Do we stop wearing saris and celebrating on the streets? Hell, no!

INTERVIEW SUKETU MEHTA, AUTHOR

- K. SUNIL THOMAS

Suketu Mehta is one of the finest thinkers on the subject of immigration, though he is better known in India for his Pulitzer prize-nominated bestseller Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004).

A professor at New York University, Mehta released This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto in 2019 and is currently working on a book on the immigrant history of New York City. Excerpts from an exclusive interview:

Q Indians abroad are being targeted.

In the US right now, Indian immigrants are under attack like never before. I haven't seen this in my 50 years of living here. For the first time, we are really on the radar, particularly of MAGA people, the white supremacists and the hardcore Trump supporters, who see us as a threat.

Now they see the Latinos coming across the border and the Africans as a threat from below, they see us as a threat from above. We are the richest, best educated community in the United States and I have been noticing on the internet just incredible racist hate directed at us.

They call us street shitters. A lot of this was directed at me after my last book, so I have seen it coming. But now it is almost entering the mainstream, and I think that is because of this kind of enormous economic insecurity that the US faces. And it is most directly felt as an attack on the H-1B visa category, which is majority Indian.

Q Prejudice has always been there. But it wasn't cool to express it publicly, but that has changed now all over the world, including in India. Is what is happening in America different?

There is a global backlash to migration. We are not much better—the horrible things that our leaders say about Bangladeshis, for example, Muslims and Christians, it is appalling.