The voice of experience, and a word of temperance, in the wake of India’s 9/11

For three days, South Asian Americans sat transfixed to their televisions, watching in horror as the bodies of innocent men, women and children lay bullet-ridden and burned in hotels and community centers in Mumbai. Many are calling these events “India’s 9/11,” and in that framing, South Asian Americans have a unique viewpoint that can inform India’s reaction to terror.

Having been victims for one-side of our hyphenated identity (American), and portrayed as perpetrator for the other side (South Asian) after 9/11, we as a diaspora, for the first time, now have more than Red Cross donations and Care packages to offer the subcontinent.

The day after the siege of Mumbai was finally over, watching footage of South Asians gathering in San Francisco and other regions of the country felt very familiar. The impulse to gather, console, and voice outrage was the same as on September 12, 2001. It is a sort of emotional emergency response that we need when no clear road to healing or normalcy seems evident.

I remember being at a similar vigil at a park in San Jose after 9/11. Even then, there was a mounting fear that America’s understandable anger would be blinding and dangerous, more spreading wildfire than controlled burn. That it would target anyone who held the loose characteristics of the names and faces of the terrorists they saw on the news. Indeed, it was a Sikh, Balbir Singh Sodhi, who was the first person murdered in the post 9/11 hate crime frenzy, the likes of which still flare up across America to this day.

Soon enough American flags were mounted on cabs, on the windows of gas stations and liquor stores where South Asians worked. Even red-white-and-blue turbans started popping up. And that was one of the most cutting of post 9/11 realities for South Asians. As many tried to pronounce their Americaness, it was uncertain whether it was the expression of patriotism or a safety precaution or both.

On a national level, as the country traded certain civil liberties for security, it was often times a South Asian that bared the brunt—the woman humiliated while being searched at the airport, the tech engineer denied clearance for a job.

All of this is to say that while the natural call for better security takes hold of India, and suspicions regarding Muslims and other minorities in India begin, we brethren across the Pacific, who have been down this road before, know its perils.

And in this new flat, fluid world, where Bangalore and Silicon Valley are joined at the hip, South Asian Americans have license, if not obligation, to offer a word of temperance.

Before, when tragedy struck the subcontinent—an earthquake in 2001, a Tsunami is 2005—our actions on the US side of the Pacific were moving and unifying. South Asians of all stripes—the Pakistani Taxi driver, the Hindu engineer, the recently arrived and the American born desi—all felt the call of duty and organized food, financial and medical assistance. But this time around our call is to prevent rather than to mend, to extend our voices rather than our pocket books. Indians don’t need to hear from Condoleezza Rice, they need to hear from the cousins.

As tragic as the siege has been, as incompetent at times the Indian government has seemed, both conditions may fuel a fire of aggression externally and internally that can cause even more pain and loss. As South Asian Americans living through 9/11, we know that initial urge to rescind civil rights as fear determines policy choices, the impulse to strike out against someone, to show that our country will not remain weak and victimized.

And as South Asian Americans living in a post-9/11 era, we also know the consequences of letting those inclinations guide us. We know the pain of families being ripped apart from increased deportations, of hate crimes being veiled as patriotism, of watching bombs dropped on homelands.

Of course the South Asian American voice has been heard before with regards to the politics of the subcontinent. The most Indians I have ever seen march in this country was when Indians marched across the Golden Gate Bridge to affirm India’s right to nuclear proliferation in 1998. Attaining “the bomb” was not a discussion about military prowess, but rather about political self-determination. But that was in a different world, where war seemed more hypothetical than imminent.

And whatever voice South Asian Americans have had in the past, it can be louder now. There are now more than two and a half million Indians in the US, roughly a million more than in 2000. There is organizational infrastructure now to amplify our voices, as the natural disasters of the past have equipped us for the political tragedy that sits before us.

In a globalized world, there is always the question as to what the responsibilities of the diaspora are. While celebrating homeland holidays and holding vigils after tragedy feels right (and is), South Asian Americans now have the offering of experience. History taught us a lesson, and if our experience is to have any value, it needs to be passed on, back to our homelands.