prasad1
Active member
When racism plays out in subtle ways in everyday life, it doesn’t provoke debate. It is only when it takes a violent turn, as it did in Bengaluru, that we are forced to address it
It is a time of denial. Barely a month has passed with many flatly refusing to accept that Rohith Vemula’s suicide had something to do with caste discrimination. Now, some politicians are claiming that violence against a Tanzanian woman in Bengaluru has nothing to do with race. Karnataka Home Minister G. Parameshwara said the incident stemmed from “road rage”. A few nights back, a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh functionary, Rakesh Sinha, said on a television show that “Indians are not racist at all”.
These statements reflect the serious nature of the problem of racism in India: a stubborn refusal to acknowledge something that is so obvious. Perhaps the fact that violent expressions of racism spring up only once in a while allows us to present the problem with other coordinates, such as law and order and road rage. When racism plays out in subtler, less physically damaging ways in everyday life, it doesn’t provoke debate, as this form of racism is internalised. It is only when it takes a violent turn that we are forced to address it.
Take the Bengaluru assault. Mob behaviour is inexplicable. But in this case, the fact that the mob chose to target Africans specifically, those whose skin colour was the same as the Sudanese man, a good half an hour after the accident, shows that there was some method even in the madness — a vague idea that all “these people” come from the same community or region and must hence bear responsibility for each other’s actions.
Saying that Indians are not racist is akin to saying that caste has disappeared in India. Examples are abundant. We turn a blind eye to advertisements that ask us to transform the colour of our skin. We applaud a film in which the heroine cringes after sleeping with a black man. We laugh heartily when Rajinikanth drinks gallons of saffron milk and lies in a tub of multani mitti in the hope of being worthy enough to woo his pretty fair-skinned love. We hear people at weddings say that the bride is too fair for the groom. We have the world’s most regressive matrimonial advertisements, we are suspicious of black people, and even if we compliment a dark-skinned person, we do it grudgingly: she’s pretty despite being dark. We also go a step ahead, we justify them in one way or the other.
However, the justifications for racism are selective; they’re only reserved for incidents within India. Any such incident outside the country and Indians lose their minds. When Shah Rukh Khan was detained at a U.S. airport, angry fans in Allahabad shouted slogans and burnt the American flag. A series of attacks on Indians in Australia triggered a diplomatic crisis between the two countries. Attacks on Sikhs in the U.S. were met with angry demands that the U.S. take urgent steps to tackle its problem of race.
But racism in India is not about skin colour alone. If it were, Arunachal Pradesh college student Nido Tania would not have died in 2014, people from the Northeast would not be harassed by employers and landlords, nor would they have fled Bengaluru in 2012 following rumours about violent attacks being planned against them. In fact, as many studies point out, racism stems from a complete ignorance about people perceived to be different, and the false stereotypes constructed about the Other.
Racism is not black and white; it shows in the way North Indians call South Indians as “Madrasis”, in the way fair-skinned South Indians sometimes treat dark-skinned South Indians, and so on. But any kind of ethnocentrism, fostered by pride in the self and in prejudices towards others, only divides people, not unites them in their diversity.
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/taking-pride-in-prejudice/article8206294.ece?homepage=true
