{"id":51801,"date":"2017-03-05T01:30:48","date_gmt":"2017-03-05T06:30:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=51801"},"modified":"2017-03-05T22:11:28","modified_gmt":"2017-03-06T03:11:28","slug":"the-kansas-shooting-teaches-indians-a-few-lessons-about-trump-and-the-united-states","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=51801","title":{"rendered":"The Kansas shooting Teaches Indians a few Lessons about Trump \u2014 and the United States"},"content":{"rendered":"


\nBy Barkha Dutt <\/strong><\/p>\n

For six days, the world\u2019s most garrulous (and seemingly most underworked) head of state, famous for his bilious 3 a.m. tweeting IN ALL CAPS, found neither one word of empathy nor 140 characters of condemnation for last week\u2019s fatal shooting of an Indian engineer in Kansas. The early silence of President Trump \u2014 and the prevarication of the White House in recognizing the slaying of 32-year-old Srinivas Kuchibhotla as a hate crime \u2014 had begun to feel near-deliberate; perhaps it was to avoid drawing unflattering attention to his administration\u2019s own nativist policies.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Srinivas Kuchibhotla<\/p><\/div>\n

When Trump finally made his first public statement on the Kansas shooting in an address Tuesday to a joint session of Congress (\u201cWe are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil\u201d), he clubbed it with the vandalism of Jewish cemeteries and anti-Semitism. His throwaway, if strongly worded, sentence came just as India\u2019s Foreign Secretary Subrahmanyam Jaishankar arrived in Washington for a four-day visit. Hillary Clinton urged Trump to speak out more strongly on the Kansas shooting. Maybe someone told Trump quietly before his speech that in Hyderabad, India, as Kuchibhotla\u2019s broken father collapsed over his funeral pyre, family and friends were waving anti-Trump banners.<\/p>\n

Still, the larger thrust of Trump\u2019s speech Tuesday night was a strongman rant against immigration, a commitment to build a border wall and an unapologetic reaffirmation of extreme vetting. All of this represents the same provocative rhetoric that some would believe emboldened Adam Purinton, the man accused in the Kansas shooting, to pull out his gun. And as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) pointed out on Facebook, Trump made it a point to invite relatives of a young American man killed by an undocumented immigrant; so why didn\u2019t he extend a similar invitation to the family of Srinivas Kuchibhotla, who lived and worked in the United States legally? Kuchibhotla was not even mentioned by name.
\n
\nMillions of Indians have been confused and disappointed by the limited attention to Kuchibhotla\u2019s death by the U.S. press. India has 165,000 students enrolled at American colleges, second only to China. Thousands of highly skilled Indian professionals like Kuchibhotla and his colleague Alok Madasani, who was wounded in the Kansas attack, work at big technology firms. In fact, Indian companies use nearly 70 percent of what the United States calls H-1B visas \u2014 employment permissions to foreign workers in specialized jobs. And Indian Americans, who are among the most highly educated ethnic groups in the country, continue to be regarded as a model minority community.<\/p>\n

So when a man says \u201cGet out of my country\u201d \u2014 shooting at two Indians unwinding over drinks at Austins Bar and Grill in Olathe (Purington reportedly was arguing with them over what visas allowed them in) \u2014 Indians are entitled to expect this murderous bigotry to dominate U.S. news headlines. But the American media, which has admirably pulled no punches in pushing back against Trump\u2019s vicious criticism of them, seems oddly muted in its coverage of the Kansas story \u2014 at least to us in India, watching from 8,000 miles away.<\/p>\n

Now, a few questions for my friends across the Atlantic\u2014 and for the U.S government: Had this deranged shooter been named Akbar instead of Adam, would the story have got more attention? Had he yelled Allahu Akbar instead of \u2018Get out of my country\u201d would they be digging the archives and working the Telegram encryptions to see what came up against his name? What if the victim were not Srinivas from Hyderabad having a drink in Kansas but rather an Adam from Olathe, Kansas, killed in New Delhi? Can you imagine the hell that would have broken loose? What if he were a Michael Brown from Ferguson instead of an Indian with an unpronounceable name from a southern Indian city? Would his killing not have been located in the larger context of race? Will anyone hash tag #BrownLivesMatter or lead mass protests for Srinivas?<\/p>\n

This is not to pass any judgment on the empathy of the American people. Strangers have pitched in to raise funds for Kuchibhotla\u2019s bereft family. Most moving is the story of Ian Grillot, a regular at the bar, who jumped up to intervene and took a bullet himself. He is now a hero in India. But how many Americans know Kuchibhotla\u2019s name?<\/p>\n

Before his death, Kuchibhotla\u2019s anxious wife, Sunayana Dumala, had urged him to go back to India. He said that they didn\u2019t need to go back and that in the United States, \u201cGood things happen to good people,\u201d she said. Now a widow, she is asking Trump\u2019s administration \u2014 and the United States \u2014 \u201cDo we belong here?\u201d<\/p>\n

The Kansas killing has triggered an ideological war in India. Right-wingers in India have been locked in furious debate with liberals (as India becomes more and more like America) over whether the Trump linkage is fair; they point to hate crimes that took place on Obama\u2019s watch or after 9\/11, citing the 2001 murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh American mistaken for an Arab.<\/p>\n

For Indians who lean to the right, particularly supporters of popular Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the rise of Trump is akin to the ascent of India\u2019s leader. Trump, like Modi, represents the smashing of elitism, the end of politics-as-usual and, most importantly, a defanging of \u2018hypocritical\u2019 liberals.<\/p>\n

But when the White House is won on dangerous populism and anti-immigrant rhetoric, there is a real danger that prejudice will be cloaked in official respectability. The Southern Poverty Law Center noted that there were 437 instances of intimidation within just six days of the Trump victory, targeted at people of color, Muslims, immigrants and other minorities. After Kansas, reports from Denver suggested that an Indian man\u2019s home was marked with eggs, feces and hate messages.<\/p>\n

We are going to need more data, over a longer period of time, to determine whether the graph in hate crimes is higher under the Trump administration compared to previous governments. But the Kansas shooting should give serious pause to those in India who go on about Trump being \u201cgood for us.\u201d If Indians have been part of the great immigrant story in America, then a White House-backed backlash against immigration will not leave them unscathed.<\/p>\n


\nAnd there will be another Kansas. It\u2019s just a matter of when.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Courtesy: The Washington Post<\/em><\/p>\n

Tweet<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Barkha Dutt For six days, the world\u2019s most garrulous (and seemingly most underworked) head of state, famous for his bilious 3 a.m. tweeting IN ALL CAPS, found neither one word of empathy nor 140 characters of condemnation for last week\u2019s fatal shooting of an Indian engineer in Kansas. The early silence of President Trump …<\/p>\n

Continue reading ‘The Kansas shooting Teaches Indians a few Lessons about Trump \u2014 and the United States’ »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51801"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51801"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51821,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51801\/revisions\/51821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}