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Town hall meeting amid rumours of biological warfare

Jeet Thayil in New York

It began almost immediately after the devastation of September 11. The next attack would be on September 22, the rumour mills said, getting increasingly more insistent as the days went by.

The New Yorkers were told not to drink tap water or travel by subway. Most people ignored such talk, knowing that if they did not, the terrorists would have succeeded.

A town hall meeting -- WTC Attacks and Beyond -- was held at the New York University on September 22. The hall was more than half-empty.

On the other hand it may have been almost half full. Sreenath Sreenivasan, a professor at the Columbia Journalism School, had his own take on the situation.

"We were supposed to have a biological warfare in the morning," he began. "How many of you heard the rumour that the world was going to end on September 22?" Many hands went up. "Well, thank you for coming," he said.

Of the panel of five speakers, three showed up. Fahima Danishgar of Women for Afghan Women was not present and Zahid Ghani, the United Nations correspondent for NNI, Islamabad, was unable to make it too.

His brother-in-law Waqar Hasan, a New Jersey businessman who had recently located to Dallas, had been shot dead in his new grocery store following the terrorist attacks on America. Hasan's murder had been classified as a hate crime.

The town hall meeting was organised by three groups: The South Asian Journalists Association, of which Sreenivasan was a co-founder; the Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program & Institute at New York University; and the Tides Foundation - India Fund.

Paul Knox of the Tides Foundation and Sreenivasan had originally thought up the meeting with the idea of discussing the tragedy and its aftermath, specifically the backlash against Muslims, Arab-Americans and South Asian-Americans.

Moderator Sreenivasan introduced the first speaker, Satveer Chaudhary, the senior-most elected official of South Asian origin and a state senator of Minnesota.

Elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives in 1996 and to the Minnesota senate in 2000, Chaudhary was the first Indian senator in American history and the youngest senator in Minnesota history.

He said proactive steps had been taken in Minnesota to deal with the threat of terrorism. "The response to terrorist must come from a united America," he said.

"When we attack other Americans for an attack on our country, that is the kind of chaos the terrorists want. They want nothing more than to bring down the foundations that have taken us so long to build."

He said the attack was a call to action for American minorities.

Amrik Singh Chawla, a financial service consultant who had been in the vicinity of the World Trade Centre at he time of the attack and had been chased by three men who called him a terrorist, spoke in the meeting.

He said on September 11 he had heard a loud noise, as one of the twin towers crashed. "It is a sound I wake up to ever since," he said.

Chawla had taken off his turban to escape his would-be attackers.

When asked if he was afraid of going out, Chawla said lately he had been getting more attention than usual. Some of that attention was unwelcome. He said the American ideal of freedom was what everyone should be striving for. He reminded the meeting of those who had lost their lives during the attacks. "This is what they gave their lives for," he said. "Hiding is not going to help."

The panel discussed the latest news about the South Asians who had been taken off international flights because other passengers said they were "uncomfortable" having them around.

"The last thing we want to see is people afraid to be seen with a minority," Chawla said.

Chaudhary said it was important to know who the enemy was. He suggested that divisiveness was a terrorist tactic. "If we succumb, we have lost the war without deploying a single troop," he said.

He said every "patch on the quilt of this country" was important in the fight against terrorism. "That quilt includes Muslim Americans, Hindu Americans, Christian Americans, blacks, whites, native, Asians... all of us should stand together."

The Attack on America: The Complete Coverage

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