INDIANS TOLD TO GO BACK
For residents of Cara Park community in Dublin, Ohio, it was like any other day at their local park where they would gather to take in the evening, play cricket or watch their children run around.
Unknown to the many nonAmerican families living in condominiums that one of them said smell like “dosa sambhar”, a man was filming their evening routine. He would later upload the film on the internet with a conspiratorial commentary about Indians taking over the area, jobs and white American lifestyle. The man was confronted but was nearly done.
“It was weird,” said an Indian-American who doesn’t live there, but is familiar with the neighbourhood. He didn’t want to be identified for fear of attracting attention to himself or his family in “these uncertain times”. “The man could have been carrying an AR-15,” he warned. AR-15 is a militarystyle automatic rifle used in several mass shootings in the US.
The video, shot purportedly to highlight the loss of American jobs to foreigners has taken on a far more disconcerting dimension after the murder of after the murder of an Indian engineer Srinivas Kuchibhotla in Kansas and shooting of Sikh man, Deep Rai in Washington state. Both were told by their assailants to “go back to your country”, which is something Indian-Americans hear frequently in Ohio, one of the states in the US manufacturing belt crippled by loss of jobs shipped abroad and which were critical to President Donald Trump’s victory.
In another incident, in January, an Indian-American woman found a note stuck to her car in the parking lot of a grocery store in Dublin. It said, “A note this time, but not next time.” Lawyers, however, are examining the video. “We’re investigating the video as well as researching laws that it may be violating,” Suhag Shukla, a lawyer with the Hindu American Foundation, an advocacy group, said in response to a question if it constituted stalking. “Stalking laws are very specific and differ from state to state,” he said.
A VIDEO SHOT TO HIGHLIGHT LOSS OF JOBS TO FOREIGNERS HAS TAKEN A DISCONCERTING DIMENSION AFTER MURDER OF AN INDIAN ENGINEER