On October 15, Michael Lamjathang Haokip, a 26-year-old Manipuri youth,
was attacked by a mob and asked to speak in Kannada in Bangalore. He was
reminded during the scuffle that he ‘was not in China, but India’.
The
very next day, in Delhi’s Sikanderpur area, two Naga youths were
mercilessly thrashed with cricket bats and hockey sticks and allegedly
told, “If you guys from Manipur and Nagaland come and stay here, we will
kill you.”
These two incidents come close on the heels of
another racial atrocity in Delhi. Last month, three African men were
nearly lynched to death by a mob in the Rajiv Chowk Metro station after
they objected to being photographed and commented upon by fellow
commuters.
For a country as diversely populated as India — where
a multitude of communities following different cultures inhabit greatly
varied geographies, where the nuance of ‘unity in diversity’ is oft
quoted and rhetorically celebrated — such blatant racial attacks are
bound to evoke a number of questions, with the most basic being ‘why?’.
In
the editorials and op-ed pieces that proliferated after Nido Taniam’s
death in January and the thrashing of the Africans last month,
commentators and journalists expressed their opinions taking a cue
mostly from the existent cultural differences between ‘mainstream
Indians’ and northeastern people, and political opportunism of Delhi.
However,
the recent incidents of unprecedented mob violence and public lynching
leave experts confused about a plausible explanation, feels Pratap Bhanu
Mehta, director of the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.
“Racial
prejudice and ignorance about people from different cultures have
always existed but targeted mob violence against certain racial groups
is a distinctly new phenomenon,” says Mehta.
Mehta adds, “I
honestly do not understand what is happening — there is no social,
economic or political reasons which can be directly put forward as a
cause for such brutal mob violence. Such incidents defy any easy
sociological explanations.”
He, however, says that these
incidents indicate that in urban areas of India there exists a macabre
fascination with violence, and that is quite disturbing.
But,
Anjali Monteiro, professor and dean at School of Media and Cultural
Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, offers a different
perspective.
She says that the brutalities witnessed in
Bangalore and Delhi stem out of the same idea of hierarchy and supremacy
that the country has been bearing in its caste system for so long.
“The
concept of ‘the other’ from which our caste system and religious
fundamentalism against minorities germinates, is the same which stokes
these ghastly acts against certain racial groups,” says Monteiro.
The
‘other’, she says, is like a variant — it can be the Dalits or people
from the northeast or religious minorities — but the ‘intolerance to
differences’ remains the same.
“There is a culture of
normalisation of hierarchy in the Indian society, mainly pushed by the
caste system, and such ideas of hierarchies, albeit in different
contexts, are all inter-connected,” argues Monteiro.
A report by
the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research, Jamia Millia
Islamia, last year stated that the number of youth from the northeast
region in Delhi was around 2 lakh. The same survey also estimated that
more than 4 lakh people migrated from the northeastern states into
various metropolitan cities in India during 2005-10. And, a recent
report by a government-appointed committee reveals that in the past
three years, crimes against people from the northeastern states have
gone up by 270%.
Kaustubh Deka, an assistant professor of
political science at the University of Delhi, puts things in perspective
by explaining how the equations between communities have changed in a
post-liberalised India where internal migrations for better
opportunities have increased phenomenally.
“The increasing out
migration from peripheral areas like the northeast to urban centres and
big metros are bringing a lot of tensions to the fore, both with respect
to employment opportunities as well as cultural insensitivities,” says
Deka.
The employment opportunities which Deka talks about have
come up mostly, as an essay in the Economic and Political Weekly notes,
from “business process outsourcing (BPO) and other private sector
businesses, which put a premium on proficiency of the English language,
suits people of the northeast, most of whom are products of relatively
better, English-medium private high schools”.
Deka further adds,
“Post-liberalisation developments have laid open the possibilities of
real cultural assimilation which was only in theory as a constitutional
arrangement earlier.”
And the recent incidents of mob violence,
Deka notes, show how in an actually diversified society “the real
insecurities and insensitivities of a section of people are coming out
more sharply”.
Other than the undercurrents of violence in urban
India and demographic issues pointed out respectively by Mehta and
Deka, another reason which can be attributed to the horrific mob
violence is the cultural ignorance of the rest of the country about the
northeast.
“I study in an IIM, which is supposed to have the
best of the country’s students, and believe me, most of my colleagues
and friends do not know the names of all the states in the northeast,”
says Shougaijam Dibyalaxmi, a Manipuri student at the Indian Institute
of Management, Kozhikode.
“At a party recently,” she adds, “a friend introduced me as an Assamese!”
“Ignorance
about the northeast and lack of cultural education are, in my opinion,
the root causes of the mob violence the country has witnessed last
week,” she adds.
Sunil Khilnani, in his book The Idea of India,
says that Nehru envisaged India as ‘a space of ceaseless cultural
mixing’. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, at his maiden UN General Assembly
address in New York, referred to the Indian ideal of “vasudhaiva
kutumbakam (the world is one family)”. Such ideals cannot be met easily
until racism and divisive forces continue to rule the roost.