What (if any) were the long-term effects or repercussions of the "dotbusters" incidents against Indian-Americans in NJ during the 1980s?

New Jersey's Dotbusters

According to Elizabeth Gutierrez (1), in the 9-month period from June 1987 to Feb 1988, >15 Indians were brutally attacked in and around Jersey City, New Jersey. A group calling itself 'Dotbusters' sent a letter to the The Jersey Journal in August 1987 stating their intention to force Indians out of this community, by violence if necessary (see below from 1).

'If I'm walking down the street and I see a Hindu and the setting is right, I will just hit him or her'

The shocking 1987 attacks on Navroze Mody (on Sep 27, 1987 in Hoboken, New Jersey), which left him dead, and on Kaushal Saran (on Sep 24, 1987 in Jersey City, New Jersey, which left him with permanent neurological damage, didn't lead to appropriate punishments for the culprits. Mody's killers were convicted for merely aggravated assault and simple assault (2) while Saran's attackers were acquitted (3, 4). In fact, even Mody's father's complaint that the police didn't do enough to ensure his son's protection (2) was dismissed by the 3rd Circuit of the US Court of Appeals.

One of the most shocking and certainly flagrant aspects of these beatings and killing is that a mere 2 weeks earlier, on Sep 12, 1987, two of the brothers convicted on the aggravated assault charge for Mody's killing had apparently beaten two other Indians, Stevens Institute of Technology students Syed Hasan and Vikas Aggarwal. As the 3rd Circuit of the US Court of Appeals itself notes (from 2, emphasis mine),

'On September 12, 1987, two Asian Indian students from Stevens Institute of Technology (Stevens) in Hoboken, Syed Hasan (Hasan) and Vikas Aggarwal (Aggarwal), were walking to a restaurant named East L.A., two blocks from Stevens, for dinner. At 9:00 p.m., as they were about to enter the restaurant, someone stepped in front of them and stole Hasan's umbrella. Hasan turned and saw a man holding a baseball bat and another running away with the umbrella. When Aggarwal stepped forward and asked for the umbrella back, he was punched in the face by one of the men. About this time, an unknown person hit Hasan on his left side with a metal bar.

Hasan and Aggarwal entered the restaurant to escape their assailants. Aggarwal was bleeding profusely from his mouth. From inside the restaurant, he and Hasan could not see whether their assailants had left the area. They decided to walk back to Stevens and call security. Hasan only got as far as the curb when he was hit from behind with a baseball bat and fell into the road. Two men then picked Hasan up bodily, slammed him against the door of an adjoining store and punched and kicked him for about five minutes. Hasan ran back to Stevens alone. None of the men tried to rob Hasan. In the meantime, Aggarwal had also been attacked and struck senseless. He too was not robbed during the attack and, after the Hoboken police found him, he was taken to St. Mary's Hospital.

Mr. Ivan Sales (Sales), a man of Hispanic origin employed at a nearby restaurant called "Chicken Galore," saw the attack and called to the men beating Hasan and Aggarwal to stop. In response, three of the attackers ran over to Sales and assaulted and robbed him. The attackers fled as police responded to the scene.

After receiving medical treatment for their injuries, Hasan and Aggarwal gave signed statements to the Hoboken police about the attacks. While Hasan said he would recognize "the tall chap" if Hasan saw him again, neither Hasan nor Aggarwal could identify the attackers. Sales was able to identify two of them as "Chinito" and "Chinito's" brother. App. at 372-73. Hasan and Aggarwal were not asked whether they wanted to file complaints against their attackers. After they gave the police their respective dorm hall phone numbers and addresses so the police could reach them if needed, they left thinking that there was nothing further for them to do in order to press charges. Later Hasan did contact the Hoboken police to give them the phone number of his uncle's house in Queens, New York where he was staying while he recuperated from the attack.

Three days after the assaults, Detective Cahill learned that William Acevedo, also known as "Chinito," "was telling his friends in Hoboken High School how he had beat up two Indians and the Chicken man." Id. at 371. On September 17, 1987, William and Luis Acevedo went to the Hoboken police station. Detective Cahill reported that he then called Hasan and his roommate, Aggarwal, but Hasan said he did not want to file a complaint. The phone number Detective Cahill said he called was not the phone number of either Hasan or Aggarwal, and Hasan and Aggarwal were not roommates. Hasan and Aggarwal said they never told the Hoboken police that they did not want to press charges. Indeed, Aggarwal said he was never contacted by the police after he reported the incident. Hasan testified that he once received a message at his dormitory that the police had called and would call back, but they never did. Detective Cahill did contact Sales. Contrary to earlier statements, Sales now said that he did not want to file a complaint.

About a week after the attack, Peter Van Schaick (Van Schaick), a friend of Hasan's family and an attorney practicing in Hoboken, went to the Hoboken Police Department to talk with Lieutenant Kiely upon learning from Hasan that the police had taken no action in the matter. Lieutenant Kiely explained that no action had been taken because none of the victims had filed a complaint, but he admitted that he could legally pick up the attackers without awaiting a filed complaint from the victims. This explanation surprised Van Schaick since Hasan and Aggarwal had told him they did want the police to press charges. Van Schaick also told Lieutenant Kiely that he suspected the Hoboken police were not pressing the matter because the victims were Asian Indians. Later, another member of the Hoboken police force told Van Schaick that gangs and the "dot busting" problem were not high on the police department's priority list'

In other words, future violence and certainly Mody's killing was likely preventable if police had acted expeditiously in apprehending Hasan and Aggarwal's attackers. Why didn't this happen? Institutional indifference, bias? All these years later, we each have to fill the blanks ourselves as per our disposition. Violence to Mody and Saran was preventable because not being held accountable for the Sep 12 student beatings sent a strong, univocal message to those perpetrators that their open season mayhem on the Indian-American community in their neck of the woods was, if not officially sanctioned, somehow allowed.

Community Activism, Legal Repercussions And Consequences Of New Jersey Dotbuster Attacks In The 1980s

Such concerted attacks within a short time period caused the Indian American community in this area to coalesce around this issue. Following numerous public protests (5, 6), the US Justice Department became involved (7) and only then did local city officials begin to pursue a more aggressive approach against these crimes.

These 'dotbuster' incidents may have played a role in the passing of the bias crimes law (ethnic intimidation law) in August 1990 by the New Jersey State Assembly or so asserts the senior US Senator from New Jersey, Bob Menendez (8).

However, though frequency of such attacks definitely abated from their 1980s highs, hate crimes against Indian Americans in this region of New Jersey haven't stopped.

• In June 2010, 49-year old Divyendu Sinha, a 49-year old Stevens Institute of Technology professor was savagely beaten and killed in Old Bridge Township, New Jersey, ~30 miles south of Jersey City, while he was out for a walk with his two sons near his home (9). At that time, the Indian population in this predominantly white town of 70,000 had increased to ~6%. Two of the 5 accused high school students, though tried as adults, were finally acquitted of all the most serious charges and instead only found guilty of simple assault, 'a 4th degree crime that carries the presumption of non-incarceration' (10). One was sentenced to >12 years in prison (11), another to 7 years for aggravated manslaughter (12) and the fifth to 15 years (13).
• As recently as July 2015, 57 year old Rohit Patel was apparently the victim of a hate crime attack (beating) in North Brunswick, New Jersey (14), ~32 miles south of Jersey City.

Indian Population Demographic Changes In Jersey City, New Jersey post-1980s

Inexplicably, dotbuster attacks appear to not have prevented Indian immigration into this area. Indian population in Jersey City has expanded steadily, regardless of these attacks. While some have speculated that Indians' tendency to cluster spatially both residentially and in business in this area made them more visible as targets for the 1980s attacks (1), it may be that counter-intuitively, the same tendency helped sustain their continuing immigration into this region. Strength is in numbers after all.

• In 1992, the New York Times (15) quotes the Census Bureau as stating that 'During the 1980's, Jersey City's Asian Indian population increased from 2,303 to 7,361’.
• By 1989, it had apparently increased to 15000 (16), a >2X increase in just 2 years, ~6.5% of the total.
• While Jersey City Indians numbered 27111 in 2010 (17), representing 10.9% of the overall Jersey City population, their number further increased to 27603 by 2013 (18), a 1.8% increase over 3 years.

Bibliography

1. Gutierrez, Elizabeth. "THE-DOTBUSTER-ATTACKS: HATE CRIME AGAINST ASIAN INDIANS IN JERSEY CITY, NEW JERSEY." Middle States Geographer 5 (1996): 30-38. http://msaag.org/wp-content/uplo...

2. 959 F.2d 461

3. New York Times, Feb 11, 1993. 3 Are Acquitted on a Count In Indian Physician's Beating

4. Hudson Reporter, Ricardo Kaulessar, Mar 5, 2009. ‘DotBusters’ victim looks back<br><font size=2><i>Now in Oklahoma; racial attack nearly killed JC resident in 1987</font></i><br>

5. New York Times, Oct 8, 1987. Jersey City Indian Community Protests Rash of Racial Attacks

6. New York Times, Dec 16, 1987. Protesters Want Four Tried As Adults in Killing of Indian

7. New York Times, Oct 12, 1987. In Jersey City, Indians Protest Violence

8. Menendez Letter To TIME On Joel Stein's Essay About Indian-Americans In NJ | U.S. Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey

9. Jersey Journal, Stephen Sterling, July 1, 2010. http://blog.nj.com/ledgerlocal/p...

10. Jersey Journal, Sue Epstein, Oct 1, 2013. Acquittals in Old Bridge beating death spark tears of relief, tears of frustration

11. Jersey Journal, Sue Epstein, Apr 3, 2014. Last of 5 charged in fatal Old Bridge beating case sentenced to 12 years in prison

12. News12, Oct 18, 2013. 3 sentenced in fatal beating of Old Bridge man

13. Jersey Journal, Sue Epstein, June 12, 2014. Appeals court upholds Old Bridge teen's 15-year prison term in Old Bridge fatal beating

14. Times of India, July 7, 2015. Indian man attacked in apparent hate crime in New Jersey - Times of India

15. New York Times, Sep 12, 1992. 3 Indicted in Beating of Indian Doctor

16. New York Times, Apr 10, 1989. Indian-Americans Protest Verdicts in Jersey City

17. American FactFinder - Results

18. American FactFinder - Results

19. American FactFinder - Results

https://www.quora.com/What-if-any-were-the-long-term-effects-or-repercussions-of-the-dotbusters-incidents-against-Indian-Americans-in-NJ-during-the-1980s/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala

What are the differences and similarities between India and America when it comes to racism?

Assuming America means the US, in my experience, India and the US are depressingly similar when it comes to racism. Both have a long shameful history of deliberately disenfranchising specific groups of people, who are then socially shunned, economically decimated, and culturally sidelined, of course after the dominant groups appropriate whatever they like or want. As well, this history is much longer in India, the group in question the Dalit, formerly called Untouchables. In the US, it's blacks and Native Americans. Process is also depressingly similar, the marginalized are deliberately segregated geographically, economically, educationally. In both countries, widespread protest movements galvanized change with governments enacting laws attempting to empower and enfranchise, through a variety of Affirmative action programs. However, ensuing changes are often cosmetic and cultures stubbornly hold on to the disenfranchising status quo. After all, easier for the privileged to view their accomplishments as merit-based rather than feasting off the banquet of generational entitlement, easier to dismiss the deliberately, systematically downtrodden groups as deserving of their lowlier fates. Difference is India retains a more visible and persistent feudal structure that exacerbates caste and class divides.

My earliest memory of bigotry is from my own family. With India still stubbornly feudal, everyone worth their salt has servants, now euphemistically called domestic workers. Change in name, not dignity. We had a couple, wife for house work, husband the gardener. I was around 3 or 4 years old. Living with us, my widowed paternal grandmother, conservative, rigid and very casteist. She'd wash her own clothes and hang them out to dry in the back yard. That day, as she used her long bamboo stick to hang it out on the back yard clothes line, Katayan, the gardener, accidentally brushed against her washed saree while weeding a garden patch. I'll never forget the Tamil cry that burst out from her lips, 'Dushta, dushta', i.e. wicked, wicked. Striking him once on the shoulder with her stick, she then agitatedly set to pulling her saree off the clothesline and ran off with it to wash it again, his body's accidental brushing apparently enough to 'pollute' it.

Of course, this was decades back and India has come a long way from such decrepit and utterly repulsive ideas or so the elite would have us believe but nothing could be further from the truth. By many measurable metrics, access to education, literacy rates, per capita income, Dalits remain marginalized and disenfranchised, entirely by design and not by accident. Sure, the Indian media often touts tremendous individual Dalit success stories but the reality is similar to the US. After all, one Obama in the White House doesn't mean blacks are suddenly equal to whites in terms of access to opportunities, wealth and power, and protection under the law, does it? And, lacking even the fig leaf of an Obama, Native Americans are left out of the conversation altogether.

Years later, a conference room at the US NIH fills up as people stream in for a meeting or presentation. Walk in on the tail end of some desultory conversation about a topical news issue, obviously about blacks. Shockingly, a senior white researcher, a famous name in fact, says of course, it's well known that among blacks it's the stupid ones that got caught in the first place. I'd never heard of such a flagrantly odious and self-serving theory to explain black enslavement. To hear it at all was shocking, to hear it stated by someone so highly educated even more so. That it was said at all in that room only emphasizes how spaces deemed to represent power in US society continue to systematically exclude blacks. Of course, that room was filling up with white Americans and immigrants deemed deserving, no blacks.

My own experience of racism in the US was less overt, often expressed as persistent suspicion. For e.g., being asked for my ID when presenting a credit card at the check-out when those ahead of and behind me, all whites, weren't. Once is a quirk. Often? That's a pattern. Then there was that ominous entanglement with a white cop my very first year in the US. Having written about it elsewhere (1), the recent, steady drip-drip of news stories of blacks killed in police encounters underlines in no uncertain terms how lucky I was to not end up with the same ignominious fate, shot and killed during a police encounter.

Recently, India was roiled with the high-profile Suicide of Rohith Vemula, a Dalit scholar at the University of Hyderabad. Didn't make as much of a buzz on Quora. Inevitably, what I read  included commenters unabashedly engaging in character assassination of a young man who's no longer around to defend himself. After all, at a time when internet penetration is <30% in India, no surprise haves would dominate in their access to it. Meantime, protestors in India are rightfully calling it institutional murder. After all, Dalits who demand to be seen as peers are actually perceived as dangerous interlopers and treated as such, creating conditions not so different from those that provoked the recent protests at 2015 University of Missouri protests. Why did Rohith's suicide touch such a nerve? The poignance and eloquence of his suicide note (2). Even birth in penury to a laborer and a seamstress couldn't prevent his rare and marvelous writing talent from blossoming. As James Baldwin famously seared the American public's conscience in his 1963 interview (3) with Dr. Kenneth Clark on the Negro and the American Promise, so Rohith's forlorn words reverberate in India today, in a culture that pays lip-service and doesn't sincerely engage in righting egregious historical wrongs, whose entrenched elite lack the generosity and humanism necessary to restore dignity to the ranks of the generationally oppressed by reaching out, mentoring and nurturing their talent. 

Racism is much more stark and overt for the thousands of African students now streaming into India for higher studies. As a black American PhD Student at the Delhi School of Economics wrote in 2009 (4),

'Discrimination in Delhi surpasses the denial of courtesy. I have been denied visas, apartments, entrance to discos, attentiveness, kindness and the benefit of doubt. Further, the lack of neighbourliness exceeds what locals describe as normal for a capital already known for its coldness.

My partner is white and I am black, facts of which the Indian public reminds us daily. Bank associates have denied me chai, while falling over to please my white friend. Mall shop attendants have denied me attentiveness, while mobbing my partner. Who knows what else is more quietly denied?

"An African has come," a guard announced over the intercom as I showed up. Whites are afforded the luxury of their own names, but this careful attention to my presence was not new. ATM guards stand and salute my white friend, while one guard actually asked me why I had come to the bank machine as if I might have said that I was taking over his shift'.

Be it Caste Hindus in India or whites in the US, bigotry goes underground following laws ostensibly banning it. Enacting laws isn't the same as implementing them. Entrenched power doesn't give its hegemony away. It has to be wrested out of cold dead, usually male, hands. Meantime, institutionalized bigotry cleverly engages in tokenism to gain the cover of plausible deniability, something B. R. Ambedkar, Dalit architect of India's constitution foresaw (5). Obvious symbols of tokenism, when blacks and mixed race sporadically rotated through my NIH lab, systematic lack of structural support and thoughtful mentoring ensured their inevitable failure. Self-fulfilling prophecy in place, such tokenism also gestates the far more dangerous seed of resentment within the easily self-satisfied and less self-aware among the privileged, yes, the same ones quick to myopically complain about oppressive levels of political correctness in society.

A quote often attributed to Gandhi advises, 'First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you and then you win'. Yet the process isn't so conveniently linear, tying itself in the pretty bow tie of victory at the end. All too often, initial victories are pyrrhic and the persistently disenfranchised need to cycle back through the process. So, be it India or the US, we're cycling back to the 3rd stage. In both cultures, pressures from such an abhorrent and unsustainable form of institutionalized apartheid are now again coming to the boiling point. Maybe a course correction, maybe some more laws, some more tokenism, ending with marginally more power to the Dalits and blacks. Dare we ever hope for better than this?

Foot-notes

1. Power without accountability creates a desert where disdain blooms at the expense of humanism and dignity by Tirumalai Kamala on TK Talk  

2. Rohith Vemula's suicide letter published by the Times of India, Jan 19, 2016. Full text: Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula's suicide note - Times of India 

3. James Baldwin interviewed by Dr Kenneth Clark, 1963. WGBH American Experience
 . Bonus Video  

4. Outlook India, Diepiriye Kuku, June 29, 2009. 'India Is Racist, And Happy About It' 

5. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Interview by BBC Radio, 1955. Round Table India - Dr Ambedkar Remembers the Poona Pact in an Interview on the BBC 

https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-differences-and-similarities-between-India-and-America-when-it-comes-to-racism/answer/Tirumalai-Kamala

Power without accountability creates a desert where disdain blooms at the expense of humanism and dignity

What to say about an old routine traffic stop that was anything but routine? How lucky it wasn't worse, much worse.

May 6-7, 1998. Past mid-night, ~12:20AM. Heading home from work in my second-hand, beat-up Honda hatchback, the only car I could afford back then. I'd been working on my scientific presentation for the next morning. An immunology lab at the NIH, the PIs' work the stuff of text-books. New to the lab and to the US, my mind's still running through my data slides, slides I'd toiled over till late that night.

Preoccupied, I cross the Montrose Road and East Jefferson intersection. Become dimly aware of flashing lights behind me. Instinctively assume an ambulance and swerve to the right to give space but the lights follow. Confused, swerve to the left, again to give space but the lights still follow. Only then do I suddenly realize it's a police car not an ambulance, and immediately stop.

Cop car drives ahead, swerves to block my car and stops, cop lunges out of his car, yells to get out of the car and to keep my hands out of my pockets. No one else in sight or on the road, no person nor car. Totally shell-shocked, I get out with my hands up, left hand in a splint. A lab mishap the previous month had meant emergency tendon repair surgery in my left hand.

Moved to the curb. Proceed with exercises. So clueless, I realize only later they're tests for ascertaining alcohol-induced driving impairment. Pass those tests? Of course. After all, I hadn't consumed alcohol, ever. Cop's still haranguing me. Says I'm not on alcohol but he's sure I'm on something. What is it? Point to my ID badge, explain to the cop that I worked at NIH, that I'd initially mistaken his car lights for an ambulance, that my mind was on my next morning's presentation. Patent innocence and naivete of someone habituated to speaking truthfully and used to being believed.

Response? To cuff me. Threatens to take me into custody. With my left arm in a splint, struggles to put the cuffs with my arms in the back, finally cuffs in front. Pitiful and thus fittingly absurd.

Second cop car with two cops pulls up. Shine a light into my face. First cop says I was clean for drink. Explain my story to them, ask why the first cop's treating me so badly. Shrug, say they can't do anything about it, it's his call. Drive off.

Cop tells me I'm not fit to drive my car home. Not alcohol but I'm on something, he doesn't know what or so he insists. Calls for a tow truck. We wait for it. My apartment is less than 500 yards away. After it arrives, asks if I have the $75 to pay for it, uncuffs me, tells me to get out and go home with the tow truck. Drives off, never explaining why he cuffed and uncuffed me.

Get home around 2AM. Pay off the tow truck driver. Do I sleep that night? Don't remember. Next morning, get dressed, go to Bagel City bagels, get bagels and cream cheese for the presentation, go to NIH and present my data at 10:30 as usual.

After the presentation, tell my PI (Principal Investigator) about my mishap. She advises to not pay the tickets and to instead appeal in traffic court. Also to write everything down while it's still fresh in my mind.

I write down everything as I remember it and send it to the First Secretary, Consul, Embassy of India in Washington D.C.. Also send a copy to Bob Levey, a Washington Post reporter then covering disproportionate use of force by local cops. He thanks me for sending him my report but he's moved on from covering this story. Meet the vice-consul at the Indian Consulate in Washington, D.C.. Unsurprisingly, a dead end there too.

September 14, 1998. My day in traffic court. Cop lies, says I was on alcohol that night. My threadbare protection? That his own recording of the facts don't support his lie. After all, when it's my turn to speak, I freeze. Never been in court. Judge decides quickly. Just fines to be paid after all. Pay at the counter with a personal check. Now history, the entire event meticulously documented, labeled and filed away in my ever-burgeoning file cabinet of a life.

Other things take longer to put away. For years, while driving, whenever I heard the sound of sirens, be they cops or ambulances, one of my legs would start trembling uncontrollably.

I'd made a traffic error for sure. Past midnight, traffic signs stop working. If they blink orange, slow and go. If they turn red, stop and go. At the Montrose intersection, they'd blinked red. I should have stopped before going. Instead my error was to slow and go. A new driver, I'd only learnt car driving after coming to the US. My mind was also too much on my presentation.

Did my traffic error justify this cop cuffing me and threatening to take me into custody? Certainly not. Diligent researcher, not involved in anything even remotely anti-social or criminal. Ours the only cars on that road while this entire incident transpired. Safe neighborhood, not a drug- and/or crime-infested one. Yet so lucky it didn't end another way.

Smart phone cameras. One brutal incident after another uncovering a critical slice of American culture that stayed largely hidden or unspoken in polite society, a culture of police impunity, especially against non-whites. Beggars the imagination that an immigrant scientist could have a harrowing personal experience about cops and yet I do, that too years old. My bad luck? Maybe. Certainly arbitrary and capricious. An anomaly? Certainly not, too many tragic videos attest to a culture of law enforcers habitually violating the rule of law.

Power exercised arbitrarily, with bias. Inevitable when complacence, willful ignorance and apathy drive a Faustian bargain prioritizing so-called safety and security at the expense of accountability. A basic tenet for an equitable society, selective or non-existent accountability desiccates human relations. What withers first? Humanism. Is it even possible to prosper and feel good about ourselves without it? Rather, isn't denying others basic dignity by opportunistically abusing power the very manifestation of privation of human decency? After all, what's civility but to treat each other with a modicum of dignity, and to not dehumanize? Easy to say, 'let's reverse course'. Not so in practice. Once given away, arbitrarily bestowed power isn't easily wrested back, nor its pernicious corrosion of human values easily reversed.

What's behavior worthy of emulation? One where individual dignity prevails. Going to traffic court, lodging my complaint with the Indian Embassy in writing and in person, writing to the Washington Post's Bob Levey, all to reclaim my dignity because I choose to live a life where it's sacrosanct. It behooves each and every one of us to choose to make this the norm in our lives but are we equally up to the task? Not in the least, else why this ruinous state of affairs where bigotry and inequity of one kind or the other prevail the world over? Not simply because bigots and other agents of inequity exist but because cultures tolerate and even accommodate them. And so, driven by cravenness, humanity's caravan of the absurd lumbers on in perpetuity, a Sisyphean quest seeking to create nobler versions of ourselves.

https://tirumalaikamala.quora.com/Power-without-accountability-creates-a-desert-where-disdain-blooms-at-the-expense-of-humanism-and-dignity