Rampant racism

In a country where political and cultural leaders liberally spout the fair names of Gandhi and Buddha at global and local platforms to foreground India’s tradition of peace and non-violence, the spate of violent racist attacks witnessed in Delhi should disabuse us of every hoary notion we harbour about ourselves and the society we live in. The video footage of three African students being hemmed in, punched, and beaten with rods and chairs at Rajiv Chowk station, heart of Delhi’s modern metro-rail service, peels away all our pretensions.

Equally disconcerting was that several young men whipped out their mobile phones and could be seen gleefully capturing the action on their mobile phones. To compound the sheer brazenness of the attack, it was staged at a Delhi Police stall at the metro station, even as policemen stood watch as mute spectators. The attackers alleged that the students made lewd gestures to a woman, a charge the two Gabonese and one Burkina Faso national have rejected, who claim they were the victims of racist actions and taunts.

Besides our racist inclinations, the incident exposes another widely touted assertion: of being the world’s largest democracy. That the mob chose to mete out instant justice without turning the students over to the police or registering a complaint shows disdain for the rule of law, and how  superficial our democratic instincts are. In January, February, July and September this year, incidents of Manipuri men and women being attacked were reported in the Capital.

In January, Nido Taniam, an Arunachal Pradesh legislator’s son, was beaten to death by a mob after he protested their racist comments on his hair colour. In July, a Manipuri BPO employee was stabbed to death. All these were cases in which race, allegedly, became a factor in men ganging up to attack unarmed victims. If Indian consciousness of colour, ethnicity, religion, caste and sex was restricted to personal choices and did not impinge on the rights of others, it could have been treated as mere prejudices. But, these prejudices have too often, taken on violent avatars like communal riots, caste oppression, rape, honour killings, female foeticide, and racism.

With a long history of caste consciousness hardwired into the Indian psyche, it is only natural that the hitherto dormant racism surfaced when migrants — workers, students, and tourists — entered public spaces. Ironically, the Europeans who ruled India for nearly 200 years were looked upon with awe. While America has boldly faced up to its history of racism in literature, cinema, politics, and social reforms, India chose a deft balancing act. It has attempted to reconcile with historic injustices through enacting laws. But they are weakly enforced to avert a backlash from dominant sections who are left free to practice their casteist, patriarchal and parochial notions.

The Indian promise of “zero tolerance” to racism, made to African embassies who protested the incident, must be seen in this light. Authorities will react based on the scale of the outrage, or on an incident-to-incident basis, or enact a law targeting racism akin to the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act, but will continue to ignore the routinisation of racism/casteism that Africans, North-Easterners, Central Indian Adivasis and Dalits face daily. India celebrated Gandhi’s sanitation crusade this Gandhi Jayanti; for the next we could remember his first fight — against South African racism — and another task he left us unfinished.