Non-resident Bangladeshis and Indians are a great source of pride and money for those back home and are often role models around whom whole communities start dreaming. Sureshbhai Patel, a 57-year-old grandfather from rural Gujarat, had gone to visit his prematurely born grandson in the state of Alabama.
He was brutally assaulted by the local police as he was taking a stroll in the neighbourhood where his son lives. The man received severe spinal injuries and is now partially paralysed. While such gross injustice should attract condemnation as it has from various sectors of US civil society and elected representatives, the there is something about the reaction of powerful brown people resident in the subcontinent that requires introspection.
After the Sureshbhai Patel assault news broke, Delhi’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) sprang into action, putting on its “empathy” for brown man Sureshbhai and “outrage” hats at the same time at the excessive use of force by the police. The MEA spokesperson Syed Akbaruddin said it’s important that the Indian community feels safe and secure in USA.
The Indian consulate in Washington DC has planned to contact the US State Department. A US embassy official in Delhi was also summoned by the MEA and was told how India feels about this event. People surely deserve a government that cares for them, even when they are abroad. Crimes by US police on an Indian citizen are unacceptable. But what about daily crimes by Indian police on Indian citizens? But before that let’s go back to USA.
In February 2011, Krittika Biswas, the daughter of an Indian Embassy official in New York, was made to spend a night in jail on charges that were subsequently proved to be false. Krittika was outraged in the ways she had been dealt with by the New York police, including tight handcuffing while interrogation by police and taking her out of school in handcuffs in full view of her fellow students.
At the jail, she was disallowed from using the restroom during detention, was kept with people who had allegedly committed serious crimes, was kept in a jail with unhygienic conditions. She was there for 28 hours. She publicly broke down while recounting her ordeal in front of the press. She gathered support from people who stood with her resolve to ensure that the price of every tear of her’s needed to be paid.
Krittika’s family subsequently decided to pursue legal action to ask for financial compensation from New York because of its actions. Damages claimed were of the order of $1.5m. At that point, the Indian MEA officially stated in a media briefing on June 10, 2011: “However, once Ms Biswas’s family sought ministry’s permission to initiate legal proceedings against the concerned authorities in New York, it was granted promptly. Ministry’s thoughts and support remain with the family at this difficult juncture and we will continue to provide them whatever assistance we can.”
This means that the MEA of India also considered it’s just that such treatment of a person by the police does call for compensation of the grade. That’s good to know. The case was settled in September last year, with New York agreeing to pay her $225,000. Now let’s come back to India.
If the alert, honourable, and super-patriotic citizens of India were to direct their sensitivity a little inwards, they would actually bankrupt the country. Here’s how. If the above amount is a fair amount, what would be the probable amount of compensation owed to the parents of the Manipuri young woman Thangjam Manorama, widely believed to be have been abducted, tortured, raped, and murdered by members of the security forces, namely the Assam Rifles.
Who will be held accountable for not releasing the government inquiry commission report, after serious discrepancies between Assam Rifles version of events and some objective data that was incompatible with Assam Rifles version? What would be a fair amount of financial compensation for the mass gang-rapes of Kashmiri women in Kunan Poshpora, allegedly by soldiers of the Indian Army? Add to this the innumerable illegal detentions, random beatings, rapes, and so much more against women by police and security forces in India.
The total amount of compensation (calculated using standards that the Indian government endorses in the Krittika case) for these crimes would make the Indian State go bankrupt. By its attitude on Manorama and Kunan Poshpora, vis-à-vis its agile response to Sureshbhai Patel and Krittika case, the Indian state has already proven itself bankrupt in other ways.
If all this makes Bangladeshis feel smug about their state of affairs vis-à-vis the Indian Union, I have only two words to offer for starters. Kalpana Chakma and she is just one of the many Jumma men and women who will never be seen again. Google that name and read about her. Those reparations might cost a few Padma bridges. Our collective crimes can’t be atoned in many lifetimes. We have no shame. Not you, my brothers and sisters, on the other side of the eastern Radcliffe border. Nor me, sitting here in Kolkata.
Should brown people escape their homelands to foreign countries to be considered as human beings by their “own” state powers? Maybe they should wait it out for the unlikeliest scenario that these reparations owed to millions of our own victims for brutality by security forces are paid.
That will actually bring in a lot more money in the bank account of most people in the subcontinent than the mythical 15 lakhs Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised to everyone living in the Indian Union after black money from foreign accounts would be brought back? Do we realise the gravity of these daily sins?