When I read the news of an Indian diplomat’s daughter Krittika being handcuffed and kept in a New York jail for 24 hours on suspicion of sending anti-Jewish hate mail to her schoolteachers, the news really didn’t sink in. Nor did I realize, that she is the daughter of an old friend of mine, Debasish Biswas, a Barrackpore boy, who had joined our foreign service and had served at various missions with diligence, intelligence and a genuine ever ready smile.
A teenage Indian girl sending anti-Jewish hate mails? A diplomat’s daughter being handcuffed and hauled over to keep company with `stars’ from New York’s red light district and petty criminals from Bronx, merely on suspicion that she sent some stupid mails? It seemed like one of National Geographic’s Jailed Abroad TV show series.
India is possibly the only major country, with no record of anti-Jewish hate crimes. Indians don’t even have any anti-Jewish jokes in their repartee! Jews have lived in India since 500 BC and have produced outstanding Indian leaders – from Gen JFR Jacob, the then chief of staff of India’s Eastern Army who plotted the Army’s lightning 14 day advance to help liberate Bangladesh in 1971 to David Sassoon, the 19th century business tycoon and philanthrophist to Pearl Padamsee, Mumbai’s famous theatre personality and well known poet Nissim Ezekiel.
Calcutta, of which Barrackpore is an extended suburb, has a special soft corner for Jews, who have among other things, run jute mills, the famous New Market bakery – Nahoum, almost an institution for Anglophile Bengalis besides prestigious schools and colleges. A girl from this milieu, could hardly be the type who would bombard her Jewish teachers with hate mails!
USA of course has had its more than fair share of anti-Jewish hate crime, despite having earned the credit of liberating Jewish survivors of Germany’s holocaust. Statistics released by the FBI for the year 2009, shows that 70 per cent of America’s hate crimes are committed against Jews. White American young men and women are the mostly likely culprits.
It turned out that the school authorities at John Browne High School where Krittika studied and the New York police had acted not only in haste but without doing basic investigation. The school later discovered the mails had been sent by a fellow student of Chinese origin!
The `Big Apple’ police force, which hauled Krittika, perhaps rightly argued that a diplomat’s family did not have immunity in criminal cases. However, the point that one can’t brand a person, especially an impressionable teenager, as a criminal and treat her as one, without checking out facts, seems to have been given a go by in the zeal to rope in a brown skinned `Jew hater’!
Teachers and school administrators who should have done an internal investigation before going to the police and treated the young lady, who was their charge, with far more compassion, obviously also need to do more than introspection.
The story unfortunately does not end there. The student who sent the hate mails has neither been expelled, punished or jailed for the crime for which Krittika was wrongly picked up. Perhaps he is a rich and powerful man’s son. Perhaps, the school has introspected and decided they should not mar any other teenager’s reputation and psyche even if he richly deserves a lesson in good behaviour !
Krittika and her father have rightly decided that New York City authorities need to be taught a lesson and have filed a compensation case for $ 1.5 million against the city. Lets see how a city famous for its statue of liberty and for having sheltered millions of people from all races copes up with this challenge to its reputation.
A teenage Indian girl sending anti-Jewish hate mails? A diplomat’s daughter being handcuffed and hauled over to keep company with `stars’ from New York’s red light district and petty criminals from Bronx, merely on suspicion that she sent some stupid mails? It seemed like one of National Geographic’s Jailed Abroad TV show series.
India is possibly the only major country, with no record of anti-Jewish hate crimes. Indians don’t even have any anti-Jewish jokes in their repartee! Jews have lived in India since 500 BC and have produced outstanding Indian leaders – from Gen JFR Jacob, the then chief of staff of India’s Eastern Army who plotted the Army’s lightning 14 day advance to help liberate Bangladesh in 1971 to David Sassoon, the 19th century business tycoon and philanthrophist to Pearl Padamsee, Mumbai’s famous theatre personality and well known poet Nissim Ezekiel.
Calcutta, of which Barrackpore is an extended suburb, has a special soft corner for Jews, who have among other things, run jute mills, the famous New Market bakery – Nahoum, almost an institution for Anglophile Bengalis besides prestigious schools and colleges. A girl from this milieu, could hardly be the type who would bombard her Jewish teachers with hate mails!
USA of course has had its more than fair share of anti-Jewish hate crime, despite having earned the credit of liberating Jewish survivors of Germany’s holocaust. Statistics released by the FBI for the year 2009, shows that 70 per cent of America’s hate crimes are committed against Jews. White American young men and women are the mostly likely culprits.
It turned out that the school authorities at John Browne High School where Krittika studied and the New York police had acted not only in haste but without doing basic investigation. The school later discovered the mails had been sent by a fellow student of Chinese origin!
The `Big Apple’ police force, which hauled Krittika, perhaps rightly argued that a diplomat’s family did not have immunity in criminal cases. However, the point that one can’t brand a person, especially an impressionable teenager, as a criminal and treat her as one, without checking out facts, seems to have been given a go by in the zeal to rope in a brown skinned `Jew hater’!
Teachers and school administrators who should have done an internal investigation before going to the police and treated the young lady, who was their charge, with far more compassion, obviously also need to do more than introspection.
The story unfortunately does not end there. The student who sent the hate mails has neither been expelled, punished or jailed for the crime for which Krittika was wrongly picked up. Perhaps he is a rich and powerful man’s son. Perhaps, the school has introspected and decided they should not mar any other teenager’s reputation and psyche even if he richly deserves a lesson in good behaviour !
Krittika and her father have rightly decided that New York City authorities need to be taught a lesson and have filed a compensation case for $ 1.5 million against the city. Lets see how a city famous for its statue of liberty and for having sheltered millions of people from all races copes up with this challenge to its reputation.
2 comments:
Agree on all points.
It is nice to know that the GOI and the Indian Embassy, ably headed by Meera Shankar, ahve taken the matter "very seriously."
One only hopes this will not end up as a wasted protest like when Indian Sikhs were asked to remove their turban at American airports and students, thrown out of their institutions that were de-reognised, made to wear gadgets on their feet so that their movement could be monitored.
Post script : The US State Department has asserted that the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations does not give consular offer's families diplomatic immunity. Indian interpretation differs. A US Federal Court hearing Krittika's case may save the US State Department by ruling that it does. However if it doesn't one shudders what this could imply for consular officers elsewhere. Family members of any one them could be targetted by a hostile host government and arested on trumped up charges!
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