Black is certainly not beautiful in India. Chatting in a Mumbai café, a Sudanese student sitting at the next table told my friend that the first ‘Indian’ word he learnt was a pejorative ‘Kallu’. Last year, in Bengaluru, four Tanzanian students were assaulted and the sole woman among them was hit and stripped after a drunk Sudanese student ran over a local woman. Three months later, in Delhi, a Congolese student was bashed to death by three men. Last week, a mob set upon four Nigerian students in Greater Noida after a local boy died of an overdose of drugs allegedly given to him by some Africans. I could go on and on.
In the Bengaluru case, the Tanzanians didn’t even know the Sudanese student; they just happened to be in the locality. In Noida, three of the Nigerian students attacked were out shopping, the fourth was on the road by chance when the group protesting the boy’s death was passing. The fact that they were black was enough to rile the locals. Interviewed after the attack, the Nigerians said they’re routinely abused, overcharged and assaulted. Not because of anything they’ve done, but because of how they look. Bigotry, unlike beauty, is more than skin deep.
It’s not just the Africans who face discrimination. Even Indians from the Northeast, working or studying in other parts of the country, are routinely taunted and harassed for looking ‘different’. The Manipuri sales girls at my favourite accessory store tell me it’s taken their neighbours in Delhi’s Kotla area (where they live) seven years to stop calling them ‘chinki’ (at least to their face). “And these are people we are friendly with,” adds one girl.
If you define racism as ‘prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race,’ all the cases cited above qualify for the title. And yet, any time a hate incident occurs, our authorities are quick to condemn the criminality of the act but equally quick to maintain that there’s no racism involved. After the fatal attack on the Congolese student, which was followed by four other isolated attacks on Africans in the city, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said, “India, being the land of Gandhi and Buddha… can never have a racist mindset.”
So what are you to make of the 2013 Washington Post report, based on a study by two Swedish economists on racist attitudes across the world? The economists asked people globally whether they’d object to a neighbour of another race. In only two of the 81 countries surveyed did over 40 per cent respondents say they would: Jordan and India. You could argue that the question was too vague and misleading; that people in the developed world are too smart to reveal their racial biases, unlike us Indians.
But in our heart, we know the truth. We are a deeply biased society that judges everyone else, by their religion, caste, language—and looks. Moreover, we’re obsessed with skin colour and look down on anyone who’s darker than us. Even in our mythology, we keep the good guys fair-skinned, the demons dark.
Which might explain why we shout racism anytime there’s an attack on an Indian overseas but keep quiet when it happens at home. Playing victim is ok; playing perpetrator is not. Guess it’s too black a crime for even Fair & Lovely to cover up.