[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]While harbouring colour and caste biases, we are touchy about how the world treats us

By Ranjona Banerji

Indians, especially those who live abroad, can be very thin-skinned. They are alert to every slight or “disrespect” done to them, what they believe in and what they hold sacred. This does not even count how they react when they are victims of racist speech or attacks.

Surely, racism—whether by acts of discrimination or speech— is unacceptable. The question is: Does racism mean two different things to Indians? Do Indians abroad treat everyone of every colour around them with the same respect they deserve? And, does the behaviour of Indians abroad have any connection with Indians who live in India?

False equivalences, I hear someone say. And maybe that is what I have done. Indians do not deserve racist attacks and any such attacks must be condemned. But how does the storyline go when Indians themselves are racist? Are all Indians who live abroad kind and loving and accepting of all the peoples who live around them, regardless of colour and ethnicity? Are they as kind to others as they expect others to be to them?

And then we have Indians in India. A teenage Indian boy died in Noida, part of Delhi’s National Capital Region, from a drug overdose, this week. His family suspected he was given the drugs by Nigerian drug pushers. As a result, Nigerians were brutally beaten in a mall. Even if you excuse vigilante justice and use the “sentiment” of the family argument so often used by our law-un-abiding politicians, there was no connection between those beaten up and the supposed drug-pusher. But in the Indian view of life, any Nigerian will do, because well, all Nigerians are the same, look the same, do the same things.

This is not the first time we have seen this. It is a recurring theme through riots, whether politically instigated and state sponsored or spontaneous. We find it easy to make spot judgments and are unable to distinguish an individual from a community. So, if one short-haired woman is a sex worker, we easily make the illogical segue to “all women with short hair must be sex workers”.

Therefore all Muslims are terrorists, all Nigerians are drug pushers, all people from the North East are chinky-eyed Chinese and there you have it—racism, rage and irrationality in three easy steps. And yet, when a white American yells at an Indian girl in the US to go home, we are outraged and upset. How dare the white American a) make racist comments against us, and b) mistake us for another group to which we do not belong?

Human history is full of various kinds of discrimination, codified by religion or rulers or society. But many societies have since tried to overcome these forms of discrimination by realising where the past was wrong. But in India, despite discrimination on the basis of caste, race, colour and gender being illegal since the Constitution came into being, we see no end to such prejudices.

While Indians get upset at the prejudices they face in other countries, they perhaps fail to see the deep-seated prejudices they themselves harbor.

Or perhaps we see the irony. It’s just that we don’t care. Maybe we really believe that we are special and they are not.

Hopefully, I’m wrong. Hopefully most Indians are more humane than those in Noida on Monday.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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