The attack on 'Nigerians' in Greater Noida on Tuesday shows up several flaws in our sense of law and justice. That four youngsters were brutally beaten by a mob while hundreds watched shows our security personnel in poor light. But more importantly, such attacks on African students, a recurring pattern in recent years, give the lie to our outrage over hate crimes against Indians in America and Australia in recent weeks. How can we be derisive about Americans' inability to distinguish a Sikh from a Saudi national when we cannot tell a Nigerian from a Tanzanian? Even if we and the Americans weren't so geographically challenged, it wouldn't justify attacking people completely unrelated to the cause of the grievance, in this case the death a teenager due to a drug overdose.
That racism runs deep in Indian society is hardly news. Instances of casual racism against black Africans are legion, but attacks on people from the continent have increased in recent years due to the demonisation of Africans as drug-peddlers. The police and the press tend to report these individuals as 'Nigerians', as a kind of short hand for African nationals. This disregard for detail is just another facet of the ignorance that defines our relation to Africa. We have no notion of being black too and in all our colonial and post-colonial encounters we have taken pains to separate ourselves from dark-skinned peoples, be it in South Africa, Trinidad or USA.
We had a few Nehruvian decades of making common cause with African nations on world fora. Alas, we've come away from those days. We may be ignorant of justice but surely we understand self interest? Therefore we must remind ourselves that India has huge stakes in Africa. Millions of people of Indian extraction live on that continent and we compete with China for the graces of those regimes so that we might be given a foothold in those markets and some access to their resources. It's time we gave ourselves a crash course in geography and justice.