By Amitava
Kumar
March 15, 2017
Sunayana
Dumala at the funeral of her husband, Srinivas Kuchibhotla, an Indian engineer
who was murdered last month as part of a hate crime in Kansas.PHOTOGRAPH BY
NOAH SEELAM / AFP / GETTY
On a
September evening in 1987, Navroze Mody, a thirty-year-old Indian man living in
Jersey City, went for drinks at the Gold Coast Café, in Hoboken. Later that
night, after he left the bar, he was accosted on the street by a group of about
a dozen youths and severely beaten. Mody died from his injuries four days
later. There had been other attacks on Indians in the area at that time,
several of them brutal, many of them carried out by a group that called itself
the Dotbusters—the name a reference to the bindi worn by Hindu women on their
foreheads. Earlier that year, a local newspaper had published a handwritten
letter from the Dotbusters: “We will go to any extreme to get Indians to move
out of Jersey City. If I’m walking down the street and I see a Hindu and the
setting is right, I will hit him or her.”
When I
first read about the attack on
Mody, I had only recently arrived in the United States. I was a young graduate
student at Syracuse University then, and although the news alarmed me I wasn’t
fearful. In those days, distances felt real: an event unfolding in a city more
than two hundred miles away seemed remote, even in the imagination. I might
have worried for my mother and sisters, who wore bindis, but they were safe, in
India. Whatever was happening in Jersey City, in other words, couldn’t affect
the sense that I and my expat friends had of our role in this country. The
desire for advancement often breeds an apolitical attitude among immigrants, a
desire not to rock the boat, to be allowed to pass unnoticed. Since 1965, when
Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act, abolishing the
racist quotas of the nineteen-twenties, our compatriots had been bringing their
professional skills to America. If we didn’t hope to be welcomed, we at least
expected to be benignly ignored.
A lot has
happened in the long interregnum. Indian-Americans have the highest median income of any
ethnic group in the United States. There is a greater visibility now
of Indians on American streets, and also of Indian food and culture. I’ve seen
the elephant-headed deity Ganesha displayed all over America, in art museums,
restaurants, yoga centers, and shops, on T-shirts and tote bags. The bindi
isn’t the bull’s-eye it once was. But the bigotry, as we have witnessed in
2017, has not gone away. In early February, an Indian man in Peyton, Colorado,
awoke to find his house egged, smeared with dog feces, and vandalized with
racist slogans. Two weeks later, at a bar in Olathe, Kansas, a U.S. Navy
veteran named Adam Purinton allegedly opened fire on two Indian patrons.
Srinivas Kuchibhotla, a thirty-two-year-old aviation engineer, was killed; his
colleague Alok Madasani survived. Ten days later, a Sikh man was attacked
outside his home in Kent, Washington, while washing his car. A white man
wearing a mask told him to go back to his country, then shot him in the arm.
Soon after that, as if to confirm that Indians across the country were now on
notice, an unsettling video began
to circulate online. Originally posted in August by a sixty-six-year-old
computer programmer named Steve Pushor, it shows a crowded park in Columbus,
Ohio. As the camera pans past immigrant parents playing with their children,
Pushor says, in voice-over, “The Indian crowd has ravished the Midwest.”
The
racist’s calling card is ignorance: he cannot discriminate (if that is the
right word) between nationalities and religions, between Indians and Saudis and
Egyptians, Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs. One of the first hate crimes to take
place in the days following 9/11 was the murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh gas-station
owner in Mesa, Arizona. The killer probably thought that Sodhi, with his turban
and beard, was Muslim; he had told his friends that he was “going to go out and
shoot some towelheads.” This year’s attacks bear some of the same hallmarks.
Purinton reportedly shouted “Get out of my country!” before firing on the men
from India, who he believed were from Iran. And last Friday a white man in
Florida set fire to an Indian-owned convenience store because, he told police,
it didn’t carry his brand of orange juice and he wished to “run the Arabs out
of our country.” We, the mistaken people.
The
incitement sixteen years ago was 9/11. Today it is Donald Trump. The
President’s nationalistic rhetoric and scapegoating of racial others, not to
mention his habitual reliance on unverified information, have sown panic among
immigrants. I’ve often asked myself lately whether I’ve been right to suspect
that people were looking at me differently on the street, at airports, or in
elevators. Whenever a stranger has been kind to me, I have almost wanted to
weep in gratitude. Unlike when I first arrived here, distance no longer offers
any reprieve from these feelings. The Internet delivers ugly fragments of
report and rumor throughout the day, and with them a sense of nearly constant
intimacy with violence.
Soon after Kuchibhotla’s murder, a commentator in
India pointed out a grave irony:
in the run-up to the 2016 election, a number of right-leaning American Hindus supported Trump’s candidacy,
not only with donations but also with elaborate prayer ceremonies to propitiate
the gods. The more conservative of these people—those who backed the rise of a
hypernationalist Hindutva ideology in India through the nineties—have made
common cause with American conservatives, who share their view of Islam as the
enemy. Trump’s fear-mongering found a ready echo in the ultra-right-Hindu
heart. But to the homegrown racists emboldened by that same fear-mongering, the
Hindu-G.O.P. alliance makes no difference. Purinton’s question for Kuchibhotla
and Madasani in the bar in Kansas was not whether they were Muslim but
whether they were in the country illegally. (They weren’t.) A week later, in a
Facebook post, Kuchibhotla’s widow framed the question as Purinton perhaps
really meant it: “Do we belong here?” This
week, a possible answer came from Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary,
when an Indian-American woman confronted him at an Apple store. “It’s such a great country
that allows you to be here,” Spicer told her. His interlocutor was an American
citizen, but that didn’t seem to register. (Not white, not quite.)
An Indian
man in the Midwest once told me that, every time an American shakes his hand
and says, “I love Indian food,” he wants to respond, “I thank you on behalf of
Indian food.” He might just as well thank the American on behalf of—take your
pick—spelling bees, lazy “Slumdog Millionaire” references, yoga and chai
lattes, motels, software moguls, Bollywood-style weddings, doctors and taxi
drivers, henna, Nobel laureates, comedians, the baffling
wisdom of Deepak Chopra, and Mahatma Gandhi. But perhaps it’s time
he reminded the American of something, too. The man who shot Gandhi, in 1948,
was neither Muslim nor Sikh nor a foreigner. He was a disgruntled member of the
majority, like Purinton, and had once belonged to India’s most nationalistic
party—the same party that, just today, told Indians in the United States
to stop worrying for their safety.
Amitava
Kumar is a writer and journalist who teaches at Vassar College. His latest
book, “Immigrant, Montana: A Novel,” is forthcoming from Knopf.
Source:
newyorker
