They maybe millionaires, but to the Americans they all look the same.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_293710,0005.htm
Hate crimes worry US Indians
S Rajagopalan
Washington, June 28
Last Sunday’s horrendous attack on an Indian student in New Bedford, Massachusetts has sent shockwaves through the Indian American community. Many expatriates reckon it to be a new dimension to the wave of hate crimes that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Some, however, view it as an isolated incident.
But there is little doubt that hate crimes are steadily on the rise in the US. The Indian sufferers, in about every instance, have been victims of mistaken identity. And most of the victims have been Sikh men, mistaken to be followers of Osama bin Laden because of their turbans and beards.
Saurabh Bhalerao, the victim in the New Bedford episode, is perhaps the first Hindu to be viciously attacked by fringe elements indulging in racial profiling. Bhalerao, too, was mistaken to be a Muslim. “Go back to Iraq,” his attackers shouted as they clobbered him, ignoring his protestations that he was a Hindu from India. The graduate student of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth is slowly recovering.
There have been well over 250 hate crime incidents involving the Sikhs, most of them in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. But, two years later, Sikhs are still being subjected to attacks. Just a month ago, Avtar Singh, a 52-year-old truck driver, was shot at and wounded in Phoenix, Arizona. In this case, the assailants shouted: “Go back to where you belong.”
Preetmohan Singh, director of the Washington DC branch of Sikh Mediawatch and Resource Taskforce (SMART), is among those who believe that hate crimes are now widening in scope. His organisation has come out with an elaborate set of do’s and don’ts for the Sikh fraternity.
Amnesty International says that only one out of every nine hate crime cases is getting reported. Singh, agreeing with this contention, says that many Indian expatriates are not coming forward to lodge complaints because of their tenuous immigration status or fear of retribution.
Four days after the 9/11 attacks, Balbir Singh Sodhi was gunned down at his gas station in Mesa, Arizona. The man who killed him exulted: “I am a patriot. I will stand up for my brothers and sisters in New York.” Sodhi’s brother, Sukhpal Singh, also died in a shootout in Dale City, California, a year later, but the police concluded that it was not a hate crime.
The Indian American community is 1.8 million strong. Among the immigrant groups in the US, it happens to be one of the most affluent. Some Indians feel that this level of prosperity itself could make the community vulnerable to attacks at a time when the US economy is in the doldrums and Americans are losing jobs in a big way.
But Ann Pillai, a community activist living in the US since 1969, believes that hate crimes are not that many now and should not be blown out of proportion. A former hospital administrator in Boston, Pillai says she never encountered any racial ill-feeling in all her 34 years in the US.
Rajwant Singh, chairman of the Sikh Council on Religion and Education, holds a different view. “The number of incidents may have come down, but undercurrent of fear is very much there,” he says. Singh, however, is relieved that the White House remains sensitive to hate crimes and the FBI readily takes up such cases.
