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Indians under President donald Trump in America

Hate crimes against American Indians

By Abdul Majeed MohammedPublished 4 years ago 3 min read
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Sunayana Dumala at the funeral of her husband,Srinivas Kuchibhotla,an Indian engineer who was murdered as part of a hate crime in Kansas.

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.”

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. The hate crimes have increased after the election of the Republican President Donald Trump..

On February 22, 2017, Adam Purinton shot two Indian men, Srinivas Kuchibhotla and Alok Madasani, whom he had allegedly mistaken for Iranians, at a restaurant in Olathe, Kansas, killing Kuchibhotla. He reportedly yelled "get out of my country" and "terrorist" before firing. A third man, Ian Grillot, was wounded after he came to the two men's aid. Several hours later, Purinton was arrested in Clinton, Missouri.

This fact, however, may help explain why Kuchibhotla's death has generated an unusual degree of alarm in the Indian community, including segments that have not otherwise been politicized.Unlike many of the Sikh and Muslim victims of past hate crimes, including those which occurred after 9/11, Kuchibhotla was Hindu. He was, in other words, an everyman figure in the eyes of many in India, and just as importantly, his death comes against a backdrop of rising white nationalism and disaffection.

For Bay Area activist Anirvan Chatterjee, the shootings in Kansas served as "a huge wake-up call" for Hindu Americans."They thought they were safe," he said. "They thought their bindis would protect them, they thought their last names would protect them, they thought their advanced degrees would protect them, and something changed."Another factor is wealth. Indian Americans have the highest median income of any ethnic group, and this attribute may have helped inoculate the community against a sense of threat.

According to a recent report called “Communities on Fire” by the Washington, DC-based group South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), hate crimes against Indian Americans and other South Asian Americans surged 45% from November 8, 2016, to November 7, 2017. The group recorded 302 incidents during that period, 213 of them being direct physical or verbal assaults.

Hate crimes against Native Americans increased a whopping 63 percent in the first year of Donald Trump's presidency, according to new data released by the FBI.Law enforcement agencies across the nation reported 251 hate crime incidents against American Indians and Alaska Natives in 2017. That represents a significant jump from the 154 incidents seen as the Barack Obama era came to a close. The incidents involved 321 victims, according to the Uniform Crime Reporting Program’s annual Hate Crime Statistics report. That figure represents a nearly 90 percent increase in victims from the year prior, the data shows.

While the number of reported hate crimes dipped slightly in 2018, violence against individuals rose to a 16-year high, according to numbers released Tuesday by the FBI.The FBI's annual tally counted 7,120 hate crimes reported last year, 55 fewer than the year before. The main concern for extremism trackers, however, is the rising level of violence — the report showed an increase in the number of "crimes against persons," such as intimidation, assault and homicide.

The current US government has earned an anti-immigrant reputation thanks to president Donald Trump’s protectionist rhetoric and the administration’s steps to curb visa misuses.

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