Two days after an Indian grandfather was accosted, roughed up and slammed to the ground by US police officers for being unable to communicate in English, leaving him partially paralysed, questions are being asked once again of American tolerance and the blatant racism running rampant across the country.
US President Barack Obama made it a point to preach tolerance, invoking Mahatma Gandhi twice in two weeks, but police officers in Alabama have put the US President to shame once again in this instance of racial profiling.
On February 10, Sureshbhai Patel, 57, was walking down the street outside his son’s home in Madison, Alabama, when an officer of the Madison Police Department confronted him, allegedly responding to calls about a “suspicious person in the neighbourhood”. According to the official police statement, the officer attempted to search Patel. When he put his hands in his pockets, the officer forced him to the ground.
Here’s what happened in the words of the Patel family’s lawyer:
The incident has stirred up fresh controversy in the American and Indian media — more so in the backdrop of the recent unrest following the twin murders of black men by white police officers: 18-year-old Michael Brown was killed by Darren Wilson in Ferguson in August 2014, and 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot dead by Timothy Loehmann in Cleveland in November last year.
The attack on Sureshbhai Patel also comes barely a week after US President Barack Obama made a plea for religious freedom at India’s expense, saying Mahatma Gandhi would have been shocked by the acts of intolerance in an India famed for its diversity.
And, that wasn’t even the first time Obama criticised India’s religious tolerance. In his Town Hall speech at Siri Fort, the American president fired this salvo at the Modi government:
The media in India has not taken this apparent double standards lying down.
