By D N Singh
How long would this prejudice keep haunting the psychology of the ones who still believe in racial apartheid?
Known to be the most liberal and civilized nation in the world, America today appears suffering from the stigma where even American Law Makers are not spared from the dirty syndrome.
If it is Indian-American lawmaker Pramila Jayapal today fell victim to a stalker who not only stalks but hurls invectives at Jayapal from home to out and back home, then tomorrow it can be Kamla Harris as well.
Or for any Indian American for that matter, or the ones who serve in US as employees or got settled.
The spike in intolerance towards Indian American was somehow there in US and UK (for non-whites) subterranean in tone and tenor, but what happened with Pramila Jayapal, a Law Maker, on Thursday last, was just outrageous and uncivil.
She was literally given a dirty hounding chase all through as if a Law Maker, in US Congress as an elected one, has no worth despite representing millions of Americans. Which is just absurd that, she was stalked with abuses hurled at.
The abuser even being arrested dared the police that he would continue to do that, till she left India.
In the case of Jayapal it may have been a chanced coverage of her 47 minutes long ordeal in the streets of Washington , but one never knows how many Indian Americans suffer such hatred and go back home shaken by fear yet keep quiet.
“But I will continue to drive by here and voice my opinion, until she goes back to India – or something else,” Brett Forsell, 49, one of the two men said as he sat in a police car after his arrest.
Jayapal was born in Chennai, India and immigrated to the US at the age of 18. After two years in Washington state politics – serving in the state senate – she was elected to the House of Representatives in 2016, becoming the first Indian woman to do so (Kamala Harris became the first Indian American woman elected to US senate the same year – their respective terms started in 2017). A Democrat, she is now in her third term and heads the party’s congressional liberals as chairperson of the House Progressive Caucus.
Many Indian-Americans will identify with her experience. A group of them found themselves yelled at by a woman in Plano, Texas recently. “Go back to India,” their tormentor, a woman who introduced herself to them as Mexican-American, told them repeatedly, among other things. She was arrested later.
Srinivas Kuchibhotla, a software engineer with GPS major Garmin, was killed in a bar outside the company premises in Olathe, Kansas in 2018 by a man who yelled at him to “leave my country”. The killer claimed he had mistaken Kuchibhotla for someone from the Middle East.
“I’ve had people forever telling me to go back to India,” Jayapal told The Washington Post. “But I will say that this was different. This was really different.”
