The Tuesday after Charlottesville
Why Hindu-American Voices Must Rise Against India’s Sectarian Violence
On Sunday night, after a weekend where every minute alone escalated a headache that would end in tears, I told my parents I was going to a rally to protest white supremacy. Almost immediately, they told me they didn’t want me to go, for safety’s sake. They love me, so I agreed. And hung up and cried a little more.
Hari Kondabolu once said that being obsessed with race in America is like being obsessed with swimming while you’re drowning. The normalization of the America’s far right’s racism and misogyny has raised the collective vulnerability of people of color. The model minority status that once gave us the luxury of ignoring American racism is no longer a shield from the violence. We have been caricatured, targeted, killed, and labeled outsiders just like everyone else.
And so at midnight on August 15th, on the 70th anniversary of India’s Independence, I am painfully aware and unsure if, how, and why I should celebrate the very heritage that makes it unsafe for me to stand up for justice.
India. The name floats into a colorful embrace over my heart, a phenomenon beyond understanding that I guard with hawkish and fevered pride. It is not, I snap, just yoga and curries, Bollywood and multi-armed gods. It tastes like mangoes and papayas that my grandfather expertly peeled. It swings in the interval between the Ri and Ni in Raag Desh, thumps rhythmically like dhols and tuk-tuks, and calls faintly to prayer from minarets almost obscured by early morning smog. Even Doordarshan montages could never do it justice: India is more than the sum of its countless parts, a state of being that fills my heart with an immeasurable sense of belonging. I imagined that if even from afar I could feel this way about India, surely its proud diversity gifted that same sense of belonging to every other Indian.
Alas, my naiveté showed itself to me only in 2014, when the spectacle of a Twitter-loving uncle-ji delivering speeches via hologram forced me to follow India’s electoral politics. I had heard of interstate territorial drama and regional corruption. But it was when I heard the numbers — 2,000 killed, 150,000 refugees — from a statewide riot against Muslims in Gujarat when this uncle-ji was its governor that I realized something felt terribly wrong.
Fast-forward to now. I’ve read the ever-growing list of historical and contemporary horrors inflicted on Sikhs, Christians, Northeastern Indians (because of their East Asian looks), and Africans. The news is peppered with tales of vigilante beef lynchings. Mughals — the people who built the Taj Mahal that rakes in 7–8 million tourists every year — are being written out of history books. A beloved Muslim Bollywood star, Aamir Khan, stands up against the wave of repression against Muslims and is told by the Times of India that he should move to Saudi Arabia. The ultra right-wing “fringe” of Hindu nationalists are determined to make India a Hindu nation by 2023.
I just shake my head when anyone implies India is a land of peace and diversity, just as I can no longer say the same about America.“There are a lot of problems.” The #NotInMyName movement as well as the efforts of many liberal Indians gives me hope that the problem of sectarian mob violence will be made more visible. But things are different.
To this day, Modi says his biggest regret about the riots was not handling the media well. He has yet to issue an apology.
The Hindus for Trump Facebook page posted on March 27th, “Become relevant and differentiate yourselves from Muslims.” There are numerous references to “pasty white Leftists,” really the only detail that differentiates the Hindu-American Trump-support from that of the Hindu Trump-support in India. But what strikes me is their “About” section:
“American Hindus are model citizens, educated and industrious. We want a responsible nation where Americans are both safe and free.”
I am both taken aback and impressed at their claim to being American. Of course, I too have laid unabashed claim to my American-ness (responding to the standard “Where are you from” with, “Texas,” and a smirk). I too, as a person in America, want to be safe and free. And, of course, we should each fight for each other’s right to vote how we please.
But when push comes to literal shove across a phalanx of police shields or into a speeding car’s path, it won’t be your civic desires that they see first, but the color of your skin. And try as you might to differentiate yourselves from “Muslims”, try as you might to vote in the way that should surprise and maybe impress members of the alt-right, or try as the rest of us — in fact, all of us- do to be upstanding Americans citizens, the question remains: in Trump’s America, will we ever be safe and free? Ultimately, as long as there is foreignness on our features, isn’t there overwhelming proof that we will always be treated as foreigners to this country? That it won’t matter if we’re enjoying a beer or walking along the street…
Just as it doesn’t matter if you’re a Bollywood star speaking out against rising Islamophobia, eating mutton in Maharashtra that looks like beef, or having the wrong-sounding name at the wrong damn time. Because both India and America, once proud of their diversity, have now, complicit with their leaders, normalized rhetoric that endangers the lives of their minorities. And both countries are now facing the effects of encroaching fundamentalism and nativism and, particularly, Islamophobia, effects that include the harassment and death of their own citizens.
But with this reality comes a duality: In America, my visible Indian-ness might be forced into a silence that begins to understand the constricting of non-Hindu communities in India. And even from afar, my Hindu-ness maybe affords me the privilege to say to my India: That my heart found a home in everything I thought India stood for and broke when it saw the ways it is no different from my broken home in America. But if I must fight for my safety and freedom in America, it behooves me to fight- even if only with my words— for those who need safety and freedom in India. Because if I come from such a mosaic land, then I not only carry its colors on my body, but pursue and spread its multihued beauty and ideals as far and wide as I am able.
