Daily Times

Brown-on-black racism boggles my mind. The notion that people who are discriminated against for the colour of their skin in western countries should in turn push the same prejudice onto those of a darker pigmentation than themselves is absurd. Whither human compassion? Sadly, this is all too real and endemic in India, the self-described “world’s largest democracy”. Vineet Thakur, a researcher at the University of Johannesburg, and an expert on India-Africa relations, shares “Generalisations are bad, but this one I’m happy to make. Indians are most certainly racist.”

The scariest thing about big media in the West is its ability to shape global narratives. It is the 800-pound gorilla gatekeeping information in the Internet age. Moreover, when harnessed by a major power like the US as an instrument of foreign policy, big media becomes a potent weapon of psychological warfare able to irrevocably demonise countries that do not kowtow to its “national interests.”

India, it would be churlish to deny, is in the ascendant right now, and therefore, being wooed by Washington for greater trade and as a like-minded partner to contain China’s military ambitions in south and east Asia. This is why, barring the odd BBC exposé, big media’s coverage of India’s negatives, including systematic, often violent racism against African nationals, is low-key and fleeting. The treatment meted out to Pakistan, meanwhile, stands in sharp contrast. Despite being a front-line state in the US global war on terror, Pakistan has long been made an unfortunate caricature of by big media — presented as a medieval backwater where all men look like the Taliban and womenfolk are treated like cattle.

Nevertheless, behind the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s “India Shining” mantra is a country hardwired to ugly xenophobia, courtesy of its primitive caste system that rates citizens based on the colour of their skin. The recent rash of mob attacks on African nationals in India is symptomatic of this value system. While big media geared up early June to fête Indian premier Narendra Modi’s latest trip to Washington, complete with the rare privilege of addressing a joint session of Congress, few international news outlets highlighted the ordeal of six African men beaten up without provocation across New Delhi on May 26.

One of the victims, a Nigerian priest named Kenneth Igbinosa, claimed he was manhandled because “I’m an African, that’s why… they were saying, ‘you leave our country, you Africans’.” These attacks were rather tame compared to what had transpired less than a week earlier, when a Congolese man, Masonda Oliver, was clubbed to death following an argument with a local about who had first dibs on an auto-rickshaw. Given that tens of thousands of African nationals — including some 30,000 university students — presently call India home, the depressing frequency of such incidents greatly peeves African diplomats.

Following Oliver’s murder, these diplomats as a group warned New Delhi, “Given the pervading climate of fear and insecurity in India,” they were “left with little option than to consider recommending to their governments not to send new students to India unless their safety can be guaranteed.” This was their second warning of the year. Previously, in February, the African heads of missions had logged a strong protest with the Indian government after incensed locals in Bangalore stripped a young Tanzanian women naked, thrashed her and torched her car in a case of mistaken identity over an earlier hit-and-run.

New Delhi’s stock response to these attacks has arced between apathy and deflection. The city’s deputy police commissioner, Ishwar Singh, insists there is “no element of racism” to such altercations, and “It’s not as if there’s a public movement against African nationals.” At the same time, Mahesh Sharma, India’s tourism minister, bemusedly shrugs, “Even Africa is not safe.” This state of affairs is all the more surprising considering Modi sarkar’s (government) eager attempts to coax African nations into building closer trade and investment ties with India.

Last October, New Delhi hosted a mammoth third iteration of the India-Africa Forum Summit, bringing together an unprecedented 40 African leaders for a five-day powwow to “harness new opportunities unleashed by the parallel and interlinked resurgence of India and Africa,” divulged Nivedita Ray of the Indian Council of World Affairs. Yet the majority of Indians today, even city-dwellers who should know better, view those of African ancestry around them as merely a cut above farm animals. Thakur adds: “Many of these attacks happen because of the assumed lifestyle of Africans — what they eat, how they party, etcetera — which is seen to be ‘uncivilised’’.”

Furthermore, India’s bigoted attitude towards Africans is daft in view of the divergent nature of the slave trade in South Asia as compared to the West. Slave ships to America in the 17th century clearly held “chattel,” men and women destined to be worked and sold as their masters willed it. Not so in India, where African slaves imported by Arabs and Ottomans in the 12th and 13th centuries had every opportunity to move up the social ladder if they showed enough gumption. Indeed, some Siddis or Habshis (Arabic for Abyssinians) went on to become rulers and viziers of Indian states. Bengal had at least four Abyssinian sovereigns in the 15th century, while nawabs of African descent governed the princely states of Janjira and Sachin through the British Raj.

To boot, there are approximately 20,000 to 50,000 Siddis living in South Asia today. In India, they are enclaved in the states of Karnataka and Gujarat, while those in Pakistan populate the Makran coast and Karachi’s Lyari Township. Unlike Karachi, though, where Mombasa Street and Sheedi Village are part of the city’s social palette like any Chinatown abroad, Indian anthropologist Kiran Kamal explains the Siddis in Karnataka “live in dense forest areas, literally cut off from everyone.” Why? Because “there is a strong fear of non-African Indians. Indians also have a very disrespectful attitude towards them, despite using them for all the hard labour,” Kamal adds.

India prides itself on being multicultural and pluralistic, but its maltreatment of African nationals and natives of black ancestry belies these claims. In truth, beneath the veneer of secularism, Indians living in the “world’s largest democracy” are as pathologically racist as they believe Caucasians to be.

The writer is an Islamabad-based freelance journalist