#dnaEdit: Not seeing racism

With African diplomats demanding that India take concrete steps against racism and Afro-phobia, India must move quickly at multiple levels to ensure that the situation does not snowball into a diplomatic row. A joint statement by African Heads of Missions has sought the postponement of the Africa Day celebrations organised by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations. The mission heads also threatened that they would ask their governments to forbid students from travelling to India until their safety can be guaranteed. Such a move would be damaging to India’s international stature. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj has intervened and said that she has sought stringent action, including trial by a fast-track court, against those accused of murdering a 29-year-old Congolese national in Delhi. She stressed the point that it was an attack by “local goons”, even as her ministry emphasised that not all attacks on Africans were racist in nature. Despite the government’s attempt to delink racism and criminal actions, this does not pass muster. Too many incidents have happened in recent times and this is the first time that the African missions have leaned towards stronger measures.

Against the African diplomats’ demand for “appropriate programmes of public awareness that will address the problems of racism and Afro-phobia in India”, Swaraj has tweeted that “we will also launch a sensitisation program to reiterate that such incidents against foreign nationals embarrass the country”. The emphasis is on such incidents embarrassing the country when the need of the hour is to confront racist mentalities. Of course, no country likes to be told or lectured by foreigners about what it must do. Considering that it is their citizens on the receiving end, the African diplomats are justified in demanding that India take steps to address racism.

Moreover, the African diplomats are only echoing what many Indians have been demanding for long. Earlier this year, after a Tanzanian student alleged that she was stripped naked and paraded in Bengaluru, the state home minister claimed this was not a racist attack, but a response to another incident of drunken driving involving a Sudanese national. In crime after crime where the victims are Africans, the official machinery has had difficulty admitting that race was a factor in making them targets of violence. The statement by the African heads of missions also notes that “several attacks and harassment of Africans have gone unnoticed without diligent prosecution and conviction of perpetrators”. 

Only a few incidents have captured media and public attention like last week’s murder, the Bengaluru stripping, and the 2014 attack on three African students on the Delhi metro. As the African diplomats have stated, most racist incidents are going “unnoticed” because the victims are not part of our social mainstream. For some years now, African students associations and even Indians hailing from the North-East have been complaining of wanton acts of racism and racist harassment on the streets. Anything about their appearance like the colour of the skin, the clothes they wear, their language, food habits, or social life, makes them a target. The allegations that the police do not take such complaints seriously merits more attention from the government. In February 2015, the home ministry had proposed to punish any “word, gesture or act intended to insult a member of a particular group or of any race” with a three-year jail sentence. Nothing has been heard since then. Though the government has repeatedly asserted that there would be “zero tolerance” whenever race crimes provoke outrage, the message has not filtered down either to the police or the public. Prejudices surrounding colour, caste and ethnicity are widespread in India and cannot be dispelled unless these are confronted frontally. The government is justified in its focus on controlling the diplomatic fall out of the latest incident, but it can no longer shy away from sensitisation programmes that hold a mirror to our racist mentality.