Wife mulled returning to India but slain techie Srinivas Kuchibhotla had faith in US

WASHINGTON: The widow of the Indian engineer killed in a Kansas bar by a white extremist said she often wondered about returning to India because of her perception of growing intolerance in the US, but her husband urged her to be positive, saying "good things happen to good people".

"We've read many times in papers of some kind of shooting happening, "Sunayana Dumala, whose husband Srinivas Kuchibhotla was shot to death by a crazed xenophobe, said at a presser at the headquarters of Garmin, where Hyderabad-raised Kuchibhotla worked as an aviation systems engineer. "And we always wondered, how safe are we?"

In a choked voice that left hardly a dry eye among the 200 Garmin workers who gathered to pay tribute to her husband and support his co-worker Alok Reddy Madasani, who survived the shooting, Sunayana described how they came to the US a decade ago, met online, and married in 2012 after a six-year courtship. They moved soon after to Olathe, Kansas, when Kuchibhotla got a job with Garmin, and bought a house. She said they were planning to have kids.

Often, Sunayana said, they had discussed going back to India or moving to another country, but her husband always rejected the idea, confident that everything would be fine.

Echoing the doubts in the minds of many immigrants and guest workers from India, the young window asked, "I have a question in my mind: Do we belong?" as she spoke candidly of weighing whether to continue living in the US.

She wanted to know what the government was going to do to address the issue of hate crime. "I need an answer, I need an answer from the government. I need an answer for everyone out there," she said. "Not just for my husband ... but for everyone, all those people of any race." But as of Saturday, there was little by way of commiseration from the administration, with the ruling dispensation seemingly intent on appealing to its hardline nationalist white base that gathered for the Conservative Political Action Conference.

The White House said any loss of life was tragic, but stopped short of entertaining notions that it was a hate crime, while maintaining it would be it would be absurd to link the shooting to President Donald Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric. But race relations experts and activists pointed out that Trump never seemed to have time to tweet about violence against immigrants.

This even as India's tech brigade in the US remained in mourning. “There's no place for senseless violence & bigotry in our society. My heart is with the victims & families of the horrific shooting in Kansas," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella tweeted.

Indian-American lawmakers too expressed their grief. "This shooting was a brutal, racial attack on two men, and on the fundamental values of our nation," Democratic Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi from Illinois said. "We can't let hatred win. Extremely saddened to hear the news out of Kansas. My sympathies go out to the victims and their families," Indian-American Democratic Senator from California Kamala Harris tweeted.