INS's Part in the War on Terrorism:
Keshav Jiwnani is Not the Enemy

CAMILLE T TAIARA / SF Bay Guardian 18mare03

A gay Pakistani who helped build S.F.'s psy-trance music scene faces deportation and maybe even death.
His story is a case study in everything that's wrong with post-Sept. 11 America.

KESHAV JIWNANI MADE a long and difficult journey before he finally found a safe haven where he belongs. Now, if the Bush administration gets its way, a quick plane ride could deliver him back to his persecutors and maybe even to his death.

A Pakistani native, Jiwnani is one of thousands facing deportation as a result of an immigration dragnet that President George W. Bush launched through the Immigration and Naturalization Service as part of the government's "war on terrorism."

But even a cursory look at his life shows Jiwnani is no threat to this country. He was actually a victim of Islamic fundamentalism, not a supporter. Today it's hard to conceive of him belonging anywhere more than he does in San Francisco.

In the Mission District neighborhood where he resides, Jiwnani has transformed a rundown storefront into an intimate sanctuary. Sunlight floods the living room from two large skylights 15 feet above. Plants surround a pillow-laden couch, and ivy crawls across the northern wall.

Wooden ladders lead up to self-constructed bedrooms seven feet off the ground, creating cozy corners and workspaces below. On a countertop sit two turntables, remnants of Jiwnani's pre-CD beginnings as a DJ. A poster of the Hindu god Ganesh adorns one of his warm-hued walls.

Like Jiwnani, his home is warm and inviting, bohemian yet contemporary. It speaks to his propensity for creating viable alternatives to the alienation and intolerance suffered by people like him in much of the world.

A slender 34-year-old with expressive, deep brown eyes, Jiwnani is both Hindu and gay. In Pakistan his identity was impossible to hide: his name distinguishes him as a member of the hated religious minority. As he grew up, his demeanor and mannerisms were always more effeminate than those of other boys.

In the fundamentalist Muslim nation of his birth, belonging to either of these minorities can bring a death sentence. As a result, Jiwnani said, he suffered severe and repeated intimidation and both physical and sexual violence until he escaped to the United States 17 years ago. Now the federal government wants to send him back.

The story of Keshav Jiwnani, known as KJ to his many admirers in the local music scene, is a case study in everything that's wrong with the crackdown on Middle Eastern and Central Asian immigrants that followed the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. "It's funny that this is the kind of case that special registration is bringing in," Jiwnani's attorney, Robert Jobe, said. "The idea is to pull in people who may have links to terrorism, but instead they're pulling in a persecuted gay Pakistani man."

Becoming KJ

In many ways Jiwnani represents the San Francisco many of us feared would be lost as a result of the dot-com boom of the late 1990s: a city that has been a mecca of diversity and counterculture, a refuge for the glorious misfits of the world.

As a veteran DJ with unparalleled knowledge of electronic music from around the globe, Jiwnani has gained international acclaim for his sonic manipulations and has been instrumental in introducing psy-trance to the local scene.

"The music KJ brings has a bit more of a spiritual flavor to it – kind of ethereal, but with a strong dance beat," John Wood, of the San Francisco Late Night Coalition, said. "It's different from what you hear in the more commercial settings."

Wood explained that Jiwnani's music is rooted in what was initially called Goa trance, a style popularized at beach parties in Goa, India, in the early 1990s.

"Goa trance was more Indian-influenced, more melodic, with a much fuller sound," he said. "Over the last few years, the music has become a little more techno. In order to differentiate it, people developed the 'psy-trance' label."

An event producer, Wood first met Jiwnani in 1997, when they worked the Halloween party in the Castro District. Jiwnani is a regular at outdoor festivals such as the Pride parade, the Castro Street Fair, Pink Saturday, and the How Weird Street Fair. He also lends his talents to a range of good causes, including the No on Proposition 22 campaign (Prop. 22 was a state ballot initiative in 2000 that would have reinforced prohibitions on same-sex marriages). He's spun beats at virtually every club in San Francisco that features electronic music: the DNA Lounge, 1015 Folsom, Club 550, and a dozen smaller venues like Liquid and the Galaxy Club.

"Electronic music is part of our culture here," said Anna Sitko, co-owner of the record label Eyephunk, who credits Jiwnani with helping her get her business off the ground back in 1999. Friends say Jiwnani has helped many people launch their own careers in the electronic music scene – as DJs, promoters, distributors, and more. "The diversity of the electronic music community in San Francisco is really special. Without somebody like KJ, it would die out. He's devoted to creating environments where people can gather together. I think it's sometimes overlooked how important that really is."

As Jiwnani contributed to the music scene in San Francisco, he found a sense of acceptance and belonging he hadn't known before.

"I found freedom in music," Jiwnani said. "If I can share that with a lot of people, and people feel the same kind of emotions, then there's something about that – not about me, but about the music itself – that's good for their validation, for their faith."

Growing up different

A gentle, spiritual man who believes everything happens for a reason, Jiwnani always tries to find the lesson to be learned from life's hardships. But his childhood reads like a horror story.

His family had lived on and worked the same land in Karachi for seven generations and owned a grain import-export business. By local standards, they enjoyed a good deal of wealth and status, but that would change.

By the time Jiwnani was born, in February 1969, the political turmoil following Pakistan's secession from India had left the family so destitute that his mother sold him to a granduncle for a pound of salt. It was largely a ceremonial exchange: Jiwnani continued to live under his parents' care, and his mother eventually bought him back. But the act attests to their desperation.

The family's adversities were the direct result of faith-based persecution. The government confiscated their land and their business and froze their bank account. Plagued by the kinds of health problems associated with living in crippling poverty in a third-world nation, only three of Jiwnani's six siblings survived the first few years of their lives.

"My father, grandfather, uncle, and granduncle were arrested and jailed during the 1965 and 1972 wars between India and Pakistan because Hindus are widely perceived to be spies for India," Jiwnani wrote in a declaration supporting his petition for asylum, submitted to the INS this past December, which could allow him to remain in the United States.

Whenever tensions rose between Pakistan and India, angry mobs would surround the apartment complex where the Jiwnanis and three other Hindu families lived. Sometimes the mob would appear several times a week. In good times they'd arrive once every two or three months.

"More often than not," Jiwnani wrote, "my family and I could not safely enter the temples because of anti-Hindu mobs or riots. I remember rioters throwing stones at Hindus trying to go to the temple, or setting Hindus' cars on fire. I also know that Hindus have been killed." At school other kids weren't allowed to play with him.

But the young man had another aspect that singled him out for persecution: being gay in a culture that sees homosexuality as unnatural and its expression grounds for imprisonment, up to 100 lashes, or even death by stoning.

By the age of seven, he had been sexually abused by his nanny's son, a boy twice his age. He soon became a target of sexual abuse by other older boys as well. His sister, Dawn Tuvell, noticed a change in Jiwnani. (Tuvell asked that we not use her Hindu name for this story.) As a child, "he was always very mischievous, always running around," she said. But by the time Jiwnani was a preteen, he had become conspicuously introverted. "The changes were subtle, but I figured it was part of his growing up," Tuvell recalled. "There were a bunch of neighborhood kids. Sometimes he'd come back [from playing with them] really upset and angry, but none of us paid attention to it. Mostly we assumed it was because somebody had taunted him for being Hindu. Because that was something I had grown up with.... In retrospect, a lot of this makes sense now. I wish I'd known then what I know now. I would've been able to help him. But he didn't say much about it at that time."

Ashamed and fearing repercussions, Jiwnani tried to keep quiet. But when he was 15, one of the older boys outed him at school. "My teacher told me that Allah was never going to forgive me and that I was going to hell," he wrote in his asylum declaration. "She implied that I should convert to Islam and beg for Allah's forgiveness."

He was expelled from school and soon became prey to an older man, a taxi driver, who raped and blackmailed him repeatedly until his mother caught them one day. She blamed her son for bringing shame to their family. She beat him viciously and threatened never to speak to him again.

Within months Jiwnani was arrested when police caught him with another man in a local park. Tuvell, who worked at the local Holiday Inn at the time, pulled some strings, borrowed a huge sum of money – more than she could repay at the time – and bribed the police to release him.

"[When I went to pick him up,] the policeman told me that if he ever saw Keshav around again, I would never see him again – I would never even find his ashes," said Tuvell, who now lives with her husband and two daughters in Concord.

Escape to San Francisco

Jiwnani's senior by 12 years and a mother figure to him throughout his life, Tuvell turned out to be her brother's savior. In 1985 she married a U.S. Marine stationed in Pakistan, and they moved to southern California. By December 1986 she had arranged for her brother to enter the United States on a student visa. Jiwnani was 17 years old.

"For once in my life, I finally felt free from the oppression that I grew up with in Pakistan," Jiwnani recalled. "I slowly started to come out and to accept myself. When I went to my first gay bar I was like, 'Oh, there are people actually holding hands, and they're dancing. It's all guys in here.' I had never seen anything like that.

"There was also a gay and lesbian community center, where I went to a support group of youth who were also coming out. Just to know there was support like that, and to hear their stories and share my story," Jiwnani, who had already learned English in Pakistan, said. "To know that what I was feeling was not wrong ... it made me feel more connected to the world."

But Jiwnani's visa soon ran out, and an immigration lawyer told Tuvell there was little chance he'd be granted permanent residency without his parents here. He spent the next several years wandering around the country, living on $150 a month from his older brother and sleeping on people's couches or wherever he could find a floor.

He was too scared to work a regular job or to reenroll in college without papers. He found refuge in his music and, in 1997, in San Francisco, where he finally made a stable home in the one place he'd found where he was no longer an outcast.

As it turns out, he might have been able to avoid many of the problems with his immigration status. Because of his sexual orientation and his religion, Jiwnani could have qualified for political asylum and, eventually, a green card. But the INS didn't exactly publicize such options then, and the situation for immigrants has gotten steadily worse since.

Congress passed the draconian Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act in 1996. Among other things, the law requires that immigrants apply for asylum within a year of arrival or, for those already here, within a year of the act's implementation. Now his attorney, Jobe, explains, Jiwnani's best hope for a reprieve is to qualify for "withholding from removal," a status that's considerably harder to obtain but that would essentially place his deportation on hold.

"It doesn't mean he gets to live here indefinitely," Jobe explained. "If the Immigration and Naturalization Service can demonstrate in the future that conditions [in Pakistan] have improved, then they can attempt to remove him at that time." In the meantime Jiwnani would be precluded from traveling outside the country or applying for permanent residency.

Still, before the Sept. 11 attacks, Jiwnani probably would have had a better chance of being allowed to stay in the country. But thanks to the Bush administration's crackdown on immigrants from Jiwnani's region of the world, Jiwnani is now fighting for his life all over again.

Also in December, the same month Jiwnani applied for asylum, the federal government began implementing the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, which requires all "nonimmigrant" men 16 years of age or older from a wide range of mostly Muslim nations to report to the INS to be fingerprinted, photographed, and questioned.

The deadline for Pakistanis to "special register," as the process is commonly termed, was Feb. 21. (It has since been extended to March 21.) Fearing that his failure to comply would threaten his chances for asylum, Jiwnani registered at the San Francisco INS office Feb. 18 and was immediately placed in deportation proceedings.

The INS Asylum Office has since referred his case to the immigration judge presiding over Jiwnani's deportation hearings, set to begin July 3. "It could take anywhere between a few months to several years to get a final decision," Jobe said. "In this case it'll probably be resolved in six to eight months, but you never know with these things."

Facing the music

On a recent Friday night Jiwnani headed to an electronic dance party at a converted warehouse in the Tenderloin. Local trance producers transformed their Psy-Fi 604 compilation CD-release party into a benefit for Jiwnani's legal defense and asked him to spin.

The crowd was multicultural, international. Northern California earthy types commingled with Eurotrash and kids of the hip-hop generation sporting tribal tattoos. The atmosphere attested to the diverse sense of community Jiwnani has helped foster.

Behind the CD turntables, Jiwnani flipped through homemade discs of the latest electronica from England, Austria, France, Sweden, and Israel. He added his own sonic touches as he masterfully transitioned from one track to the next, then danced behind the DJ table or answered questions about the artists he was playing and the labels they're on.

For Jiwnani, it's about re-creating ritual through modern technology – about providing others the opportunity to "dance with their own demons, too." He kept the people moving. "This one's a floor filler," he said over the reverberations from the booming speakers. Sure enough, even more people joined the already crowded dance floor and gave themselves over to the music.

Throughout the night dozens of friends and fans approached Jiwnani with words of support. Their affection for him was sincere and plain to see. That night the organizers of the event raised $2,000 for Jiwnani – still just a drop in the bucket when it comes to legal fees, but helpful nonetheless and priceless as a symbol of solidarity. KJ, the outpouring seemed to say, is one of us.

Indeed, the benefit that night was but one example of the community coming together on Jiwnani's behalf. His case was initially publicized by the Bay Area Reporter. Then more than 200 people and organizations sent letters to Jiwnani's attorneys supporting his bid for asylum, including state assemblymember Mark Leno, San Francisco Board of Supervisors president Tom Ammiano, Sups. Chris Daly and Bevan Dufty, Amnesty International, and the San Francisco Late Night Coalition. More than 300 people signed a petition to the same effect.

Nonetheless, it was up to Jiwnani himself to take the first step and face down those real-world demons who would exile him once again.

As thousands of Pakistanis flee across the U.S. border to Canada, Jiwnani has decided to fight his case – and to place the most intimate details of his life on display – in the hopes of raising awareness.

"I don't want to be ashamed to ask for protection," said Jiwnani, who is a victim of the same Muslim fundamentalism Bush claims to be battling. "It's taken a lot of courage to face all this, but at least I'm not running anymore."

There was a time when even that option did not exist. Growing up in Pakistan, Jiwnani "was verbally, physically, and sexually assaulted on a regular basis, but even deeper was the truth that there was absolutely no haven for him to find some moments of self-soothing or support," his former therapist, Greg Smith, wrote in a letter to the immigration judge presiding over his case. "Facing the pervasive abuse, lack of any resources for help, and the resultant inner feeling of despair, he could only see the solutions of suicide or leaving his native country. He decided to live, and to leave Pakistan.

"To date his sexual orientation and religious beliefs have not changed, and there is no cause that they should. This makes it impossible for him to return to Pakistan, where then his only recourse would be to either have a life of constant trauma, or no life at all."

The struggle with the INS has taken a toll on Jiwnani's health. Indeed, at this point in his ordeal, Jiwnani weighs a mere 98 pounds. "Sometimes I forget to breathe," he said.

Should the INS deport him to Pakistan, he said, "it would be like sending me back to my cage, or to die.... I'd be ostracized. I could be tortured or raped. I'd have to live in constant fear for my life over there.... It's taken me years to come to terms with [my past]. I don't want to go back to those dark dungeons that I came from. I want to choose life over death."

Now Jiwnani can only hope for the best. But even if the INS allows him to stay, the question remains: who's next?

Spire special benefit for Keshav Jiwnani, with KJ, Ritter Gluck, and Dr. Spook in the main room (and others in the lounge), Thurs/20, 9 p.m., DNA Lounge, 375 11th St., S.F. Free before 10 p.m., $5 10-11 p.m., $7 after 11 p.m. (415) 626-1409.

To contribute to Jiwnani's legal defense fund, go to www.sflnc.com/kj or mail a check payable to "San Francisco Late Night Coalition" to 268 Bush St., #2931, San Francisco, CA 94104-3503, and specify "KJ Legal Fund" in the memo section.

E-mail Camille T. Taiara at camille@sfbg.com.

source: http://www.sfbg.com/37/25/cover_keshav.html 24mar03