Let’s talk racism

Patralekha Chatterjee

Protest Against Racism (Photo: AP)

When do altercations become hate crimes? When is a hate crime a racist attack? These are no longer hypothetical queries. Over the past month, there have been at least three horrific attacks, which expose the ugly prejudice lurking beneath the glitzy exterior of globalising India.

First, there was the mob attack on three young men of African origin in Delhi’s busiest metro station because some people alleged that they had misbehaved with a woman in a train, though the woman made no complaint. A YouTube clip shows a frenzied crowd watching the battering as if it was a spectator sport.

Many filmed the attack on their cell phones to the chant of “Bharat Mata Ki Jai”. Policemen do little and the attack ends only after Central Industrial Security Force personnel step in. The widely reported incident created a diplomatic kerfuffle.

Barely had the horror of this episode sunk in, came news of more attacks. This time, the targets were Manipuri students in Bengaluru and Naga youth in Gurgaon’s Sikandarpur area.

In each case, news reports explicitly mention racial invectives flung at the victims. In Bengaluru, the Manipuris were taunted because they did not speak Kannada. In Gurgaon, the Nagas were abused for their appearance and hairstyle.

The attackers chopped off the hair of a young man and said, “We want to send a message to all of you in the Northeast. If you guys from Manipur or Nagaland come here, we will kill you.”

Are these really garden-variety brawls, as some suggest? No, it is time to call a spade a spade and talk about racist attacks. Nothing else explains the stated prejudice against people because they are visibly different and their cultural preferences vary.

The attacks go on and on. Not so long ago, many of us seethed at the brutal killing of Nido Tania, a young man from Arunachal Pradesh. In January this year shopkeepers in Delhi’s bustling Lajpat Nagar market taunted 19-year-old Tania for the blonde streaks in his hair.

After repeated insults, Tania reacted and broke a glass pane. He paid with his life. The shopkeepers beat him so brutally that he died the next day. A Delhi court has just jailed for life five men convicted in the infamous Dhaula Kuan gangrape case. The victim was a young woman from Mizoram.

The vicious intolerance persists. As I write, Binalakshmi Nepram, the feisty Manipuri writer-activist, has received death threats via email. She has been among the most vocal in demanding an anti-racial law.

Prejudice and racism are not new. Writing in the Hindu soon after Tania’s death, Lawrence Liang and Golan Naulak referred to “footnote racism” and “front page racism”. Footnote racism is the everyday variety that manifests itself in snide remarks, smirks, casual references to someone being “chinki” and self-righteous judgments about clothing and sexuality.

“On that count, it would be difficult to find a single north-eastern Indian who has not at some point faced the brunt either of unwelcome banter or culturally curious questions (Is it true you eat snakes?) whose naïveté would be touching were it not so offensive,” they wrote.

Everyday racism, when unchecked, erupts into violent front page racism. “Violence is erupting partly because some do not like our upward mobility and assertion to be what we want to be. In that sense, it is not that different from the attacks on dalits, or women who are seen to be transgressing norms of a feudal, patriarchal society,” a Manipuri researcher told me.

The violence is getting worse as more young people from the Northeast are coming to Delhi, Gurgaon, Bengaluru and other metro cities in search of better education and job opportunities the same as young people from anywhere else.

They may look different, dress different, eat different, but they are as Indian as someone wearing a dhoti or a mundu or a lungi, and does it really matter if some streak their hair? Why should they be at risk simply because they want to tap emerging opportunities, especially since there are very few jobs in their turmoil-ridden home states?

At the core of the prejudice is the jaundiced view of what is mainstream and what marginal. “How much more mainstream do I have to be to be accepted?” 21-year-old national boxing champ Shiva Thapa from Assam had asked in anguish after Tania’s death.

“It is always about how different we are, how differently we dress and the way we style our hair. But we know about Indian history, we have studied about the Cholas, the Guptas, the Mauryas. How much do people here know about Nagaland or other states in the Northeast?” asked Chumbemo Patton, a former Naga student activist living in Delhi.

The Northeast offers huge variety but most Indians are only exposed to the dominant narrative about the region, pivoting around guns, drugs and despair, said Patton.

No doubt, there have been initiatives to bridge the gap. But it remains vast. How many of us know the contribution of the Northeast to the freedom struggle, that Khasi and Garo leaders were fighting the British right from the 19th century? How many of us even know the state in which the Khasis and Garos live?

Union minister of state for home Kiren Rijiju says the Centre will soon implement recommendations of the Bezbaruah committee set up after Tania’s murder to look into the concerns of the people of the Northeast living in other parts of the country.

In its report, the committee says it “would not like to term each incident involving people from the Northeast as racial… Nevertheless, the fact that acts both overt or otherwise of racial nature involving the people from the Northeast are increasing has been forcefully brought before the committee by all people/organisations we interacted with.”

There is little effort to understand why people from the Northeast, like people of African origin, feel victims of racial prejudice in this country. Which brings me to the central issue the idea of what it is to be Indian or nationalistic.

While we pay lip service to diversity, many of us actually hanker after unity through uniformity. Our idea of the nation is based on partial knowledge. This idea of nationalism based on sameness and intolerance of difference needs to be vigorously contested.

While criminals must be prosecuted, the idea itself cannot be combated by policemen. A mindset change requires battling stereotypes and education from the primary level. The first target must be racism of the footnote variety, because that is what leads to the other kind if unchecked.

The writer focuses on development issues in India and emerging economies. She can be reached at patralekha.chatterjee @gmail.com