In the wake of the unspeakable horrors of 9/11, signs emerged in the US of a related casualty: multiculturalism. In recent years, the American melting-pot had turned from pressure-cooker to salad bowl, as more and more visible minorities had preserved their right to be identifiably different while proclaiming their assimilation into the American Dream. Citizens, it was agreed, no longer needed to have colour, creed, costume or custom in common. Americans grew used to sharing their streets with men in flowing beards and turbans and women covered from head to toe: mosques and temples sprouted like organic plants across the land. It was all part of the new multi-ethnic mosaic that America had become.

The most visible collateral damage of 9/11 is that the general public hostility to its perpetrators - all brown-skinned Muslims - has transformed difference into diffidence. The killing of a Sikh in Arizona, because his turban reminded a gun-toting ignoramus of Osama bin Laden's headgear, sent a chilling signal to anyone who could be seen as (or mistaken for) an Arab. Indian women who would never dream of wearing anything but a sari or a salwarkameez, started struggling uncomfortably into western skirts and pantsuits. Manly Sikhs, proud of their unshorn hair and turbans, sheepishly hung their locks in drooping ponytails. Observant Muslims, bearded as the Prophet would have wished, took razors to their fuzzy chins. Arabs shucked their keffiyehs for the hat-less look. "Different is out," said an awkwardly-teeshirted Bangladeshi I know, normally elegant in a spotless kurta. "Mainstream is in". He has tied an American flag to his car's antenna.

Despite calls for tolerance from President Bush on down, the American public appears to have developed a sudden taste for racial profiling. The old sin of "driving while black" has given way to "flying while brown". Ask the Pakistani-American who missed his brother's wedding when he was pulled off a plane because the pilot felt "uncomfortable" having him on board. Or the Muslim passenger who was taken off a flight, intensively grilled and then put back on board, only to find some of his fellow passengers bursting into tears at the prospect of sharing a plane with him. Some of this has dissipated in the two years since 9/11. I meet fewer Americans who tell me in all seriousness that they would never take a flight with an Arab on the passenger list. But the "random checks" performed by security screeners at airports still manage, however "randomly", to finger almost every brown male passenger.

And you don't even have to be Arab, or a flyer. My then 17-year-old son, walking home from school, was cursed at in the street as a "terrorist" and "Arab scum" (additional expletives deleted). There is less of that now, and the newspapers of the Indian diaspora are no longer full of stories of shoppers and diners being asked to "go back" to their own country. It has been more than a year since any reported incidents of mosques and temples being fire-bombed or vandalised, or of store-fronts defaced with anti-Arab or anti-Muslim graffiti. But I can't forget that when I addressed the South Asian Journalists' Association in New York in September 2001, in response to the convenor's question to the largely Indian audience if they had encountered any recent discrimination because of their appearance, practically every hand in the room had shot up.

Some of this is understandable in a nation gripped by a sense of peril from the threat of attacks by people who look Middle Eastern. The newspapers frequently carry alarming warnings issued by the Department of Homeland Security about enhanced state of alert, usually at such a level of generality that people know they're supposed to be afraid but not sure what they are meant to be afraid of. The recent bombings in Iraq have also added to the prevailing anxiety level.

And yet the fact is that two years have gone by without a new incident on American soil even mildly reminiscent of 9/11. People have accepted a level of security - not only at airports, but at office buildings. Government installations and even sports stadiums - that they would never have tolerated in the past. There are still those who gloomily predict that the next incident is only a question of when, not if, but most Americans would agree that the number of precautions being taken must mean that they are safer now than they were two years ago. People are no longer as much on edge as they used to be.

Nevertheless, the paradox persists. Though the fundamental decency and tolerance of most Americans reasserted itself after the initial post-9/11 period, fear and ignorance unavoidably stalk the land and bigotry hasn't been as socially acceptable in decades.

Take for example the southern state of Louisiana, where a politician's diatribe about the need to crack down on "people wearing diapers around their heads" saw his popularity polls shoot up in his home district. And yet an Indian-American is currently running for the governorship of Louisiana and faring a respectable second in the polls so far.

He has converted to Christianity and calls himself Bobby (rather than his given name, Piyush) but he is undeniably brown and his campaign overflows with Indian-American volunteers who are thrilled at the prospect of electing one of their own. Two years ago, in the wake of 9/11, such a prospect might have seemed absurd. Today, it's a reminder that the reports of the demise of multiculturalism in America are somewhat exaggerated.

Shashi Tharoor works in the United Nations and is an author.

© 2003 India Today