A Traditional Hindu Spring Parade in Queens Is Canceled as Organizers Feud
At about this time every year, members of the Indo-Caribbean population in New York City come together in Queens, and in a burst of color and gaiety celebrate the arrival of spring. They hold a big parade. They sing and dance. And in a signature rite of the festival, they throw colored powder and liquid dye on one another.
The event, a high point of the community’s calendar, has unfolded in the Richmond Hill neighborhood every year since 1988.
Every year, that is, except this one.
For the first time since the festival was imported to New York by immigrants of Indian descent, the event, known as Phagwah or Holi, was canceled, the victim of infighting among those who have hosted it.
A dramatic schism over control of the group has led to a flurry of litigation that has cast a pall over the feelings of many Indo-Caribbeans.
Viewed charitably, some community members say, the fight is a reflection of the increasing complexity within a growing population, with combustible differences being a natural outgrowth of the community’s social and political evolution.
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Dhanpaul Narine, a member of the parade committee, said of the infighting: “We’ve been so stupid that we’ve denied the community this beautiful event.” Credit Michael Appleton for The New York Times
But others say the rupture is driven by vanity, putting the egos of a few above the happiness of the many: For the organizers, who get to walk at the head of the parade, their relationship with the event can bring social prestige and maybe even a boost to their businesses.
Meanwhile, the parade, a beloved institution, has been sidelined while the fight proceeds.
“It’s so absurd,” said Dhanpaul Narine, an Indo-Guyanese immigrant and member of the parade committee. “We’ve been so stupid that we’ve denied the community this beautiful event.”
Other parade organizations in New York have run into trouble in recent years, including the group that ran the Dominican Day Parade. In an agreement with State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman announced late last month, the longtime parade director agreed to step down after an investigation revealed that the organizations he ran had no functioning boards of directors, failed to maintain proper records and failed to file reports required by law of all nonprofits, among other failings.
Last year, the group that oversees the Puerto Rican Day Parade was overhauled after a state investigation uncovered years of financial mismanagement. But even that group managed to gather itself in time to hold its parade last summer, and the Dominican Day Parade is on track to be held on Aug. 9.
Phagwah (pronounced (PAHG-wah) is a centuries-old Hindu religious tradition that migrated to the Caribbean from India, with workers who toiled as indentured servants on Caribbean sugar-cane plantations. The tradition was then imported to the United States with descendants of those workers.
Mr. Narine, who works as a teacher, said he participated in the neighborhood’s first Phagwah parade in 1988. At the time the Indo-Caribbean population in New York was a small fraction of its current size; only a few dozen people participated in an abbreviated event.
“We didn’t know what we were doing,” he recalled. “We walked around a few blocks and went back. We were all, like, groping in the dark!”
As the Indo-Caribbean population grew, especially driven by immigration from Guyana, so did the parade. Guyanese immigrants now compose the city’s fifth-largest foreign-born group and the second largest in Queens, with the greatest concentration in Richmond Hill and neighboring South Ozone Park, according to the latest data from the Census Bureau. (A significant number of immigrants of South Asian descent from other Caribbean countries, particularly Trinidad and Tobago, have also settled in these neighborhoods.)
Two years ago, on the 25th anniversary of the Phagwah festival in Queens, more than 80,000 people turned out for the event, organizers said.
The problems began with a struggle for control of the Hindu Parades and Festivals Committee, the main organizer of the parade, which was scheduled this year for Sunday, March 8.
In September, Benimadho Misir, a member of one of the contending factions, filed a lawsuit in Queens County Supreme Court seeking to force the group’s board of directors to hold an election for directors and executive officers.
The committee’s leadership was reluctant to hold an election because they feared losing control of the group and, therefore, the festival, said Parshhueram T. Misir, Benimadho Misir’s lawyer.
“I’m not getting into politics,” demurred Vivian M. Williams, the lawyer representing the defendants.
In late February, Justice Denis J. Butler determined that Mr. Misir, the plaintiff, had been unable to provide evidence that he was a member of the group or that he had the authority to act on behalf of its members, and denied the motion.
In the meantime, the two factions also submitted competing applications for a parade permit.
Officers from the local police precinct, the 106th, met with representatives from both factions and tried to help them find common ground, participants said.
Mr. Narine said he also tried to mediate the dispute. “That was the hardest thing to do: get grown men to sit down,” he said.
In early March, with peace still out of reach and time running out, the police declined to issue a permit to either faction.
But the fighting was not over. On March 2, Mr. Williams filed a petition in State Supreme court in Queens demanding that the city issue the permit to his clients and alleging that the Police Department had unjustly failed to issue it.
And even as that litigation wends its way through the court system, Mr. Williams says he is also planning to file a lawsuit in federal court, accusing the city of violating his clients’ First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and religion.
“While the city was willing to issue a permit for the Phagwah parade, it does not have the authority to arbitrate disputes between applicants claiming ownership of an annual parade,” Tisha Magsino, senior counsel for the city’s Law Department, said in a statement.
Detective Kenneth Zorn, an officer in the 106th Precinct who has been involved in the festival since it began, declined to speak about the litigation but called the cancellation of the event “a major loss to the community.”
“I hope it’s just a growing pain,” he said.
Along Liberty Avenue, the main commercial street in Richmond Hill, disillusionment and disgust abound.
“In a small ethnic community like this, you have to run away from these things,” said Kawal P. Totaram, a lawyer in Richmond Hill. He was a founding member of the Hindu parades committee but has in recent years distanced himself from the group, he said.
“When it’s a nationalistic thing, it’s more bloody,” he said.
Kerry Chester, 34, who on a recent afternoon was tending the cash register at Shakti Saree and Spiritual, a sari shop run by her cousin, said the festival was always a big sales day for the neighborhood’s businesses.
In anticipation of the event, her cousin had ordered about 10,000 packs of colored powder and 1,000 bottles of colored liquid. The boxes have been stacked in the cellar. The loss of the festival, she said, was “definitely a big deal for the community.”
In some shops, there is still confusion about the reason for the cancellation. Merchants have been sifting through various rumors, including claims that the park was deemed too wet for a crowd and that the police had denied the application for a permit because residents had complained about trash.
Told that a dispute over control had escalated to the courts, Munish Sahai, 47, a restaurateur and bar owner, shook his head knowingly. “That’s going to be a problem,” he said from behind the counter at Trini Delite Restaurant. “Nobody’s going to give up.”
He, too, had made special preparations for the parade, making a lot of extra curry, roti and other food to handle what he thought would be a spike in demand.
Though Mr. Sahai was left with many pounds of unsold food at the end of the weekend, it did not go completely to waste. He took it to Flushing Meadows-Corona Park and fed it to the sea gulls and the ducks. “So, something came of it,” he said with a shrug.
