Opinion The broken American dream doesn’t hurt me, Indian government’s inaction does
I have watched in horror as students have had their visas revoked for doing little more than reposting a meme online. I have wondered if my own youthful activities at Princeton University may be grounds for the revocation of my right to live in the US now.
A military aircraft from the United States carrying over 100 deported Indian immigrants landed at Amritsar’s Shri Guru Ramdas Ji International Airport. (Source: File) 
Like all failed comedians, I have terrible timing. I arrived in the US on September 4, 2001, to study at Princeton University on a scholarship partly sponsored by Quaker Oats. In that heady decade after 1991, Fukuyama’s pronouncements of the triumph of the Western liberal order seemed amply borne out. If my first visit to a department store roughly the size of my neighbourhood in Calcutta hinted that the end of history might be a dismal place, Princeton’s elegant Tudor revival buildings suggested otherwise.
One week later, history revived its ugly head. That evening, my new classmates gathered to digest the falling of the Twin Towers. My roommate, a jovial girl who had hung a Confederate flag on our wall and had ended my attempt to ask her of its meaning with a breezy “It’s a Southern thing,” was visibly distraught. (A Black friend who visited my dorm would explain later that it had been the standard of the slaveholders in the South who fought a civil war for the right to keep their ancestors enslaved.) “Those monkeys out there just want our bananas, and that’s why this happened,” my new roommate told the group. It crossed my mind that, to many of my new classmates, I was closer to the monkeys out there.
In the following months, I would get a quick education in US race relations and empire. As the US mobilised for a war based on phantom fears and outright lies, the first victim of its vengeful bloodthirst turned out to be Sikhs. My aunt called to advise me not to wear my usual salwar kameez. I learned to expect being pulled aside for extra inspection at every airport, particularly the smaller ones where I was one of the only non-White travellers.
Yet, on campus, like all other students, I participated vigorously and freely in the political debate on the war. I marched, alongside my closest friends at university, in the massive rally against the war in Iraq in New York. Penned in by mounted police, their skittish horses loomed far bigger than I could have imagined, for I, an urban Indian, had never seen a horse before. Yet the menace never followed me back to campus: At no point did it occur to me that my activities ran counter either to the educational ethos of Princeton University or the constitutional system of the US.
My love for the American university has kept me abroad far longer than I expected. I am hardly unique: Indian students and faculty swell the ranks of the universities where I received my education and where I still teach.
My generation of Indian students in the US embodied the conjuncture of two national dreams: A talented Indian middle class capable of competing on a global level, and the US as a land of opportunity for the plucky immigrant. For many Indian parents who send their children to universities in the US, this is still the equation they believe in. In turn, we have given back: NRIs working in the US are the single largest source of remittances, making up over a quarter of the financial cushion the nation abroad provides our country.
However, in the last couple of months, this confluence of dreams has become a double-headed nightmare. I have watched in horror as students have had their visas revoked for doing little more than reposting a meme online. I have wondered if my own youthful activities at Princeton University may be grounds for the revocation of my own right to live in the US now. The academic freedom that had been the bedrock of my own education and my teaching clearly exists no more.
More importantly, the detention of my colleague Badar Khan Suri and the aftermath of these chilling acts have shown not just how little we matter to the US, but how little we also seem to matter to India. Fellow Indians trolled Ranjani Srinivasan, who fled in fear of a similar abduction, instead of showing sympathy for their plight. Indian students and faculty, regardless of their political stripes, are rightly terrified, across the US, and it seems India has abdicated its responsibility to its citizens.
It is not just educated immigrants like myself who have been abandoned. Even as a newly arrived student, it was obvious to me that immigrants in my class were relative newcomers. I saw evidence of how Indian immigrants, unable to find suitable opportunities back home, had thrived in the US and, in turn, enriched it. Industrious Indian immigrants running motels and gas stations have shaped the landscape of New Jersey. In New York, Indian taxi drivers were the capillaries of the city through which the lifeblood of its financial and cultural life coursed. These desi worlds predated the passage of the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 when Indians were first legally permitted to immigrate to the US. It was humbling to recognise the precarious lives of my countrymen in their efforts to make a home for themselves in the US. I was grateful for these spaces of safety and familiarity, built and maintained in the shadow of US immigration law. The US can be a deeply inhospitable place and such spaces were a lifeline for a privileged student like myself, holding a valid visa, in the caustic days of the War on Terror.
As the inflow of Indians continued alongside the arrests made by the US security forces at Mexico’s borders, the image of Jagdish Patel cradling his toddler Dharmik, both frozen to death during their attempt to cross the northern border, haunted me for months. Now, the US has gone one step further, sending back planeloads of Indians in shackles.
Indian labour has been trafficked in slavery-like conditions for centuries. The modern Indian diaspora is an artefact of the British indenture system. It is a shame that these victims of the imperial regime were abandoned by the newly independent Indian state with nothing but a diktat to make homes wherever they found themselves. The BJP offered this diaspora a new relationship with India, a kind of quasi-citizenship based on an expanded understanding of the nation, one which it has eagerly embraced.
If the government has been willing to embrace foreign citizens, where is the support for actual citizens of India abroad? Where is the reaction one might expect from a country that led the global movement for decolonisation and independence at the sight of its citizens being transported in shackles? Where is the famed mobilisation of our embassies, which have coordinated the mass evacuation of our citizens from some of the world’s most brutal war zones?
The Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has met this moment of attempted imperial humiliation with roaring defiance and national pride. Mexican deportees cannot be shackled, an outcome she achieved by forceful diplomatic negotiation. They are greeted with joyful mariachi bands, financial support to restart their lives and the full embrace of the state that claims them as citizens. Meanwhile, Indians can simply be shackled and deported with nary a word from our own government. It is not the end of the US dream I am mourning, since, as an Indian citizen, it was never my dream; it is the betrayal of my own country’s promise to its citizens that has broken my heart.
The writer is Associate Professor, History, Georgetown University
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