Opinion Stepping aside

always slightly more confrontational than it need be.

But that isn’t enough to explain the massive reaction,especially among Indians living abroad,to Shah Rukh Khan’s 66-minute wait,in a presumably fairly comfortable lounge,at the request of Newark airport’s immigration officers this weekend.

Teachable moments are a terrible invention,in which we take fallible individuals,a partially-remembered confrontation,and twist them to represent Issues We Should Really Talk About. There have been a few recently,but this one marries the American-institutional-racism-even-hits-VIPs narrative of the Henry Louis Gates arrest with the secular-Indian-Muslims-aren’t-allowed-to-transcend-religion subtext surrounding the story about Emraan Hashmi and his apartment-hunting troubles. But putting the Newark incident into easy pigeonholes would miss something deeper about what is actually being revealed here,about what the experience at immigration means to most people arriving in the US: a sudden sense of powerlessness,of protections being stripped away.

Is that emotional reaction in any way reasonable? After all,the United States,for all the reflexive criticism levelled at its society,prioritises individual rights conceptually — and actually engages in the sometimes-agonising process of making sure those ideals don’t conflict too much with practice. Profiling of the sort that Khan alleges,based on ethnic and religious identity,would violate much that’s foundational about the US. And racial profiling — particularly a well-documented tendency historically to pull over African-American motorists driving cars that look too good for them to drive — is,indeed,considered unconstitutional,and only defended now by the most extreme crypto-racists out there. That needed a long discussion during the ’80s and ’90s,though: the argument that stopping and checking African- and Hispanic-Americans disproportionately often was justified because “they committed a disproportionate amount of crime” needed to be demolished both statistically and on an ideological level. It’s now settled that racial information can be used in an investigation or for an arrest — but if you’re looking for a specific offender of the same race. You can’t factor in generalisations about racial or other origins.

So was Khan reacting irrationally,then,in a post-flight haze of tiredness and nicotine withdrawal?

Perhaps. But we should take his reaction seriously anyway. Because the sad truth is that these wonderful,

liberal principles don’t quite apply to non-US citizens. In fact,we know beyond much doubt that they don’t when it comes to immigration-related questions: thanks to the famously liberal ’70s US Supreme Court,which in a judgment in 1975 that makes truly incredible reading ruled that “Mexican appearance” was a legitimate enough reason to stop a possible non-citizen.

The problem with being a free society is that you have to build a wall. And you get underpaid people to guard it — because what do you owe those trying to get in? There are always more of them. Of course,to single out the US might be a bit harsh. The double standards have been around since the birth of public liberty: at least half the free residents of classical-era Athens were “metics”,foreigners who came to the superpower to work,paid taxes and did military service,but were relatively unprotected by the law.

(Especially,in an eerie echo of our times,from judicial torture.) “Even the freest of free societies are unfree at the edge,” said Salman Rushdie in 2002. “At the edge,we submit to scrutiny… These people,guarding these lines,must tell us who we are. We must be passive,docile. To be otherwise is to be suspect,and at the frontier to come under suspicion is the worst of all possible crimes.”

But when you stand at the base of the US’s wall,looking up at it,the anxiety is somehow unique. Even privileged travellers feel it,a certain inchoate dread as you stand in line to be inspected,to be judged. You know you’ve touched down in a land which,if once you pay the ferryman,is welcoming as few are. But ahead of you is an overworked bureaucrat. He might make an error,so many such do. And that error could turn you back. It could bar you from

entering the country again. It couldn’t cause you to vanish. Or could it? If you were detained,who would know? They don’t have to tell anyone,you know. Habeas corpus doesn’t apply to you. Nor does due process,access to a lawyer,all the polite legalisms that mark the frontier between civilisation and barbarism.

The reason that so surprisingly many seemed to identify with Shah Rukh Khan this weekend is because,at some subconscious level,they actually identified with Ahmad Tanveer. Tanveer lived legally in America for years; but,one day,he arrived home to discover policemen in his apartment looking for his flatmate,whom he hardly knew. They checked up on his immigration status anyway — and discovered that he was an “offender”,as he had once,while employed by a petrol pump,brandished its unlicensed gun to try and stop an attempted robbery. That was enough: his immigration status was revoked,and he vanished into the black hole of America’s immigration detention centres,where he died. We don’t know if he received medical attention in time. For years,the US

denied he — a law-abiding,hard-working man who embodied so many virtues America prizes — even existed. He wasn’t a citizen. The principles didn’t apply.

We may not have known his name till recently. We still might not know it. But walking into that immigration hall we know — we understand,bone-deep — he and many like him existed. (We don’t know how many; attempts by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee to use the US equivalent of the RTI to get the Department of Homeland Security to divulge numbers have failed.) And we know,standing in that line,clutching our thin armour of paperwork,hoping that the computer won’t spit out a warning sign at the mention of our names,that the very impersonality of American institutions that we otherwise admire means that they don’t have any give: if your name is spit out,it won’t matter to the hard-eyed immigration officer that you’re obviously harmless — or even that you’re one of Newsweek’s 100 most influential people.

mihir.sharma@expressindia.com