Tuesday, May 13, 2008
The post-9/11 sweeps left many immigrant families without friends or money. A Pakistani Muslim and an Indian Hindu worked together to help them.
Jun 22, 2004 | When fathers and sons started disappearing in Brooklyn, N.Y.'s Little Pakistan after Sept. 11, their distraught relatives, not knowing where else to go, appealed to local businessmen. Until then, Mohammed Razvi, a business developer in his early 30s with four children, a trim beard and a Brooklyn accent, hadn't thought much about social work. He wanted to make money, not change lives. But he also couldn't turn away the immigrants, many of them poor, illegal and unable to speak English, who were searching for the men who'd been caught in the FBI's frantic and indiscriminate roundup.
The neighborhood's Business Merchants Association arranged a meeting with the FBI and local politicians, but they were told that if they wanted to find the men who'd been detained, they'd have to fill out Freedom of Information Act requests. Razvi knew the detainees' relatives would never be able to do that alone, so he decided to take time off work to help. He never returned.
While Muslims were vanishing in Brooklyn, Jagajit Singh, a Hindu who'd been a prominent youth organizer in India's Congress Party, was beginning his master's degree in nonprofit management at New York University. He'd arrived in America on Sept. 2, and, as a political person, immediately wanted to get involved in the city's response to Sept. 11, though he had no idea what to do. Then his roommate told him that a fledgling Pakistani civil rights organization needed help setting itself up. Soon, he and Razvi were partners.
Singh was untroubled by the tradition of fierce mutual antipathy between India and Pakistan. "We are all human beings in an alien land," he says.
The outfit Razvi and Singh created, the Council of Pakistan Organization, operates out of a nondescript storefront on a rundown stretch of Coney Island Avenue, in a part of Brooklyn rarely visited by outsiders. Yet COPO is also a kind of symbol of New York's greatness -- its ability, most of the time, to defy and transcend the sectarian manias ravaging much of the world. At a time when Muslim immigrants felt themselves under siege and their neighbors were suffused with a new sense of suspicion and alarm, Singh and Razvi moved quickly to protect their constituents' civil rights while creating ties between Brooklyn's hitherto isolated ethnic enclaves.
Their first priority was to help the neighborhood people who were arrested without charges, and the families struggling after their breadwinners were deported. But Singh and Razvi also built a special only-in-New York bond between the Muslims of Little Pakistan and the Orthodox Jews of nearby Midwood. They've opened up their free legal clinics and English classes to other immigrants, inviting Bangladeshis, Russians and Mexicans. In fact, next month they're changing COPO's name, but not its acronym: It will become the Council of Peoples Organization.
For Singh, a short, mustachioed 43-year-old with gold-rimmed glasses, working with Pakistanis is a kind of tribute to India's spiritual father, Mohandas Gandhi, who was heartbroken by the subcontinent's partition. "Whatever work Gandhi did, he called it 'My experiments with truth,'" says Singh. "All programs which I try to create, I also call them experiments. The first experiment was me and Moe working together." In 2002, he thought India and Pakistan were about to go to war, and he recalls proudly, "At that time, me and Moe were sitting here trying to create COPO, while our armies were facing each other."
His life in New York has elements of Gandhian austerity. In New Delhi, where Singh formerly served as the treasurer of the youth and student wing of the Congress Party, he and his family had servants and a house with a garden; now they live in a nondescript box of an apartment with little adornment, save a small altar covered with yellow cloth and small statues of the Hindu god Ganesh. It's 45 minutes by bus from his office. For the first few months of COPO's existence, he worked as a volunteer. He remembers being thrilled when the group received its first grant in November 2002 -- a check for $400. Razvi worked without pay for COPO's first two years, and has sold his business to relatives so that he can devote himself to the organization full-time.
Through COPO, Razvi says that Little Pakistan, an insular community dominated by day laborers and taxi drivers, is getting a lesson in New York's diversity. In addition to Singh, he's hired Pinky Vincent, a Christian from Calcutta, to handle COPO's public relations, and Marc Fallon, a Jew, as the organization's youth coordinator. Getting to know Singh, Vincent and Fallon, says Razvi, has "opened up the community's horizons, that there are good people everywhere."
First, though, COPO had to struggle to keep the community together. Before Sept. 11, Midwood was home to as many as a quarter of the approximately 120,000 Pakistanis in New York. After the attack, when the Justice Department ordered agents to arrest as many Muslim immigrants as possible in the hope of netting terrorism suspects or informants, FBI agents descended on the neighborhood.
Get Salon in your mailbox!