When you are NOT Krittika Biswas

Krittika Biswas should have her day in court. And more power to her in her $1.5 million lawsuit against the city of New York. My fear is we’ll draw the wrong lesson from her ordeal. It’s not that “unwarranted arrest and unlicensed detention” is wrong but that there are consequences only if you are rich, powerful, well-connected or all three. Of course that is not true just for Indians, but Indians in America seem to have swallowed their own hype as the golden minority to such an extent that they feel untouchable by law. It can’t happen to us. We top the Westinghouse Science Talent search championships, don’t you know? That feeling is strong despite the recent Wall Street scandals involving Rajaratnam and his coterie of desi brothers. So when it does happen, we are astounded and outraged. Remember the whole fracas about Shah Rukh Khan being detained by immigration authorities for an hour, maybe two, at Newark International Airport? It became a diplomatic incident. Ambika Soni suggested all Americans be frisked when they landed in India. P Chidambaram issued his own statement. Shah Rukh Khan was two hours late for his Jersey City concert. And he showed up in ripped jeans because his bags had not arrived. All in all it was not bad promo for his then upcoming film My Name is Khan. [caption id=“attachment_15904” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Krittika Biswas should get her due  in court. PTI”] [/caption] The point is most people who show up at American borders and trip over the machinery of Homeland Security don’t have the full weight of their home country’s government behind them. Remember Maher Arar, a telecom engineer with Canadian citizenship, who was mistaken for an Al Qaeda operative and whisked off to Syria while in transit at JFK and detained for over a year and tortured? Indians rightly bristle at the indignity faced by Shah Rukh Khan, Krittika Biswas, Abdul Kalam and its ambassador Meera Shankar at the hands of petty officials in the United States. It is truly unwarranted. But they are the lucky ones, because we, the media, rush to cover their stories breathlessly.

When Khan was detained, Deepa Iyer, the executive director of SAALT (South Asian Americans Leading Together) wrote “Mr. Khan’s incident might be gaining international attention because he is a celebrity, but the truth is that ordinary American citizens and immigrants here in the United States grapple with racial and religious profiling routinely at airports.” Take the case of Tashnuba Hayder, also a teenager, also from New York. The daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants, she came to the attention of the FBI because she’d written an essay as part of her home-school assignment on religion with the word “suicide” highlighted. Hayder said agents seized on one part in her essay. ‘I wrote, ‘I feel like Muslims are being targeted, they’re being outcasted more.’” In the nervous years after 9/11 that was enough to have FBI agents, posing as youth counsellors, barge into her bedroom. She was hauled away to a maximum-security juvenile detention centre, strip-searched, aggressively questioned and freed only on the condition that she self-deport to Bangladesh, a country she left when she was a toddler. Hayder left. “I feel like I’m on a different planet,” the adolescent told the New York Times from Dhaka. “It just hit me. How everything happened—it’s like, ‘Oh, my God.’” A few years ago, a sting operation in Georgia, dubbed Operation Meth Merchant targeted desi convenience store owners and clerks for selling cold medicine like Sudafed to people who wanted to manufacture meth. The ACLU said the police scapegoated South Asians and ignored white suspects. South Asian clerks with limited English didn’t catch on to drug slang like needing the Sudafed to “cook” something. “Selling Sudafed while South Asian is not a crime,” said Christina Alvarez, an attorney with ACLU Drug Law Reform project. Twenty per cent of desi-owned convenience stores in the area were indicted, while only 0.2 per cent of other stores were similarly accused. Operation Meth Merchant turned the lives of a lot more vulnerable people upside down than what happened to Krittika Biswas. This is not to say what happened to Biswas was excusable. But small store owners, who don’t speak English well, are less likely to raise a fuss. If  they are lucky and their charges are dropped they just want to go away quietly and pick up the threads of disrupted lives rather than wrangle with the might of the government again. Let’s hope Krittika Biswas gets what is owed to her in court.  But let’s remember all the ones who did not.