By Sharon Verghis

On a Wednesday evening at a local bar in Kansas, Indian software engineers Srinivas Kuchibhotla and Alok Madasani were chatting over their customary after-work whiskies.

Another patron, Adam W. Purinton, a Navy veteran, 51, started hurling racial slurs at the pair. Purinton was tossed out by security, but returned and fired on the two men. Kuchibhotla, 32, was killed and Madasani was wounded. Hours after the killing, Purinton walked into a bar and told a member of staff he had just killed “two Middle Eastern men”.

Nine days later in Washington, Deep Rai, 39, a US citizen of Indian descent, was working on his car in his driveway when an unidentified white male racially abused him before shooting him in the arm, shouting “go back to your own country”.

Both incidents are being investigated by US authorities as potential hate crimes. The attacks, and a string of other incidents across the country, have made front-page news in India. Mistaken as Muslim by extremists, non-Muslim Indians are increasingly being drawn into a wider surge of Islamophobic attacks in the country, with Indian politicians and families increasingly concerned about the safety of relatives and friends there.

They have reason to be concerned, with the Southern Poverty Law Centre documenting a surge of such incidents across the country in recent months and the number of hate groups in the US rising to near-historic highs in 2016 – something it attributes to Donald Trump’s election.

The non-profit group South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) has also noted a surge in race attacks, with 207 documented “incidents of hate violence and xenophobic political rhetoric aimed at South Asian, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Middle Eastern, and Arab communities” from late December 2015 through to November 15, 2016.

That represented a 34 percent increase in incidents in less than a third of the period covered in SAALT’s 2014 report.

In western democracies all over the world, Indians are coming increasingly under attack, with Sikhs – instantly identifiable by their turbans – a prime target of extremists who mistake them for Muslims.

In the UK, police have documented a big spike in hate crimes after Britain voted to leave the EU. In Australia, the family of bus driver Manmeet Alisher has expressed fear that his gruesome death in an attack in Brisbane was racially motivated, while recent attacks against Indian-Australians range from the assault of a 13-year-old Victorian Sikh boy on a bus last year, to the vandalizing of a Perth gurdwara.

Dr Yadu Singh, president of the Federation of Indian Associations of NSW, told The Age a Sikh friend had had his turban ripped off in an attack at a western Sydney train station a few years ago. While he saw no evidence that racist attacks were increasing in recent times, the community was watching the US situation with keen interest, he said.

He laid the blame for heightened racial tension on President Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric. Dr Gurdip Aurora, the Sikh president of the Australia India Society of Victoria, concurred, saying that “bad political leadership has a big role to play in these situations.”

For me, as an Australian of South Indian descent raised as a Catholic, the fear of being targeted is becomingly increasingly real.

I fear, too for my father – brown-skinned, 75 years old, a retired doctor – and my handsome young social worker cousin with a “jihadi” beard, as we like to tease him. I look at my male relatives and see those ill-fated engineers in Kansas, out for a drink and suddenly victims of explosive, inexplicable racial hatred.

We are not Muslim, but to those wishing violence on Muslims, we are as likely targets as the young woman with the hijab pushing her baby in a pram, the young man with the skullcap on his way to university, the elderly sitar teacher walking to class.

Sharon Verghis
About six months ago, I asked my mother to lend me a sterling silver cross even though I haven’t worn any religious jewellery since I was a child. I joked with colleagues at work that I was taking a huge risk if and when terrorists burst into our newspaper office, Charlie Hebdo-style. “Better for me to have a handy hijab nearby instead,” I quipped – with my brown skin, they’d see me as part of the ummah, and I’d be safe.

Now, I wonder what prompted me to ask for that chain. Perhaps subconsciously I saw it as protection against a different form of violence, one from the other side of the divide – to these haters, it would be a symbol that I’m not “one of them”.

It’s a small thing, this delicate silver cross around my neck. But to me, a lapsed Catholic for over 20 years, it’s powerful insurance in these troubled times.

[Sharon Verghis is a freelance writer. This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/comment/in-the-line-of-fire-8211-from-racists-20170323-gv4j2j.html]