#dnaEdit- Tanzanian woman assaulted: India needs an anti-racism law to curb such violence

The shocking assault on a Tanzanian student and her friends in Bengaluru is an incident of racism, whatever be the justification offered by the Karnataka home minister G Parameshwara. The minister has stated that the young woman was not stripped and paraded even as the probe in the case has just begun and was handed over to the Crime Branch. While one is not privy to the information that led the minister to arrive at this conclusion, Parameshwara made certain assertions that are heavily problematic. He claimed that the incident was not a racist attack, but a response to an accident caused by alleged drunken driving, in which a Sudanese national had ran over a couple riding a two-wheeler, leaving one of them dead. For one, the Tanzanian woman and her friends were not involved in the accident but the culprits set their car on fire and allegedly assaulted them. Secondly, Parameshwara is rationalising, and arguably condoning, the acts of a mob which took the law into its hands. If this is not a racist attack, what else could be the rationale for the attackers to single out a group of Africans and subject them to humiliation, physical harm, and alleged molestation?

Admittedly, the violent local response to accident deaths is widely pervasive across India and has become a major law and order issue. While we would like to believe that the rule of law is quite ingrained in the Indian psyche, emotions, communal passions, and distrust of other communities often get the better of mobs. Parameshwara’s response is worrying on another count: the persistent failure of the Indian political class to call a spade a spade, and in this case racism. As the truism goes, a patient acknowledging an illness is the first step to a cure. Unless we accept that racism is deeply entrenched in Indian society, we will not make progress towards eliminating such attitudes. In a society that unabashedly peddles beauty products with names like Fair and Lovely, Fair and Handsome, it is little wonder that the colour of the skin evokes such deep-seated antagonism. 

Merely mouthing platitudes about India being the land of Buddha and Gandhi, or the world’s largest democracy, can no longer paper over the fault-lines that are all too evident for the discerning observer. Two years ago, the Delhi Metro, a shining example of India’s engineering abilities, was witness to three African students being hemmed in, punched, and beaten with rods and chairs at Rajiv Chowk station, the heart of the Delhi metro network. It is not just Africans, people from the North-East, Kashmiris, Dalits, Muslims, Adivasis, and poor migrant labourers hailing from central and eastern parts of India, have also faced such racist or discriminatory attacks. 

The Bengaluru incident has sparked diplomatic tensions, evident from the strong language used by the Tanzanian high commissioner John WH Kijazi. He noted that there are Indians living in Tanzania, but they were not discriminated on the basis of race. With the Indian government failing to curb the recurring racist attacks, it must count itself fortunate that the African embassies have desisted from escalating the issue. It is surprising that the Indian government, with its penchant for legislation, is yet to enact an anti-racism law. In response to casteist attacks and slurs on Dalits and Adivasis, the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act was enacted in 1989, and it has had a definitive impact in creating deterrence. While penal laws are hardly successful in changing mindsets, an anti-racist law has the potential to drill the fear of the law into racist elements. Unless a law is brought in soon, India’s failure to tackle racism will be called out in global forums.