America no longer the land of the free, lament Indians

There are hundreds of thousands of people from India working in America, said Abhishek Sikhwal on Dailyo.in (New Delhi). About half of them are Hindus, and during the presidential race they embraced Donald Trump as a kindred spirit, in large part due to his anti-islamic rhetoric. Some even identified with Trump’s call to build a wall on the Us-mexico border – back home, Hindu nationalists had made similar proposals to build a wall along the India-bangladesh border. It never occurred to them that their support for “a bigot who never hid his disdain for immigrants” would backfire on them. Well, they know better now. Since Trump’s victory, there has been an “alarming increase in racist attacks on minorities”, and it has affected Hindus as much as anyone. Only last month, Srinivas Kuchibhotla, a 32-year-old Indian software engineer, was shot dead in a Kansas bar by a man who allegedly yelled, “get out of my country”, before opening fire.

Indians have been “confused and disappointed” by the muted US response to Kuchibhotla’s murder, said Barkha Dutt in The Washington Post. The case has received a vast amount of coverage in India, but the US press gave it little attention, and Trump – who’d recently professed great sorrow at the killing of a young American by an undocumented migrant – simply ignored it. In another sign of his lack of concern, his administration plans to cut right back on H-1B temporary visas, which enable companies to bring skilled foreign staff, like Kuchibhotla, into the US. Indian tech workers use up a large proportion of such visas, so this will hit them particularly hard. Still, Indian IT workers will eventually find other places to ply their trade, said Anuvab Pal in The Times of India (Mumbai). What we Indians may find harder to change, however, is our psychological attitude to America. We must stop craving America’s unconditional love and just accept that it’s indifferent to us.

“Growing up in India, we didn’t question the brain drain of our best and brightest... to America,” said Sandip Roy in The New York Times. “It was the natural order of things.” But the days when every middle-class parent dreamt of their child making it in the US are over. Now, they’re wary of letting them go there. Trump’s new vision for his country is forcing Indians to rethink their assumptions about the land of the free. “It’s too late for Kuchibhotla, but somewhere out there young men like him are wondering if the American dream itself can be outsourced.”