This killing may not be the end of the matter

With its anti-immigrant tone, the White House appears to inflame racial prejudices

or six days, the world’s most garrulous (and seemingly most underworked) head of state, famous for his bilious 3am tweeting IN ALL CAPS, found neither one word of empathy nor 140 characters of condemnation for last week’s fatal shooting of an Indian engineer in Kansas. The early silence of United States President Donald Trump — and the prevarication of the White House in recognising the slaying of 32-year-old Srinivas Kuchibhotla as a hate crime — had begun to feel near-deliberate; perhaps it was to avoid drawing unflattering attention to his administration’s own nativist policies.

When Trump finally made his first public statement on the Kansas shooting in an address on Tuesday to a joint session of the US Congress (“We are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil”), he clubbed it with the vandalism of Jewish cemeteries and anti-Semitism. His throwaway, if strongly worded, sentence came just as India’s Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar arrived in Washington for a four-day visit. Hillary Clinton urged Trump to speak out more strongly on the Kansas shooting. Maybe someone told Trump quietly before his speech that in Hyderabad, India, as Kuchibhotla’s broken father collapsed over his funeral pyre, family and friends were waving antiTrump banners.

Still, the larger thrust of Trump’s speech on Tuesday night was a strongman rant against immigration, a commitment to build a border wall and an unapologetic reaffirmation of extreme vetting. All of this represents the same provocative rhetoric that some would believe emboldened Adam Purinton, the man accused in the Kansas shooting, to pull out his gun. And as Senator Bernie Sanders pointed out on Facebook, Trump made it a point to invite relatives of a young American man killed by an undocumented immigrant; so why didn’t he extend a similar invitation to the family of Srinivas Kuchibhotla, who lived and worked in the US legally? Kuchibhotla was not even mentioned by name.

‘Get out of my country’

Millions of Indians have been confused and disappointed by the limited attention to Kuchibhotla’s death by the US press. India has 165,000 students enrolled at American colleges, second only to China. Thousands of highly skilled Indian professionals like Kuchibhotla and his colleague Alok Madasani, who was wounded in the Kansas attack, work at big technology firms. In fact, Indian companies use nearly 70 per cent of what the US calls H-1B visas — employment permissions to foreign workers in specialised jobs. And Indian-Americans, who are among the most highly educated ethnic groups in the country, continue to be regarded as a model minority community. So when a man says “Get out of my country” — shooting at two Indians (Purington reportedly was arguing with them over what visas allowed them in) — Indians are entitled to expect this murderous bigotry to dominate US news headlines.

This is not to pass any judgement on the empathy of the American people. Strangers have pitched in to raise funds for Kuchibhotla’s bereft family. Most moving is the story of Ian Grillot, a regular at the bar, who jumped up to intervene and took a bullet himself. He is now a hero in India. But how many Americans know Kuchibhotla’s name? Before his death, Kuchibhotla’s anxious wife, Sunayana Dumala, had urged him to go back to India. He said that they didn’t need to go back and that in the US, “Good things happen to good people”, she said. Now a widow, she is asking Trump’s administration — and the US — “Do we belong here?”

When the White House is won on dangerous populism and anti-immigrant rhetoric, there is a real danger that prejudice will be cloaked in official respectability. The Southern Poverty Law Centre noted that there were 437 instances of intimidation within just six days of the Trump victory, targeted at people of colour, Muslims, immigrants and other minorities. After Kansas, reports from Denver suggested that an Indian man’s home was marked with eggs, faeces and hate messages. If Indians have been part of the great immigrant story in America, then a White House-backed backlash against immigration will not leave them unscathed.

And there will be another Kansas. It’s just a matter of when.

Barkha Dutt is an award-winning TV journalist and anchor with more than two decades of reporting experience. She is the author of This Unquiet Land: Stories from India’s Fault Lines. She is based in New Delhi.