NYTimes October 7, 1998

United Ethnically, and by an Assault

By SOMINI SENGUPTA and VIVIAN S. TOY

By age 5, Rishi Maharaj was waving an American flag. By the time he was a teen-agree, he was haranguing his family to register to vote. Years before he cast his first vote, he was volunteering for political campaigns and manning the local polls. His patriotic zeal did not seem to matter much one evening in late September, though. While walking along a quiet street in South Ozone Park, Queens, Maharaj, now 20, was beaten with baseball bats by three young men who, the authorities said, wanted to attack an Indian.

Prosecutors say one of the assailants hurled a string of racist expletives while he beat him, saying, "This is never going to be a neighborhood until you leave." Now, Maharaj, the son of Trinidadian immigrants of Indian descent, is recovering at home in neighboring Richmond Hill. With facial fractures and a broken jaw held together by a steel plate, he is still too badly hurt to talk about the attack. But his relatives and other Indo-Caribbeans say the case reflects how they often find themselves outsiders in their eagerly adopted land.

The attack comes at a time of simmering discomfort in South Ozone Park. Once a largely Irish and Italian enclave, the area has become, in the last decade, a popular destination for Guyanese and Trinidadian families moving up from their first immigrant homes in nearby Richmond Hill and Jamaica. But if Maharaj was attacked because he was thought to be an outsider in this neighborhood a mile south of where he was born and raised, he and his compatriots have also been largely outside the "Indian" fold to which he was thought to belong.

East Indians from the Caribbean and the subcontinent have remained strangers at best in New York -- sharing the same faiths, but worshiping at separate churches, mosques and Hindu temples, and rarely, if ever, joining the same cultural or social networks. Many Indo-Caribbeans -- descendants of Indian indentured servants transported to cut cane in the Caribbean 150 years ago, after the abolition of slavery -- have complained about being looked down upon as inauthentic Indians. At the same time, many have remained apart from their countrymen of African descent.

Now, the attack on Maharaj, which prosecutors are treating as racially motivated, seems to have offered a rallying cry for "Indians" from both communities. Whether it will last, however, remains an open question. "The small indignities that people have endured for the last couple of decades -- when something like this happens, all of these feelings resonate," said Roger Sanjek, a Queens College anthropology professor who has written a forthcoming book on race and neighborhood politics in New York. "People feel maybe that jerk who shouted something at me at the stoplight could have gotten out and done this to me. It wasn't that he was from Trinidad. He could've been from Rajasthan and still gotten attacked."

Two Sundays ago, Maharaj was walking up 114th Street in South Ozone Park with two of his cousins, when one of three men sitting on a nearby stoop, the police said, proposed to set upon "the Indians." The man, Nuno Martins, apparently thought Maharaj was speaking too loudly. Then, the police said, Martins, 19, along with Luis Amorim, 22, and Peter DiMarco, 19, kicked, punched and beat Maharaj. The police also said Maharaj apologized repeatedly until he lost consciousness.

According to court records, both Martins, who is unemployed, and Amorim, a student at St. John's University, live near the corner where the attack occurred. DiMarco, who attends Queensborough Community College, lives in College Point.

All three are charged with attempted murder; though prosecutors asked for $500,000 bail, they were released on $20,000 bail each and are due in court tomorrow. The beating occurred less than 50 yards from the home of Maharaj's cousins, the Gopees, who moved to 114th Street three

years ago after several years in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn. The Gopees had relatives in nearby Richmond Hill, but in South Ozone Park, they found a house with a sprawling backyard and streets that seemed quiet and safe. They did not think twice about moving to a block that was still predominantly white. "We grew up among people here," said Karen Gopee, a 26-year-old

lawyer, whose family immigrated from Trinidad when she was barely a year old. "We consider ourselves to be American."

The attack has left them feeling ambivalent, at best, about the area they call home. In the last two weeks, several neighbors have come to offer sympathies, one even sending a note that implored, "Please don't judge us all by this incident." Statistically speaking, South Ozone Park today appears to be racially integrated. According to 1997 census estimates, nearly half its 17,000 residents were white, a third were black, and the rest, Asians and others.

How many Indo-Caribbeans live there is impossible to tell, though, since they alternately refer to themselves as Asian, black or simply "other" on census forms. In any case, their numbers are far greater in Richmond Hill. There, over the last 15 years, Indo-Caribbeans have bought homes, opened businesses and erected their own houses of worship.

Although police figures show few instances of bias crimes, residents and local officials say that tensions between Indo-Caribbean newcomers and neighborhood veterans revolve around more mundane civic matters -- most notably, the illegal conversions of single-family homes into multiple units. While local civic leaders say their concern is with illegal and potentially dangerous dwellings, regardless of the ethnicity of the people inside, Indo-Caribbeans say they feel they have unfairly been made targets of the housing crackdown.

"This whole area is a hotbed of tension," said Theresa Thanjan, a social worker with Catholic Charities in Southeast Queens. "There's nothing as contentious as the illegal conversions issue." One recent morning along Lefferts Boulevard, the commercial artery of South Ozone Park, some longtime residents had difficulty accepting the official version of the attack. "I know they had to be seriously provoked for this to happen," Kristie Pentaleri, 20, said from behind the counter at Star Mountain Cafe. "I don't think it was a racial thing at all." She said she had grown up in the neighborhood and knew Amorim.

Maharaj's family members say they are not so sure. Since the attack, they say, several friends have recalled aloud incidents they had never spoken of before, or reported to the police -- racial epithets, fist fights, beatings that landed them in the hospital. But the attack on Maharaj has underscored rifts between these immigrants and their native-born neighbors in Southern Queens, it has also exposed the way New Yorkers of Indian descent are riven by differences real and imagined.

While Indian immigrants tend to be most comfortable in one of the more than a dozen Indian tongues, Indo-Caribbeans generally speak only English. And their food, music and religious rites have been transformed by African and Native American influences in the New World. Each group also has firm, if inaccurately stereotyped, ideas about the other.

Probir Roy, an India-born accountant in Queens who was among the first South Asians to flock to the family's side after the attack on Maharaj, ascribed the gulf to differences in language, class and culture. He described Indo-Caribbeans as more likely to indulge in alcohol, hold blue-collar jobs and have broken families. "Our kids are in Ivy League colleges," said Roy, an officer of the Federation of Indian Associations, an umbrella group of about 60 organizations. "The Caribbeans -- their parents are not so concerned to push their kids to be professionals."

For their part, many Indo-Caribbeans complain that they have long been shunned by their compatriots from India. Indeed, the Indian Federation does not include a single Indo-Caribbean group. In the last couple of weeks, the attack on Maharaj seems to have caused Indians of both groups to reconsider their relationship in this country. Unusual if not perfect alliances have been forged. Indian New Yorkers belonging to groups like the Federation, which the Maharaj family had never heard of, have rushed to their aid. Letters and petitions addressed to the Queens District Attorney, Richard A. Brown, have been circulating on line, urging a swift prosecution of the suspects.

For the hearing tomorrow, a sundry group of members of South Asian organizations are planning a vigil outside the courthouse. Still, the ambivalent relationship of Indians from across the diaspora has not been lost on the family of Rishi Maharaj. Last week, they were invited to a $250-a-plate dinner with the Indian Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, during his visit to New York. Several of Maharaj's siblings and cousins went, dressed in their best flowing Indian salwar-kameez outfits and armed with petitions for the District Attorney.

A few people signed their petitions. Many refused. Ms. Gopee said she detected a lack of interest bordering on disdain. They left before the Prime Minister began speaking. They said they knew little about him anyway. "After the response we got," she said, "we were not interested in staying."

Officials See Racial Motive in Attack on Indian-American

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

Offering fresh details about what they described as a bias attack, law enforcement officials said Monday that a 19-year-old man who was severely beaten Sunday evening in South Ozone Park, Queens, had been singled out by residents who wanted to beat up an Indian. The man, Rishi Maharaj, remained in Jamaica Hospital Medical Center Monday with blunt-trauma injuries to the head. A hospital spokeswoman said his condition had been upgraded to stable. The police said three men beat him senseless with baseball bats while he was walking from his uncle's house on 114th Street with two of his cousins. According to investigators, one of the three suspects instigated the attack when he proposed, using an expletive, to set upon "the Indians."

Maharaj was born in the United States. His family, of Indian descent, is from Trinidad, said a third cousin of the victim. The cousin, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that during the assault, the attackers complained about Indians moving into their neighborhood and causing it to decline. She described Maharaj as a slight man who does not pick fights. "He just didn't deserve this," she said. "He is not a bully. He is the very opposite of a bully."

The attack took place in front of the homes of two of the suspects, Luis Amorim, 22, and Nuno Martins, 19. Police said the two men, along with a third, Peter DeMarco, 19, who lives nearby, had been drinking when they spotted Maharaj, who lives about a mile away on the border of Ozone Park and Richmond Hill, and his two female cousins, ages 19 and 22, coming up the street.

Law enforcement officials said the suspects would be charged today with assault, which carries a maximum penalty of 25 years in prison. Prosecutors were also contemplating attempted-murder charges. District Attorney Richard A. Brown of Queens called the crime racially motivated. "In my view, this was an unprovoked and vicious attack on a defenseless young man because of his ethnicity," he said. "It is to be condemned."

The attack comes at a time when South Ozone Park and surrounding communities have witnessed a substantial influx of Indians from Trinidad and Guyana. According to City Planning Department figures, the adjacent neighborhood of Richmond Hill now has the highest concentration of Guyanese, mostly those of Indian descent, among all city neighborhoods, while South Ozone Park has also seen a steady trickle of Indo-Caribbean immigrants.

Tensions in both middle-class neighborhoods, which are dotted with detached houses with landscaped lawns and driveways, usually involve disputes over the illegal conversions of single-family homes. Racial and ethnic attacks are rare, said Dolly Hassan, a lawyer for Liberty Immigration Services, a nonprofit group in Richmond Hill.

"There's always going to be people when they see newcomers coming in, they're going to feel invaded," Ms. Hassan said. "So I'm not really surprised. But I am a bit taken aback." Maharaj's relatives said they were stunned by the attack. "We have lived here for three years and we have never had a problem," said his cousin, who lives in South Ozone Park but did not witness the attack.

The incident began about 9:30 P.M. Sunday when Maharaj left the home of an uncle, Prakash Gopee, according to law enforcement officials. With his two cousins, Maharaj walked down 114th Street toward 150th Avenue. On the way, Maharaj made a comment about a plane that appeared to be flying unusually close to the ground, the authorities said. The three suspects were sitting on a stoop several houses down, and one warned Maharaj to keep his voice down because he might wake up the suspect's mother, law enforcement officials said.

Maharaj apologized, but the three suspects got up, ran toward Maharaj and started punching, kicking and beating him with two baseball bats, the authorities said. Maharaj's two cousins ran back to Gopee's house to get help. Law enforcement officials said Maharaj continued to apologize to his attackers until he lost consciousness. After being told of the beating, Gopee ran out of his house with a machete in an attempt to help his nephew. But the suspects wrestled the machete away and proceeded to punch and kick Gopee, the authorities said. A relative said Gopee, 49, suffered bruises on his head.

Trinidad Express October 12 1998

Indian and Indo-Caribbean immigrants close ranks in NY

TWO weeks ago, Rishi Maharaj, a 20-year-old East Indian man, was beaten senseless with baseball bats by three young men in Queens, New York. He was attacked in the South Ozone Park area of Queens, a formerly Irish and Italian enclave which in the last decade, South Ozone Park has become a popular residential area for Guyanese and Trinidadians immigrant families.

Maharaj, the son of Trinidadian immigrants of East Indian descent, is recovering at home in Richmond Hill. With facial fractures and a broken jaw held together by a steel plate, he is still too badly hurt to talk about the attack. The attack comes at a time of simmering discomfort in South Ozone Park.

Once a largely Irish and Italian enclave, the area has become, in the last decade, a popular destination for Guyanese and Trinidadian families moving up from their first immigrant homes in nearby Richmond Hill and Jamaica. Maharaj was walking up 114th Street in South Ozone Park with two of his cousins, when one of three men sitting on a nearby stoop, the police said, proposed to set upon "the Indians". The man, Nuno Martins, apparently thought Maharaj was speaking too loudly.

Then, the police said, Martins, 19, along with Luis Amorim, 22, and Peter DiMarco, 19, kicked, punched and beat Maharaj. The police also said Maharaj apologised repeatedly until he lost consciousness. According to court records, both Martins, who is unemployed, and Amorim, a student at St John's University, live near the corner where the attack occurred. DiMarco, who attends Queensborough Community College, lives in College Point. All three are charged with attempted murder; though prosecutors asked for $500,000 bail, they were released on $20,000 bail each.

Statistically speaking, South Ozone Park appears to be racially integrated. According to 1997 census estimates, nearly half its 17,000 residents were white, a third were black, and the rest, Asians and others. How many Indo-Caribbeans live there is impossible to tell, though, since they alternately refer to themselves as Asian, black or simply "other" on census forms.

Although police figures show few instances of bias crimes, residents and local officials say tensions between Indo-Caribbean newcomers and neighbourhood veterans revolve around more mundane civic matters-most notably, the illegal conversions of   single-family homes into multiple units. While local civic leaders say their concern is with illegal and potentially dangerous dwellings, regardless of the ethnicity of the people inside, Indo-Caribbeans say they feel they have unfairly been made targets of the housing crackdown.

The incident which sparked outrage among the East Indian community in New York has seen East Indians from India rally with their aggrieved compatriots from the Caribbean region. Observers, however, are wondering how long this unity will last, since there are huge rifts between the two groups which have existed for a number of years.

An article in the October 8 edition of the New York Times by Somini Sengupta and Vivian S. Toy titled "United Ethnically, and by an Assault" explored the divisions which exist within this community. The writers noted that "each group has firm, if inaccurately stereotyped, ideas of each other" and the Indo-Caribbeans feel they have been looked down upon as "inauthentic Indians".

First of all, the two groups are in totally separate social and cultural circles. And even though they share the same faiths, they do not worship at the same churches, temples or mosques. The article further stated: "While Indian immigrants tend to be most comfortable in one of the more than a dozen Indian tongues, Indo-Caribbeans generally speak only English."

One Indian-born accountant who was interviewed also ascribed the rifts to differences in language, class and culture. "Though they speak in English," he said. "It's hard to understand their English because of their accents." He added that Indo-Caribbeans are more likely to indulge in alcohol, have blue collar jobs and have broken homes. "Our kids are in Ivy League colleges," he said. "The Caribbeans-their parents are not so concerned to push their kids to be professionals." Indeed, the Indo-Caribbeans may be correct to complain about being shunned by their compatriots from India. They are not even represented in the Federation of Indian Associations, an umbrella group of about 60 Indian organisations.

"There have been strained relations," said Amit Parasnath, host of a weekly Indo-Caribbean programme on the West Indian radio station WLIB-AM. "There has not been much interaction between the Indo-Caribbean community over the years." It seems that Maharaj's beating has caused both groups of Indians to reconsider their relationships. Many Indian New Yorkers belonging to groups, of which the Maharaj family had never heard, have rushed to their aid. For one of the hearings, a group of South Asian organisations held a vigil outside the court house.

If these guys were black who beat up a white guy than they would get life in prison-- whereas these white guys who beat up an Indo-Trinidadian get out on just $20000 bail. Will justice be received if they are put in jail for 5 or even 6 years? I don't think so!

You should read Mathew Stroziers article in India Abroad, it was horrible! They did an interview in the community where this incident took place and the residents kept denying-- and thus the author of the article-- that this could be a racially motivated incident-- THEY WERE JUST DRUNK!! WE CAN'T BELIEVE IT! ETC....

I am not saying that we should interfere or dictate what the family does-- that is there "private" decision but if we believe that this is not just a private incident affecting just those directly involved, than we should make it a public issue that affects the whole community-- not just South Asians-- but all people of color and white!!!

Since South Asians, mainly Punjabis, started migrating to the US as low wage workers over 100 years ago, they have been confronted with racist attitudes and violence from the white mainstream community. In a country divided between "whites and blacks," South Asians and Indo-Caribbeans find themselves defined as "black" and subjected to the same history of white racial oppression that Native peoples, Africans and Latinos have had to deal with for five hundred years - from genocide and slavery, to lynchings and imprisonment. For example, in terms of public education, drop-out rates for recent South Asian and Indo-Caribbean immigrant students follow similar patterns as Africans and Latinos, going beyond 50 percent in some schools. Yet, typically, similar to history books and school curriculum, the multitude forms of systemic racism and racial violence in the US is downplayed and ignored by mainstream American society which views racism as either justified or something of the past.

Now numbering close to two million, South Asian Americans face increasing hatred, discrimination and brutality in the US, yet they remain divided among themselves by differences in language, religion, culture, caste, nationality, class, age, and as immigrants, first generation, second generation, and so on. South Asians, rarely, if ever, venture into Indo-Caribbean communities or attend their temples or cultural events. Similarly, South Asian organizations do not invite Indo-Caribbeans to participate in their events, address Indo-Caribbean issues, or provide outreach to Indo-Caribbean communities. Historically, South Asians have distanced themselves from Indo-Caribbeans, just as Asian Americans have distanced themselves from South Asians. Perhaps, as part of an attempt to "whiten" and distance themselves from being black and having minority status, upwardly mobile South Asians often practice their own racists and casteist attitudes towards recently arriving South Asians, Indo-Caribbeans, Africans and Latinos.

Nonetheless, diverse "Indian" communities from Africa, Bangladesh, the Caribbean, Europe, India, Nepal, the Pacific Islands, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, are finding that, as Americans, often living side by side, in the same buildings and neighborhoods, they encounter similar problems. These various South Asian communities perceive racial attacks on any "Indian" as equivalent to an attack on all "Indian-looking" peoples in the US. Both individuals and groups are no longer tolerating these issues to interfere with their lives in the US, and are organizing themselves for change.

New York City, the mythical melting-pot of white ethnicities, despite having the largest numbers of South Asians living in the US, is increasingly an unsafe space. Led by an openly hostile and belligerent mayor and police commissioner, the city has become a racially-charged, exploitative environment for South Asian taxi-drivers, street-vendors, and students alike. For example, taxi-drivers were recently referred to as "terrorists’ by the police commissioner. Muslims are further targeted as part of the general US’s anti-terrorist hysteria, and increasing numbers are being imprisoned, many without a fail trial. Whether in the city, suburb, or rural areas, racial bias and violence is a daily problem many South Asians are currently forced to live with.

For example, a few weeks ago in late September, Rishi Maharaj, a 20 year old American-born Indo-Trinidadian, was beaten with baseball bats by three white young men in South Ozone Park, Queens. Maharaj, walking with two of his cousins, incurred the wrath one of three men sitting on a nearby proposed to initiate an attack on "the Indians." One of the assailants hurled a string of racist curses while he was beating Rishi, saying, "This is never going to be a neighborhood until you leave." With no recourse, Maharaj apologized repeatedly until beaten unconsciousness. Maharaj is not an exception as everyday incidents of harassment, racial epithets, fist fights, and beatings often culminate into similar brutal and savage attacks, which forces many of us to the hospitals.

Many South Asians are also killed as a result of racist attacks. Only last week, two recent immigrants from Gujrat, India, Kanu Patel and Mukesh Patel, who worked in a Donut shop owned by an Indian American in Camp Springs, MD, a suburb of Washington DC, were brutally killed at 3 AM in a holdup. A third person was critically injured in the shooting, and the killers also set fire to the shop. This may be a case of hate crime as the culprits took some cash, but also left some money in the cash registers untouched. The wives and children of the victims are still in India and were yet to join the victims in US.

South Asian women who are abused by their families in the US face further victimization if the risk calling the racist police system for support or assistance in de-escalating violence. One incident which occurred recently in Richmond Hill, an Indo-Caribbean community in Queens, NY, was that of a wife who was being physically abused by her husband. After the police arrived, there was an escalation of violence, as they proceeded to shoot her husband dead with full impunity. As the recent Amnesty report reveals, NYC police typically ignore proper procedures and act in racist and violent ways.

Even homeowners are not safe from racism. Across America, many minorities are prevented in buying or renting homes in red-lined, white neighborhoods, and are forced into over-crowded, minority ghettos, devoid of employment, shopping and services. As part of this conflict over living space in Queens, NYC, tensions between Indo-Caribbean newcomers and white neighborhood veterans are high. Residents and local officials say that tensions revolve around mundane civic matters like the uncertified conversions of single-family homes into multiple units, usually by the addition of a basement apartment.

As part of community and state racism, working class minority homeowners are criminalized for converting their basements into apartments, and thereby providing extra housing space, often for relatives and friends, in a city desperately short of affordable housing. Poor peoples’ strategies of survival in a city with a very high-cost of living are criminalized, and they face penalities of $2,500 to $15,000 for unapproved conversions. While local civic leaders say their concern is with illegal and potentially dangerous dwellings, regardless of the ethnicity of the people inside, Indo-Caribbeans say they feel they have unfairly been made targets of a housing crackdown. White-dominated community associations are monitoring their homes and often report them to the authorities.

As a response to the attack on Rishi Maharaj, a few members of the Indo-Trinidadian and Indo-Guyanese communities have come together with members of South Asian and Latino groups in three events following the incident, organized around racial violence. First a group of 100 people demonstrated at the court house in Queens, and a few day later another group of 35 met for a town hall meeting in a Richmond Hill public school, then a group of 50 people assembeld in the offices of an Asian and Pacific Islander organization in the South Asian Jackson Heights community. At this later event, the mother and father of Anthony Rasario, a Puerto Rican killed by the NYC police, spoke to the group, emphasizing that only community protest would ensure that justice is served in the Maharaj incident.

At the town hall meeting, organized by members of the Indo-Guyanese legal and real estate community, many commented on the poor turnout in a community with over 100,000 Indo-Caribbeans. Noticeably absent were members of the otherwise visible political parties, cultural groups, religious organizations, and media. One speaker commented on the self-serving attitudes of community leaders and groups, "if they are not sponsers, organizers, or part of a panel in an event, they will not come." Interestingly, relatives of the Maharaj family and Indo-Trinidadian community were also absent. Typically, the panel was without youth, female or lower class representatives, and this also explains the poor turnout. Probing deeper, one popular community leader present at the town hall meeting admitted, "our people are very complacent." However he stressed that "unless we stand up for ourselves, no one will respect us. We need to form umbrella organizations with have nothing to do with the temples and mosques."

This leader underscores the point that as long as a particular minority community continue to exclude others, they themselves will be excluded. As long as one group discriminate and are prejudiced to those who are poorer or "blacker" than themselves and their communities, they continue to reinforce and maintain the system of white racism. It is of no use of Indo-Caribbeans trying to distance themselves from Africans, or for South Asians distancing themselves from Indo-Caribbeans and Africans, because ultimately, these groups are all considered "black" by the dominant whites. Instead of excluding others, all "Indian-looking" peoples should build alliances with each other, and with African, Latino and other minority groups, to prevent racism in all of our communities