This June while checking my e-mail from a South Asian discussion list I was stunned to read messages from Indians in the US littered with a word from the past —"Paki".
Paki-bashing is back and it is NRIs (non-resident Indians) and Americans of Indian origin who have reclaimed that racist slur to denigrate Pakistanis. This summer's conflict in Kargil unleashed a torrent of rage, reaching a feverish peak after the story of the mutilated Indian soldiers broke.
Even the media picked up this disturbing phenomenon. India Today columnist Dilip Bobb cavalierly mentions how Paki-bashing is a safe electoral bet for the 'ruling party". Rediff on the Net, a web magazine, casually carries a headline on an Indo-Pak tea summit, punning on the Hindi-Chini bhai bhai to come up with Hindi-Paki chai, while a few of its columnists actually use it as an insult. The New York Post joined in with a too-prescient headline —"India: Pakis Killed POWs" (although it caught the faux pas in time for its daily edition, its electronic version carried the slur).
Once the domain of epithetshouting skinheads in England, the indiscriminate use of "Paki" by the very people who were once thus targeted is highly incongruous.