On September 15, 2001, four days after airplanes crashed into the World Trade Centre in New York City and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, a 52-year-old Sikh man, a gas station owner, was shot dead all the way on the other side of the country in Mesa, Arizona. Balbir Singh Sodhi, who had moved from India to the US in the 1980s, is believed to be the first casualty of the post-9/11 backlash; later that day, Waqar Hasan, a Pakistani-origin convenience store owner in Dallas, Texas, was shot and killed in his store by self-proclaimed neo-Nazi Mark Anthony Stroman, while Frank Roque, the man who murdered Sodhi, fired his gun at a Lebanese clerk in another gas station and again into the home of an Afghan family, missing both times. Roque was caught the next day, but Stroman would claim two more victims, both cashiers at different gas stations — Indian-origin Vasudev Patel, who died on the spot, and Bangladeshi-origin Rais Bhuiyan, who was left partially blinded in one eye — before he was finally caught 20 days later.
In all, 2,977 people died in the 9/11 attacks. In the days and weeks that followed, as Americans struggled to cope with the horror of what happened, many among them — brown-skinned, perhaps sporting a beard or wearing a turban — found themselves under suspicion. Innocent men, women and children were profiled, and verbally and physically abused till they were forced, as Zohran Mamdani said in a video statement this weekend, into the “shadows”. These people — who, by the twisted logic of those targeting them, were just as guilty as the 9/11 attackers because they were Brown or Muslim — too were victims, even if indirectly, of that horrific day: Just like Mamdani’s aunt, who was described by the Democratic mayoral candidate for New York as being so affected by the suspicious looks directed at her hijab-clad form that she stopped using the subway.
In speaking about his aunt, about the well-meaning uncle who advised him to not be so public about his faith and about all the other Muslims of New York who strive for quiet lives in the hope that they’re not pulled into the crosshairs of an angry, divided nation, Mamdani broke a long silence. He staked his claim on a space that he has repeatedly been told, as a brown-skinned Muslim man, can never be wholly his. He did not, as the megaphones in MAGA are so stridently declaring, shove the “real” victims of 9/11 out of the frame.
It is not surprising that the Republican Right seeks to twist what was meant to be an expansion of the definition of “American” into Islamophobic, racially-charged whataboutism. For Vice President J D Vance, Trump ally Laura Loomer and others in their orbit, the larger project, after all, centres on a narrowing of this very thing: Who gets to call themselves “American” and who truly belongs. This is what lies behind Trump’s executive order which recognises only two genders in the US, the ongoing crackdown on illegal immigration which combines a frankly racist lens with unprecedented brutality to go after citizens and non-citizens alike, and the many, many ad hominem attacks on Mamdani that target his faith and insinuate that had he been mayor during 9/11, he might have sympathised with those who flew the planes into the twin towers.
Just like in 2001, in Trump’s America too there are victims who will remain unseen and unrecognised. Under a regime that revels in cruelty, their numbers have almost certainly surpassed those from a period that, by comparison, now seems far more innocent, a time when even a Republican President felt compelled to speak up against the backlash against Brown and Muslim Americans and who, on a visit to the Islamic Centre of Washington DC mere days after 9/11, said “Islam is peace”. Such words — even as a mere gesture — are unthinkable now under an administration pushing racist policies and dehumanising laws, and a reckless and divisive politics whose practitioners think nothing of leveraging the worst tragedy in their nation’s recent history to tarnish an opponent.
pooja.pillai@expressindia.com
