Recent stories from US like "Temple Vandalised", "Indian grandfather attacked and paralyzed by police" and "Indian American shot dead" are quite disturbing and bring up the issue of discrimination and racial prejudices to the fore. It is extremely heart wrenching to see that in a grandfather Suresh Bhai Patel, who is visiting US and was taking a stroll in the neighborhood was stopped by police, who were responding to suspicious activity call. This frail, innocent and unarmed person who could not speak a word of English was slammed down by police which paralyzed him. And on Shiv Ratri day Hindu Temple was vandalized and sprayed with hate messages like "Get out". These and many more such incidents show that hate crimes, racial discrimination and other kinds prejudices are on rise in US.
In Suresh Bhai Patel's case what is more disturbing is that authorities never came forth to apologize for the incident. It is only after wide protests from across the country by Indians led to arrest of officer involved, inquiry into the incident and an apology was issued by the governor of Alabama. And I'm quite apprehensive about the impartiality of the inquiry too, as the body inquiring into the incident will be led by predominantly white race.
Incidents like these have happened before on Blacks and continue to happen even now. During my recent four months stay in US, every other day there was news of Black person is shot at by authorities without provocation or were killed for no reason. All these brings out gravity of situation of non whites in the US. It is a fact that some blacks resort to crimes but I feel that Government has to look into the root cause of this problem and try address it in such a way that incidents like these should not continue to happen on Black or any other community. In a democratic country like US, high incidences of discrimination is certainly failure of system and it would not in fitness of things to talk sermons on the suppression of minorities in other countries. Instead, the administration from top echelons should try to address and it requires to be nipped in the bud. Legal recourse in US is promising but what the use is of winning the law-suite against the authorities if the innocent victim is unable to lead a normal life?
