I have a dream….that failed

I live within walking distance from where M.T. Oliva, a 23 year old national of Congo, was beaten to death in Delhi. I live just a kilometre from Chattarpur where subsequently seven African students and nationals faced four consecutive attacks. I have started to feel very guilty about the fact that I do not know any Africans. I have socialized with whites, have had Japanese visitors to my home, but no Africans or black people from any part of the world. Once after a function at Rashtrapati Bhawan, the ambassador of Gambia made an effort to connect and stay in touch but a tight schedule prevented me from responding with equal enthusiasm. 

Most readers of this column possibly do not know any Africans either, so I’m not alone in my lapse. Let’s examine our hearts and minds and accept that we are the most racially confused and therefore the most racist people in the world. We worship the bland fair skin and since fairness is also a marker of social status we are quite neurotic about it. We are not a racially homogenous people and there is no one facial Indian type. But what is uniform across the length and breadth of the land is the anxiety to be a shade fairer than one may be.  This extends to all communities in India and minorities too have hierarchies based on skin tone as I witnessed in my childhood. 

We can have distant black heroes like Nelson Mandela or Barrack Obama but catch us inviting a black person to our home or cultivating them socially. True, racism exists across the world, in Africa itself besides the West. But we are actually a shade worse because the caste system adds the psyche of untouchability to our perceptions. There are notions of being easily “polluted’ by others and it’s pretty much ‘caste’ in stone! I’m told that the Sanskrit word “Varna” apparently translates into colour. 

Let’s just compare ourselves to the US, another racially mixed society. Given the history of black people in the US where they were brought as slaves, I find it remarkable that American popular culture (that’s transmitted across the globe) has thrown up so many people of colour as heroes. True they have also produced Donald Trump, but that does not take away from the several successful black actors, singers, sports heroes and personalities (besides the current president).  

We would never do that with the many gorgeous Dalit and Adivasi women. Instead we have taken dark skinned goddesses and made them fairer down the ages. A professional photographer once told me how almost all wannabe actresses and models ask for their skin tone to be presented as a shade lighter. Our deep-rooted racism cannot be doubted. 

What I find interesting in the recent debate triggered by the attack on Africans is the reluctance of BJP and RSS spokespersons to admit that there is racism in India. Why? It’s easy to admit to our prejudices, express regret and promise more stringent laws and better policing. So what is the mindset that denies the existence of prejudice in the first place? At its core it reflects the right wing’s depiction of the nation as an entity and not a country made up of human beings, all of us flawed. 

Hence they speak along these lines: there is no caste prejudice in India; it is only secularists who call “nationalists” communal; and now, there is no racism because we are a great country with great people so we cannot be racist! 

I must also make a small note about the strange case of Goa BJP being quite brazen about revealing racist attitudes. Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar added to the recent controversy by saying that Goans are “annoyed with the behavior, attitude and way of life of Nigerians”. The inference obviously was to the use and sale of drugs. But does this attitude extend to other nationalities that also use Goa as the base for getting stoned and having rave parties? 

But the current CM is not the only BJP politico to talk loosely about a community. His predecessor Manohar Parrikar, now Union Defence minister, had said pretty much the same during his tenure as CM when he stated that more Nigerians are involved in the drugs trade hence people are turning against them (he too said “it’s not racism”). In 2013, the state’s culture minister Dayanand Mandrekar had described Nigerians as a “cancer” when some of them protested against racism. In 2014, Parrikar had tabled an answer in the Goa assembly that referred to an arrested individual as an “unknown African negro”. When there was an uproar over the word negro Parrikar sought to replace it with “unknown person with dark complexion”.  

But off course, from Delhi to Goa to Bangalore (where a Tanzanian woman was stripped and beaten by a mob) we are not racists. We just have some prejudice against darker skins, something that many of us also possess.