Last Wednesday, a white American, Adam Purinton taunted two immigrants of Indian descent, Srinivas Kuchibhotla and Alok Madasani, in a Kansas bar which showed he thought they were of “Middle Eastern origin”. After his racial taunts, he yelled at them to “get out of my country” and when one of the immigrants complained to management, Purinton was escorted out of the bar. He later returned with a gun, shot and killed Kuchibhotla, wounded Madasani and Ian Grillot, a white patron of the bar who intervened. Yet the Police have not charged Purinton with a “hate crime” but simply with murder and attempted murder.
This is surprising since, “For the purposes of collecting statistics, the FBI has defined a hate crime as a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.” In this murder, the shooter had even confessed to another bartender after his shooting when he went to have a “cooling off drink”. “The murder of Kuchibhotla is the first reported bias-motivated fatality in the United States after the bitter presidential election,” according to the Hindu American Foundation.
Following the election of Donald Trump, there has been a significant spike in hate crimes in the US, especially against Muslims and Jews, and it would appear that the numbers are even higher if this refusal of the Kansas Police to acknowledge this latest incident as one is common. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the preeminent body that collects statistics on hate crimes in the US, has made an explicit link with the spike and Trump stating that “the radical right was energised by the candidacy of Donald Trump”. While the initial jump in hate crimes has plateaued, it has done so at a higher level than before.
Kansas is a state with one of the higher rates of hate crimes, but which, in line with the rest of America, are not usually directed against “Asians”, who are seen as a model minority. But just as occurred after 9/11, Indians from the subcontinent are frequently confused with Muslim Middle Easterners and targeted. But this latest wave of hate crimes has the potential to explode way beyond the previous hysteria. Donald Trump’s vitriol-laced outpourings against immigrants now cast the net of hate far wider in scope.
In this incarnation, Trump’s nativist outbursts have also included those immigrants that are supposedly “taking away jobs from Americans” and bring an economic dimension to the hate. The model minority are now defined not as a group that is fulfilling the American dream in moving from “rags to riches” through dint of hard work, but as “scabs”. The two Indian immigrants who were shot fit that profile perfectly: they were qualified engineers employed by a nearby hi-tech GPS firm. Trump’s recent Executive Order to prevent the re-entry of even immigrants with “green cards” has now created a new debate about who are “real Americans” who should remain in the US. In the present climate, one suspects it would not have mattered if Kuchibhotla and Madasani had shown their green cards to Purinton.
The Kansas Police are probably reluctant to classify the murder of Kuchibhotla as a “hate crime” because this would now confirm what many have predicted: the nativism wave has become deadly, with its first hate-murder. African Americans have always felt the brunt of hate crimes and this has only been recently been given publicity thanks to the ubiquity of camera phones. It is not too far-fetched to extrapolate that shootings of “the other” have replaced the old lynchings of blacks.
In Guyana, there are elements that are also fomenting anger and hate against groups because of their supposed economic gains made at the expense of other groups. Unless such talk is firmly condemned by the top leaders, and equivocated on as with Donald Trump, we may also see an upsurge in hate crimes here.
