New Delhi
“I would be scared to study in the U.S.,” he said on Saturday outside a tea stall on the campus of the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi. “Did you read the newspapers yesterday? Two Indians were shot.”
An allegedly intoxicated Navy veteran was charged with first-degree murder in the shooting of two Indian software engineers in a crowded bar in Olathe, Kan., on Wednesday evening. The assailant reportedly shouted, “Get out of my country!” One man died and the second was injured, as well as a good Samaritan who tried to intervene.
The possible hate crime has prompted anger in India and concern that the Trump-era United States is no longer a safe place for its thriving community of visiting Indian students, scholars and tech workers. The father of Alok Madasani, the Indian injured in the attack, appealed Friday from the Indian city of Hyderabad to “all parents in India” not to send their children to the United States under “present circumstances.”
On a sunny day at one of India’s most prestigious science and technology campuses, the effects of Wednesday’s violence were keenly felt.
Graduate students said they were changing their postgraduate plans from the United States to universities in Canada or Australia. Others were fielding telephone calls from anxious parents.
And parents who brought younger students to a Rubik’s Cube competition said they hoped the situation was temporary, as studying abroad in the United States remains the goal for many of the country’s brightest students.
The number of international students at U.S. universities topped 1 million last year, according to the Institute of International Education, with the number of Indians up 14 percent, to 206,584.
“I used to think of America as a place where there is greater racial equality than exists in India,” said Dhriti Ahluwalia, 26, a master’s student who wants to attend a public policy program in the United States. “Now people are afraid. There is inequality. There is racism.”
Concern over the troubled U.S. political climate, beginning with its rhetoric-charged presidential campaign, has reverberated through India’s thriving industry for test preparation and admissions coaching, which prepares students for study abroad.
“Everybody is asking me whether they should go or not, whether they should look at U.S. schools or not,” said Kavita Singh, who runs the college admissions counseling service FutureWorks Consulting in New Delhi. Many of her students will want to apply to “elite schools on the coasts, in blue states,” she said, but say they don’t want to look at schools “in the middle of the country, the red states, anymore.”
