Editor,
The conviction of Rutgers University student Dharun Ravi for a “hate crime” against his white roommate, Tyler Clementi, is a misapplication of justice.
Any college student might turn on his webcam on being asked to leave his shared room by his roommate, to bring in a male stranger for sex. This stranger did not even know the “victim’s” last name: Clementi. This stranger has been described as “sketchy, scruffy and homeless looking.”
I would, like Ravi, be scared my belongings would be stolen. I would want my webcam turned on full time while this stranger was there in my absence.
But no, Ravi was convicted of “spying” by the Indian-hating New Jersey community, as represented by their jury conviction. This is a state where hate crimes galore have been committed against the Indian community, starting with the self-proclaimed “Dot-busters” which led to the beating to death of an Indian doctor on the street (for which a mistrial was suspiciously declared) and many more to this day. Instead of the American media warning the New Jersey population, especially the area in which Rutgers is located, to cool it, we have the likes of Time magazine columnist Joe Klein recently mocking the Indian presence in New Jersey.
Amid this, we had a jury in the Clementi case, which has to have known before trial that Clementi had chosen to commit suicide. But the prosecution was cunning and decided not to bring Ravi up on a charge of involuntary manslaughter or anything, so the corresponding argument that Clementi was responsible for his own death could not be made in this trial.
But the Jersey jury was already tainted. They wanted blood. And they found an easy, soft target in Ravi, an Indian immigrant who could be deported.
Now, after the fact, some American media are stereotyping the Indo-American community as a whole as being homophobic. This false accusation is uniquely American, and comes from ignorance combined with an insular resistance to get over one’s bigotry through a college education.
Thus, Indian culture not only has a long history of being accepting of gays, Hindus even have special occasions where groups of cross-dressing homosexuals parade through neighborhoods as part of respected religious ritual.
Even in the case of Ravi, he has called his act a “joke.” He may even be gay himself; after all, what straight male has any interest in watching two men having sex? So where was the intimidation?
What we have here more likely is one demographic group with a well-justified agenda to abolish bullying of young gays in colleges condensing an activist issue down to a vulnerable, brown-skinned immigrant, whom they can easily make their fall guy.
So like any classroom bully, they went after someone who was clearly not a gay-hating Christian fundamentalist because that would have brought upon them the political might of the All-American religious right.
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Twenty-year-olds like Ravi and his roommate use webcams, cell phones and emails for all kinds of purposes that have nothing to do with intimidation, let alone bias. They take pictures of each other all the time and share them on the Internet for their friends to see.
But the parents of the younger generation, like Clementi’s, may not be that hip and up on this commonplace use for humor and gossip.
These reasons are why the Jersey community as a whole has in a sense committed a biased crime against Dharun Ravi, not Ravi against poor Tyler Clementi. It is hate crimes against hapless Indian immigrants in New Jersey that should be prosecuted with more vigor.
Arun Anand Ahuja
UNM student
