President Trump arrived in India on Monday, Feb. 24, and left a couple of days later without making the trade deal that he had intended to. However, he did leave with something very valuable: the nonresident Indian (NRI) vote. Trump was greeted with an unnecessarily extravagant rally of over 100,000 people at a cricket stadium in Ahmedabad, the state of Gujarat’s largest city and my family’s hometown.
As a New York born and raised Gujarati girl, having to watch reports of President Trump in India made me visibly uncomfortable. I found it hard to digest that he was so friendly toward them and yet allows for people here to be blatantly racist toward us. After he became the presidential nominee, there was a shift within my own neighborhood and how they perceived us, despite having known us for the 20 years that we have lived here.
The visit also pushed the narrative that encourages a lot Gujaratis here to vote for him. Not once during his two-day visit did he address or condemn the violence against Muslims perpetrated by the Hindu community in New Delhi. It hurts to address the truth, but if Indian communities are being racially profiled in America, it’s because they did it to themselves.
In 2002, the Gujarat pogrom, a three-day period of violence in the state, took the lives of 1,044 people, 790 of which were Muslim. Multiple Muslim women and children were also raped, mosques were destroyed and trains were set on fire. The Hindu-Muslim conflict over territory can be traced back to the British and the British Raj’s policies, but these riots claimed more lives than the initial clash that led to the partition of India and Pakistan.
Many of the people within my immediate South Asian community voted for Trump because they genuinely believed that he would get the Muslim population out of India. Yes, you read that correctly – they genuinely think he will remove approximately 14% of the population from the country. They will endure the racism of white supremacists in hopes that Trump will fulfill their own racist intentions in India.
President Trump created an advertisement utilizing the Taj Mahal in Agra as a backdrop to target the Indo-American community. In the ad, he claims that he is fighting for us, a statement entirely hypocritical with the tightened restrictions on obtaining H1-B visas.
To make matters worse, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Trump fever is so bad that in preparation for his arrival, he strategically hid the slums of Ahmedabad, an integral part of the city, behind a cement wall. While Modi’s administration claimed that it was primarily for security purposes, a construction worker said in an interview that it was really to hide the slums of the city. The slums of Ahmedabad house approximately 2,000 people, so when Modi claims to have welcomed Trump to his hometown, what he really meant was, “I welcome you to the part that looks the best. Oh, that wall? There’s nothing behind there at all.” So, I guess Trump got his wall after all, but hiding the problem doesn’t make it disappear.
Trump pretending to advocate for the Indo-Americans doesn’t eliminate the racism brought on by his election. Voting for him because he will “get rid of the Muslims” is not a valid reason and Trump does not have our best interests in mind when he visits our country.
Drashti Mehta is a junior journalism major with minors in political science and public relations. She currently serves as the features editor for The Hofstra Chronicle and can be found on Twitter
@drashmehta.
