson’s achievements and declared “just as miraculous as successfully separating conjoined twins.”

It was when Haley spoke as “the proud daughter of Indian immigrants” that she most shone. She recalled a humble childhood in the rural South: “My family didn’t look like our neighbors, and we didn’t have much.” She spoke of the communal closeness that helped them to weather tough times and of the dream of self-invention that propelled her climb. And then she trumped Trump, and those others with similar ideas but less instinct for virality. “During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices,” she said. “We must resist that temptation. No one who is willing to work hard, abide by our laws and love our traditions should ever feel unwelcome in this country.”