The neighbor’s protest

Ten days after Toronto based author Rohinton Mistry cancelled the second half of his US tour to protest against the "unbearable” humiliation meted out to him and his wife at US airports, the US has reportedly promised that no Canadian citizen or passport holder, irrespective of his/her racial origin, will be subjected to such treatment. "As far as Canada is concerned, they (the US) will make changes (in their policy of dealing with tourists and travelers). But we have to monitor it closely,” Canada’s India-born minister for natural resources Herb Dhaliwal was quoted in The Times of India (November 14, 2002).

Mistry, who has won a string of awards including the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Giller Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, was recently awarded the seventh annual Kiriyama Prize for his latest book, Family Matters. The award is given for books that promote greater understanding of and among the nations of the Pacific and South Asian subcontinent, notes the announcement in The Indian Express (October 10, 2002). Each of Mistry’s three novels — Such A Long Journey, A Fine Balance and Family Matters — was shortlisted for Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize, but the award has eluded him, as noted Mid Day (October 23, 2002).

The Mistrys’ US tour had been undertaken to promote Family Matters. Explaining the aborted tour, Canada’s Globe and Mail (G & M) quoted a representative of Mistry’s US publisher Alfred A. Knopf as saying, "As a person of color he was stopped repeatedly and rudely at each airport along the way — to the point where the humiliation for both he and his wife has become unbearable.” Mistry’s complaint underscored "a cross-border rift over racial profiling which began after the US started to fingerprint, photograph and register Canadian citizens originally from certain Muslim countries,” notes The Indian Express (November 4, 2002).

Mistry’s original response to G & M’s query whether the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks has complicated his travels, had been low-key: "I did feel for the first few weeks... that a brown skin and a beard were not a felicitous combination. I could feel the looks from the security personnel. That is okay, it is a part of their job.”

When the author’s opinion changed, leading to cancellation of appearance in Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Salt Lake City and Utah, US booksellers were upset. "It makes me feel ashamed of my country,” Betsy Burton of The Kings English bookstore in Salt Lake City was quoted as saying.

The Express notes that the Canadian Foreign Affairs Ministry had issued a travel advisory in September warning that Canadians born in Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan or Syria could be subjected to increased attention from US authorities. Later, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen were added to the list. The advisory was stated to have annoyed the US administration as such an advisory is "generally issued for states which are unstable or have terrorist links,” noted the Express.

"Mistry is not from a country originally targeted by the US, nor is he a Muslim. And yet he and his wife would appear to have suffered some serious scrutiny while travelling on the first leg of his US tour at the end of September,” the Express has quoted the G & M report.

According to The Times, Dhaliwal said he issued "strong statements condemning the selective screening of anybody from West Asia or with West Asian looks. His government too had lodged a strong protest after Mistry, the celebrated writer touring the US to promote his latest novel Family Matters, cut short his stay after he found the racial profiling ‘humiliating.’”