Activist Vanita Gupta says Indian-Americans must rise to challenge

Settling into her new role at the helm of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Vanita Gupta says her move comes at a propitious time in the U.S. “There is real concern,” she said, “that hate has been legitimized and normalized in a real toxic climate.”

Until recently, Gupta, 42, served as the Obama administration’s principal deputy assistant attorney general and head of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. On June 1, she became leader of the conference – the largest civil and human rights coalition in the U.S. – exhorting Indian- and South Asian-Americans to get off the sidelines at a time when the Trump administration is trampling on civil rights progress of the past few decades.

In an exclusive interview with India Abroad—her first in her new avatar—she acknowledged that civil rights progress was under assault.

“The administration has over and over again undone a lot of the progress that has been made—from criminal justice reform to police reform and voting rights to inflaming divisions and religious discrimination to LGBT rights,” she said. “When I was at the Civil Rights Division there had been a lot of concern about the rhetoric in the election—it had been so divisive—and we’ve seen a spike in hate violence as well and that spike has continued on, especially in the first quarter of this year.”

Gupta is the first woman and first Indian-American to head the 67-year-old coalition. Today it represents more than 200 national organizations and boasts an ambitious agenda and a new initiative: Communities Against Hate.

“It’s an important initiative,” she said. “It’s got multiple strategies and one is to actually be able to connect victims of hate violence to legal services and victims’ services,” she said. “Another part is to do training for law enforcement to recognize and identify and appropriately investigate hate crimes,” she said. “Another is to ensure that there is adequate data being collected to document where there is a prevalence of hate.”

Gupta, who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee at its May 2 hearing on hate crimes based on religious background, said it’s not just a matter of ensuring the Justice Department aggressively prosecutes hate violence. “We need prevent it from happening to begin with,” she said. “Federal officials and senior officials need to be using their bully pulpit to roundly condemn the hate violence so that it does not become any part of the new normal in this country.” She said the Trump administration needs to recognize that its policies go deep – most especially those that target Muslims.

“We need to be making sure that our government aren’t helping to fuel and fan the flames through policies that are deeply divisive and frankly, have been found unlawful and unconstitutional by numerous federal courts,” she said.

The Leadership Conference’s taking on this abuse and violation of civil and human rights “is a multi-pronged strategy,” she said, “and a lot of community-based organizations like SAALT [South Asian Americans Leading Together], some of the LGBT organizations that exist around the country that can really help in ensuring that when hate violence occurs, it comes to the attention of law enforcement and civil rights groups so that we can do what we can to ensure that these victims and these communities have justice.”

Prevention is an important priority that starts with the bullying in schools, she said. “It can result in kinds of heinous acts like what took place in Kansas City [where an Indian engineer was shot by a gunman shouting ‘Get out of my country’ earlier this year],” Gupta said.

The government is responsible for ensuring that the culture of hate does not become legitimized, she said.

At the congressional hearing, she said, it was hard for her to hear the bipartisan consensus “but the lack of recognition of the role of policymaking itself plays in creating divisions and potentially emboldening the kind of far-right groups—the fringe groups—that exist…People need to connect those dots.”

She said that Attorney General Jeff Sessions creation of a hate crimes bureau within the Civil Rights Division to monitor hate crimes is his attempt to “have it both ways….On the one hand, the attorney general wants the Civil Rights Division to continue to be aggressive on hate crimes prosecution, and yet, he himself is pursuing an immigration agenda that is emboldening to groups that have a very anti-immigrant agenda as well.”

She said Sessions and Trump need to understand that the policies and priorities that they are putting out in terms of mass deportations, immigrant deportations, and the Muslim ban, actually was further dividing the U.S. She said the Republican Hindu Coalition’s endorsement of Trump’s Muslim ban and draconian immigration postures was disturbing. “I want to make a really important point for South Asian-American communities, which is the fight to ensure that this country is inclusive, fair, and just and that it is a country of the rule of law is not a Republican or Democratic endeavor,” she said. “It should not be politicized.”

Gupta is also head of the Leadership Conference’s sister organization, The Leadership Conference Education Fund. She said it is imperative for Indian-American and South Asian-Americans to support and help fund such groups as The Leadership Conference and the Southern Poverty Law Center so that these organizations have the wherewithal to sustain their efforts at preserving civil rights.

“This country has given a lot to our communities in a lot of different ways and we’ve never said that this country is perfect,” she said. “In fact, the work that I have done and so many others have been doing has always been about trying to create a more perfect America…Our community must rise to the challenge.”