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'Welcome to America. Now here are your handcuffs'

I have been watching two stories emerging in the US media -- one that of 40 Indian engineers on H1-B visas arrested at an Air Force base in Texas; the second that of Reddy Bali Lakireddy, restaurateur and landlord in Berkeley, California, accused of immigration fraud and of sexual exploitation of girls he allegedly 'bought' in India. And then an acquaintance told me of his experience with Los Angeles' dearly beloved police force. All this adds up to a stark picture.

A casual observer might wonder if these things are related. Let me give you my take -- I believe there is ongoing racism anyway against brown people; perhaps there's a feeling amongst some Americans that enough's enough with all these darn Indians and their computers. This does not bode well for Indian-Americans; consider the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II; or Indian-Americans being stripped of US citizenship in the early 1900's for being non-whites (see my earlier column Remember Jallianwallah Bagh!").

The Indian government, whose citizens (the software engineers) were ill-treated, has done nothing. I think it would be entirely appropriate, during Bill Clinton's visit to India, to pressure him to issue a public apology for the brutalization of these innocents. I do wish someone in India would stand up and make Clinton sweat a little -- maybe some good will come out of that boondoggle after all. Why aren't Ashok Mitra and Sitaram Yechuri, those professional Marxists, raking this up?

I am perturbed by the fact that the apathetic, practically comatose, Indian-American community has also done nothing to ensure that its constitutional rights are upheld and that discrimination against Indians in the US is dealt with firmly. Today it is legal temporary workers, tomorrow it could be naturalized citizens, unless someone says, "Enough is enough".

Instead of focusing on this large issue, what I assume is the 'progressive' element among Indian-Americans has been railing about a narrow issue, the Lakireddy case -- after all, whereas the Texas incident indicates government culpability and possible conspiracy, Lakireddy is merely one individual. The fact is that an Indian girl living in an apartment owned by Lakireddy was found dead of carbon monoxide poisoning. It is alleged that Lakireddy brought her into America (along with others) by defrauding the Immigration and Naturalization Service; that he had sex with several of these girls. Since they were under-age, this would be statutory rape, a felony.

Indian-American protesters have, according to media reports, been gathering outside Lakireddy's restaurant, wearing white ribbons on their sleeves, and, I am not making this up, singing "We shall overcome" in Hindi! Overcome exactly what, I wonder? It appears that Lakireddy has already been, in the minds of some, tried and convicted. In fact, he has only been accused.

Nobody knows yet whether Lakireddy is innocent. He may well be a sexual predator and a felon. But isn't it allegedly the essence of the US legal system that a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty?

There is also the disturbing thought that these girls may indeed have been 'sold' willingly to Lakireddy -- maybe, being dirt-poor, their alternative would have been to be sold off into Mumbai's red-light district, Kamathipura. The rediff.com series on Lakireddy's home district brings out the fact that he is a man of substance on home turf. Perhaps in the feudal mindset of the villagers there, offering a young girl to him was a proper and economically rational thing to do? Who knows?

I must add that I am not putting down the various Indian-American groups offering succor to battered Indian women in the San Francisco Bay Area -- they are indeed doing signal work, and I can understand their fury at the alleged exploitation of women. I can also understand Manuela Albuquerque, city attorney in Berkeley, Indian-American and resplendent in a pink sari, pursuing this case with particular vigor, for she would feel obligated to show no nepotism towards those of her ethnic background.

But at the end of the day, I fear there is an element of "Whatever will the Americans think of us model-minority Indian-Americans? We must denounce this man just in case the Americans think we are all sex-criminals. See, we are not like him." Fie on that sentiment, I say! Let us worry about the reality, not what someone else may think.

The only Americans who pay any attention to this are those with their own agendas, for example, one Jan Black who wrote to the San Jose Mercury News, suggesting that while she herself was a proper legal immigrant, she didn't like all these "illegal immigrants". Black, of course, ignores the fact that these programmers are not immigrants, legal or otherwise; they are fully legal temporary workers, gastarbeiter as they say in Germany, supplying skills where there is demand.

Furthermore, Lakireddy is a successful businessman; his Pasand restaurants were a haven for displaced South Indians like me when I first arrived. I wonder if there is an element of jealousy in the reactions of some Indians. The old syndrome of pulling down one's own to please the foreigner -- exactly what Jaichand did, and what Mir Jafar did.

Incidentally, when Lakireddy's troubles began, he was quickly identified as an "Indian-American". What happened to all those hosannas to South Asian unity? Why isn't Lakireddy a "South Asian-American"? I have always felt that those who go overboard with this "we-are-one-big-happy-family-
from-South-Asia" nonsense are Nehruvian relics deluding themselves about the "South Asian subcontinent's" solidarity. Yes, that's what the BBC calls it, did you know it is no longer the "Indian subcontinent" to western media? But that's a philippic for another time.

I have suggested previously that Indian-Americans are inviting trouble upon themselves through their apathy. Few Indian-Americans bother to participate in the political process in the US, and they seem to be under the impression that police brutality and civil rights violations only happen to "other people", that is, blacks and Hispanics, not "to people like us" -- such a model minority, we. I am not quite so sure. Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom.

Indian-Americans might consider reading a very disturbing recent book. David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown dissects the American criminal system and finds it severely biased in No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System (The New Press, $ 25). According to a review in the Economist of February 19, 2000, 'what makes his book so unsettling… is his argument that it is only by denying basic rights to poor and black Americans that the more prosperous white minority can enjoy the constitutional protections of which Americans are so proud.' That is, it is systemic, rampant and endemic.

I have only read the first chapter of this book; and even that was a harrowing experience -- it details what appears to be the widespread and court-sanctioned flouting of the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution which guarantees immunity against search and seizure without a warrant. It appears certain that black, brown and yellow US residents are far more likely to be subjected to acts that violate such constitutionally-guaranteed civil rights than whites are.

And furthermore, it is clear that the Rodney King incident of police brutality in LA is not unique. The Mullen Commission investigating police corruption and brutality in the Bronx reported in 1994, quoting actual interviews of officers, that the police there beat up blacks and Hispanics not because they were suspects, but 'just to show who was in charge.' There are hundreds of such cases quoted by Cole.

Here is more from the Economist review re blacks: 'The police stop you regularly for no reason at all, demanding to know who you are and where you are going. They often search your car or belongings. As a matter of policy, they consider your ethnic group more prone to criminality… If accused of a crime, you know that the lawyer who is supposed to represent you… will probably try to persuade you to plead guilty. If you insist on your innocence, you will sit in jail for months, and then have a quick trial before a jury from which all members of your ethnic group will probably have been carefully excluded.'

They go on to suggest that being stopped for no reason by the police is routine for blacks: "The court has allowed police so much discretion in deciding whom to stop and search that most African-Americans are wearily familiar with the practice of being stopped for 'driving while black', an offence of which white Americans are blissfully unaware."

This is how the other half lives in America, if you are to believe Cole's -- I am told -- meticulously researched work. Many Indian-Americans have led a charmed life, straight from universities to comfortable middle class white suburbs, but there are other Indian-Americans, taxi-drivers, gas-station attendants, news-stand vendors, and so forth, who must be facing discrimination and ill-treatment on a regular basis.

Now I understand what my American-born and mild-mannered friend Reeta Sinha said on sulekha.com After growing up in North Dakota, she moved to Texas; and immediately started feeling so insecure about her brown skin that she carries a copy of her American passport in her purse, for there is no telling when a zealous Texan police officer will jail her for 'driving while brown', assuming she's a 'wetback', a derogatory term for illegal Mexican immigrants.

This is not purely theoretical: see the experiences of my acquaintance in Los Angeles -- he's in his early twenties, a Ph D candidate at one of the universities there, and has been in the US for a year or two. In his own words, this is what happened when he arrived at LA's airport recently, back from a trip to India (verbatim email from him):

"I was given a warm welcome at LAX. I landed here and a couple of friends picked me up. Just as we got out of the airport in the car, a cop hauled us bcos I had forgotten to wear my seatbelt (one gets used to certain luxuries even in a brief trip to India), all that was ok. We were waiting for the cop to give us the ticket. Around 15 mins later, 2 more cop cars landed, 3/4 cops got out, all of them pointed guns at us, the microphones screaming and the lights on, we were asked one after the other, to get out of the car, hands up, of course. At the end of a series of request/response rounds, we were lying on the road, face down, and they were handcuffing us. We were hauled in, and it turned out that the cops had run a check on the driver (my friend) and found that he was a deportee and a violent criminal. I'll skip some of the more gory details (no violence), but at the end INS said that the cops must have been morons to interpret the data wrong."

My acquaintance, a young man who is apparently able to see the humor in the situation, is none the worse for wear; but it must have been a terrifying and humiliating experience while it lasted. Here we see the INS data being misinterpreted by the police -- of course the driver was no violent criminal nor a candidate for deportation. I daresay this has a significant race element to it -- a foreign student from Europe would not have faced such an inquisition.

'If I don't put handcuffs, you may grab a pen and kill me'

Rajeev Srinivasan