essay on racism in india

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Unfolding the Reality of Racism in India

This article is written by Joshita Mohanty. In this article, the author has explained the reality of racism in India.

Table of Contents

Introduction to Racism

Race can be defined as the attributes, traits and features which differentiates one group from the other existing social groups. In simple words, races are the physical qualities that one inherits biologically and serves as a way of self-identification from the other groups. Racism is a theory that one race is superior that the other based on the physical attributes, caste, creed, ethnicity or origin.

A person is being racist when he displays the emotions of hatred, prejudice, biasness and intolerance against another person solely due to his skin color, structure of his lips, language, place of origin or any other attribute which he might have gained biologically. We live in a country where racism is deeply rooted, especially in the North-east parts. The north-eastern people are subjected to daily humiliation and passing of comments such as by calling them “Chinese”. With the ongoing spread of the COVID-19, there has been an increase in the hate crime against the Northeast Asian people due to their facial features. The constant insult, “Chinki” has been invariably used by the Indians to identify any East Asian person which clearly depicts racism. 

We live in a society where the people are highly obsessed with one’s skin tone. Indians have varied degrees of skin complexion and they are categorized as fair, dusky, dark etc. Indians believe that fair-skinned people are of a much more worth and value than those who are dark skinned. The fair is considered the intellectual and gets the respect, dignity and the social status while the dark are left behind struggling for their rights and status. We face color hatred and prejudice and somehow still choose to remain silent about it.

The people need to understand that a person’s worth or status is not determined by his or her color. There are numerous cosmetic brands promoting skin lightening creams and lotions. There are advertisements promoting the desperate need of looking fair. The question is why? No one has the right to question or judge one’s complexion. Racial discrimination brings down the morale and the enthusiasm of the dark, they do not get a chance to stand up and speak up or fight for themselves. The mindset of the Indian society should realize the fact that no matter what the skin tone is, what caste or origin a person belongs to, irrespective of all the other physical traits, a person is entitled to equality before the law and has every right to deserve the same respect and honor a fair person gets. 

Ancient India and Racism

India is known as one of the most mega diverse nations in the world. It is indeed a diverse country and a home for people belonging to different caste, religion, color, creed, culture and traditions. Indians are known for their varied degrees of skin complexion termed as fair skinned and dark skinned. The skin color has always remained an important factor in determining a person’s value and worth. Fair skin people are considered to be of a superior status than to the people with a dark sin. Racism has been prevailing in India since the Rig Veda Period, followed by the Mughal era and the British rule. 

Rig Veda Period 

The Indian caste system has always remained very complex in the terms of its stratification. The caste system is divided into 4 parts, Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and the Shudras. The earliest form of racism was seen in the Rig Veda period itself. The brahmins were considered as the most upper-class people, followed by the kshatriyas and the Vaishyas. Shudras were the lowest of all. They were called untouchables due to their dark skin color and background. No one was permitted to eat or sleep with them, as the Brahmins coined them as impure. They were subjected to exploitation mainly because of their dark complexion and were generally referred as the Black Tribe. Two other significant groups existed, the Aryans and the Dasyus (Non-Aryans). The Aryans belonged to the noble society as they were fair in color. They treated the Dasyus as their enemies and were highly condemned. They were known as the black population. But it should be noted that, the Ancient Mythology did not show any such signs of racial discrimination.

The dark-skinned heroes and warriors were highly praised because of their power and courage. Lord Krishna is an epitome of Lord Vishnu who is himself dark in color. Draupadi, who was the leading female character in the Mahabharat is described as a young, dark and a beautiful woman. This showed that people appreciated the beauty and the charm irrespective of the skin color. Goddess Kali and Parvati are also described as dark, but exceedingly beautiful. Thus, this shows that the caste discrimination definitely led to the color discrimination in the Vedic period. But nonetheless the Ancient Mythology depicted every human with the same dignity and appreciation irrespective of their skin color.

The Mughal Era 

India served as a home to the Mughal invaders as well. These led to the start of the Mughal empire in 1526. There is no definite depiction of hatred and prejudice by the Mughal emperors on the basis of skin color, caste or background. However, the Muslims and the Arab did have a much fairer complexion than the Indians. But the differences in the skin tone did not pose as a harm or threat to the local population. 

The British Raj 

India was ruled by the British from 1858-1947. This was the period when the racial discrimination took its worst form. The British were extremely fair skinned, hence they considered themselves as the most superior and influential. The Indians being of a dark color were highly condemned and were subject to utmost exploitation and harassment by the British rulers. In 1935, the British introduced 400 Indian groups which were known as the untouchable and the impure due to their tone of the skin color. The comparatively light skinned Indians earned a position in the Army but the dark skinned were either denied access to employment or were given odd, degrading jobs. Freedom fighters like Mahatma Gandhi, BR Ambedkar, Jyotiba Phule etc. fought deeply for the eradication of untouchability. The untouchables formed a group and referred themselves as the Dalits.

The Dalits and Shudras were denied access to drinking water, entering temples, educational institutions, employment etc. They were considered so impure and contaminated that if a person touched them, they should wash themselves with the holy water. The Hindu Swaraj movement led by Gandhiji did not only focus from freeing India from the clutches of British, but also to free the untouchables and the Shudras from the exploitation and oppression. Gandhiji named the Dalits as Harijans, which meant that they are the people of God. He opened an ashram for them, where he co-lived with the Harijans. Jyotiba Phule led the Anti-Caste Dalit Movement in the 19 th century which emphasized on giving the same level of respect, dignity and honor to the Dalits. Thus, the white skin rulers had moulded the Indian society on the basis of skin complexion and caste. The white people became the ruling class and the dark people were the victims to racial discrimination and oppression.

Racisim in the Form of Colorism

Our country has a history of being ruled by the whites, i.e. the Portuguese, the Dutch and French traders, the Mughals, the British. They were relatively fairer than the rest of the Indian population. This succession by the white people left behind the desperate desire of looking fair. Indians felt that only the light skin people can attain power, dignity and respect as they were the master race. The racial prejudice in our country has taken the form of colorism. The basic definition of colorism means that differentiating or classification of a person from another on the basis of the skin tone or complexion. Discrimination against the members of the same race due to their dark skin complexion is called colorism. The black people are generally considered of a lower status and they are included in the lowest strata of the society while the fair is considered the noble and intellectual. In our Indian society, the complexion of a person is given a lot of importance, fair people are believed to have positive impacts and the dark has negative impacts. This is how the stereotypical mindsets of the Indians work. The black is now hated upon, it is highly condemned by the people worldwide. 

Racism and colorism are very closely related to each other. People with a lighter skin tone were considered as a rich of an upper-caste while people with a dusky skin tone is considered as a poor of a lower caste. Due to the color discrimination, the black people face problems all over the world. It brings down their morale, enthusiasm, self-efficiency to a great extent. They fear the world outside, the voices of the black people go unheard. They do not receive the right amount of appreciation, instead they face constant hatred and are subjected to brutality. The black people face harassment be it in either a physical or virtual form on any online platform. They are bullied not only on the basis of their color, but also on the basis of the structure of their lips or any facial attribute. The black color is the least preferred color in the entire human race. They are denied access to educational institutions, workplace or employment services, social services etc. There is no system which would act as a protection shield against the brutal and the inhumane bullying. The crime rate against the black has evidently increased, but people choose to be silent about it. If the same crime had been done to a white, then the public and the law would have done their best to win justice.

Factors Promoting Colorism

The social media and the advertising agency contribute to a great extent in favoring the notion of colorism. It is well known that the people would prefer a lighter skin tone than a deeper one and they would try their level best to reduce the tone of their skin color using any artificial means. People tend to follow the social media, their role models and hence in a despair to look fair. There are numerous cosmetic brands and skin lightening industries which came up as a solution to their consumer’s needs. In 1975, the “Fair and Lovely” cream was launched by Hindustan Unilever. This brand added a lot to the theory of colorism. It had become an indispensable requirement in the life of the young girls. In the advertisement, it was depicted that the father of the girl was disappointed due to her dark skin color and he wished upon if he had a son. Then, the mother gives the famous cream to the girl which would lighten up her skin tone. Thus, eventually the girl underwent the transition from dark to fair. This finally made her father proud and she was successful in life. It gained immense response as it was a skin lightening cream. Similarly, in 2005, the “Fair and Handsome” cream was launched by Emami, whose brand ambassador was Shahrukh Khan. 

This clearly shows how an advertising agency can brainwash the minds of the people. It denoted that the deep complexion was not acceptable by the society anymore and how the dark people prove to be a disappointment. Only the fair people could achieve success and lead a happy life. Such fairness cream commercials promote the concept that how fairness is the only means of achieving success, dignity, honor and respect. Such products created an obstacle in the society by differentiating people on their skin tone. There was no actual appreciation of the natural beauty and color anymore. It lead to the formation of biasness on the preference on the skin tone and color. In 2014, the Advertising Standard Council of India, laid down guidelines that there should be no advertisements which demonstrates negative conventions on skin color or depict deeper skin tone people unsuccessful in life. Thus, colorism really brings down the level of self-esteem and confidence in life of the people which in turn creates a confined status. 

Ethnicity and Racism: Differences

India is the country which portrays a unique combination of people having various cultures, religions, tribes and traditions. The variety in the language, culture, originality, religion brings in the existence of ethnicity. The basic definition of ethnicity refers to the cultural and the sociological factors such as the language, religion, tradition and the place of origin. It basically means the background of the place of the origin and its specific cultures and traditions which are taken up by the people. It is not something that a person attains biologically or genetically. Facial and other genetic attributes do not come under the category of ethnicity. If a person is questioned as to reveal his identity, it may push him to categorize his identification on the basis of the place he was born and brought up, the language and the culture taken up by him. Ethnicity is a group where the people share common traditions, culture and language. The three main ethnic groups of India are as follows:

• Indo-Aryans which mainly comprises of Assamese, Bengali, Gujrati, Hindi, Kashmiri, Konkan, Marathi, Nepali, Sindhi, Urdu and Punjabi. 
• Dravidians which mainly comprises of Kannada, Tamil, Tulu, Telegu and Malayali. 
• Sino Tibetan which comprises of Bodo and Manipuri.
• Austroasiatic which comprises of Santhali.

Very often, race and ethnicity are confused with each other and are considered the same. But in reality, there exists distinctive features between the both. Race is broadly defined as the facial features like the skin color, shape of the lips, eyes or nose or any other feature which is inherited genetically or biologically. On the other hand, ethnicity has a sociological aspect, it distinguishes a group from the other based on their linguistic, culture and the traditional aspects. A person can either accept or deny to conform to its own ethnic group. But a person cannot deny its own race because it is something that he owns biologically. Both, race and ethnicity are used to categorize people and distinguish them from the others. These two draw a fine line between supremacy and inferiority, acting as a barrier to equality that should be given to the people of all races and ethnic groups. 

The Growing Crime and Abuse due to Racial Discrimination

Abuse and violence against the schedule caste and scheduled tribes.

The Indian caste system is divided into 4 parts, i.e. Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and the Shudras. Shudras are the present day’s backward classes. It includes the schedules caste and the scheduled tribes. Dalits which were formerly known as “untouchables” are literally considered the outcastes. The upper-class Hindu consider the Dalits impure and contaminated; they are excluded from the caste system. In India, the Dalits are the most exposed to the inhumane and abusive treatment. Dalits are denied access to the basic privileges like drinking water, entering temples, education from institutions or eating in the presence of upper-class Hindus.

India’s National Crime Records Bureau released a report stating that on an average everyday 2 Dalit are murdered; 3 Dalit women are raped and 2 Dalit are assaulted. As per NCRB, the crimes against Dalit rose by 25% from 16.3 crimes per 10,000 Dalits in 2006 to 20.3 crimes in 2016. 422,799 crimes were reported against the Dalits between 2006-2016. Most of the crimes are committed in Delhi, Mumbai, Sikkim, Goa, Bihar and Jharkhand. The number of pending police investigation rose from 8380 cases in 2006 to 16,654 in 2016. The number of pending trials rose by 50% from 85,264 to 129,831 between 2006-2016. Thus, this shows that the justice has never been in the favor of the Dalits. This is because the mostly, the village panchayats, the government officials, the police officers etc. are in the favor of the upper caste Hindus and they are paid an amount of money to shut the investigation of the case.

The Dalits live in a world of oppression, fear and are always dominated upon. They are beaten to death for standing up and speaking up for themselves, they face large scale abuse for fighting for their very own privileges. The upper caste Hindus condemn the Dalits and look upon them as untouchables who deserve nothing but are a shame to the humanity. Inhumanity and abuse against the Dalits and the SCs STs go unnoticeable because the public and law do not consider them important enough. The government chooses to remain silent rather, giving the other castes an upper hand over them.

On February 17 th , 2020, Akash Kumar Koitiya, who is a Dalit was attacked in the Banaskantha District in Gujarat by the men of Thakor koli as he was riding a mare during his own wedding procession. The men pelted stones at him for riding a mare as it was considered as a privilege meant for the upper Hindu class only. 

In the year 2018, month of May, four wedding processions of Dalit was similarly attacked by the people belonging to the Thakor community and other upper classes. Even after the police investigation, no arrests were made. 

In Uttarakhand, a Dalit man named Jitendra was brutally attacked by the men of the upper class and 9 days later, due to the severe injuries he died. The reason of the attack was that he ate food in a wedding in the presence of the upper- class villagers. The local residents claimed that since the food was prepared by the upper-class people, the Dalits were not allowed to touch or eat it. Such cases of killings for ordinary and common reasons posed as a threat to the Dalits, fearing the outcome, they never rose their problems to the higher authorities. 

The Dalit women are subjected to rape, brutal harassment, violence and torture by the men of the upper class. They are generally forced into prostitution and girl child trafficking. In UP, a 24-year-old Dalit woman, named Savitri, who was 9 months pregnant was beaten to death by the Anju Devi and her son, Rohit who belonged to the Thakur community. They said that the victim had contaminated the garbage bin by touching it as it belonged to the upper Thakur community. She was so ruthlessly beaten that she suffered a miscarriage and was declared dead.

The above instances show how the Dalits are being treated in the different parts of the country. They face nothing but pure humiliation and ruthless violence. Article 17 of the Indian Constitution says that untouchability has been abolished and one who practices it shall be punished under the law. The Untouchability Offences Act, 1955 also prohibits the practice of discrimination against the untouchables like entering temples or drinking water from the well. Although, there are laws implemented but the problem lies in its enforcement. The laws should be enforced with much stricter implementation. The Dalits are mere puppets who do not have the proper means, i.e. money and power to fight against the discrimination. Class conflict has elevated way too high and people should know that Dalit lives matter too. 

Racist Abuse and Aggression against the People of North-East India 

Racial discrimination against the north-east Indians is deeply rooted in our Indian Society. Indians have a very basic and stereotypical notion about the north-east parts of India. The north-eastern people are most of the time addressed as “Chinki” due to the structure of their eyes which is very common among all the people of Northeast and that particular feature differentiates them from the rest of the Indians. They are often questioned if they eat dogs, snakes or frogs because the Chinese eat it as a part of their food diet. Whenever we come across a girl who has a fair skin tone, with absolutely straight hair and Mongolian facial features, the first thought that comes in our mind would be “Oh! Look a Chinese girl”. People often call out the north east Indians as Chinese, Korean, Japanese etc. To a lay man’s eyes, they all look the same but that does not give them the right to go ahead and discriminate them. The north east region people feel indifferent and isolated. People do not call a Sikh, a Pakistani nor do they call a Bengali, a Bangladeshi but why is it so easy for them to call an Assamese, a Chinese. This is pure irony. Indians are so conscious and mainstream about the looks that if a person does not fit into the stereotype custom appearance, he/she should be hated upon. Racial slurs have become extremely common in north east states. 

The most tragic case of north east India was the murder of a 20-year-old boy, Nido Tania who was from Arunachal Pradesh. In the year 2014, January 30 th Nido Tania died due to the severe lung injures he had been inflicted upon as a result of ruthless and brutal beating by the shopkeepers in the market of New Delhi. Nido got into an argument with the shopkeepers as they passed racial slurs and comments on his long, dyed hair, facial features like eyes ad his dressing sense. The locals even claimed that the shopkeepers kept calling him out as Chinki or Chinese. The sad killing of Nido was a heinous crime which was an outcome of pure racial prejudice. The police had charged the accused under section 302 of the IPC, however the CBI dropped the murder charges and framed charges under the SC/ST Atrocities Act, 1989. Later, the court dropped the charges of SC/ST act saying that there was no establishment of the motive of “racial slur”. This incident moved the north east Indians in a very aggressive and agitated way. They demanded equal recognition and appreciation for the north east states. 

With the ongoing spread of the Coronavirus, the racial prejudice against the north east Indians are also increasing day by day. The north east people staying in different parts of India have reported cases of abuse, bullying and intolerance due to their mere facial resemblance to those of Chinese. The people accuse them of carrying the virus based on their mongoloid features. There are cases where the staff of the grocery store asked them to show their identity to reveal that they were Indian and not foreigners. 

Ever since the pandemic started, the virus is being used as an insult to the north east Indians. On 22 nd March 2020, a humiliating report of a racial slur was made by the victim, Rameshwori who stays in Delhi. She was spat upon by a man who was probably chewing tobacco and she claimed that the man shouted “Coronavirus”. This happened because that man could clearly see that the victim looked different than the others with the mongoloid features and could probably be a carrier of coronavirus. This attack had created an environment of fear for the north east, they feared of the harm that be possibly done to them by the people of their own nation. Times like this call for unity and cooperation but instead there is a spread of violence and hatred against the migrants of north east.

Recently, a group of Manipuri students were harassed and forced to leave the house by their landlords in Kolkata. They were mocked as Chinese and corona. People need to understand that these students live away from their home and such kind of harsh treatment will leave them vulnerable. Small children are taught to cover their mouth while passing by any north east migrants. The north east migrants are being forces to leave their place of stay and move out of the country itself. They are being tagged and labelled as Coronavirus. 

Alana Golmei who is the founder of the North east helpline and security, recently wrote to the ministry of home affairs regarding the concern of the growing racial discrimination since the rise of the pandemic. She was herself called as “corona” at the NCERT office in Delhi, so she had a clear idea of how the rest of the migrants are treated. They are exposed to all kinds of hatred by every social group around them. The hatred is not only physically, but also on online platforms like twitter, Instagram etc. where people are asking them to leave the country. Such comments leave behind a very traumatic effect in the mind of the people. They are emotionally disturbed and are vulnerable in facing the outside world, mainly women. The people should that the facial features are similar to those of Chinese, just because of their ethnic group, i.e. Tibetan Mongoloid origin and that does not serve as a basis of racial discrimination and prejudice. 

Laws Implemented For Racial Discrimination

Constitutional provisions identified under the constitution of india.

• ARTICLE 14 says that no person should be deprived of equality within the territory of India.
• ARTICLE 15(1) says that there should be no discrimination on the grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth and ARTICLE 15(3) guarantees to make special provisions for children and women. 
• ARTICLE 16 ensures the citizens equal opportunities of employment to both the men and women. 
• ARTICLE 17 abolishes the practice of “untouchability” and any person who practices untouchability shall be punishable under the law. 
• ARTICLE 21 protects the citizens from deprivation of life and personal liberty. 
• ARTICLE 46 ensures the protection of the weaker sections of the people the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes and promotes provisions with special care to meet their economic and educational interests. 
• ARTICLE 51(A)(e) signifies the duty of every citizen to the feeling of harmony and brotherhood among all the citizens of India and abandon the practices which are derogatory to the dignity of women.
• ARTICLE 243D(3) says that one-third (including the number of seats reserved for the women of Scheduled caste and Scheduled tribe) of the total number of seats has to be reserved for women in Panchayat. 
• ARTICLE 243T(3) says that one-third (including the number of seats reserved for the women of scheduled caste and scheduled tribe) of the total number of seats in every municipality has to be reserved for women. 
• ARTICLE 243T(4) provides for the reservation of offices of chairpersons in the municipalities for the scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and women as per the manner provided in the state. 

Other Legislations and Acts

Anti discrimination and equality bill, 2016.

In the month of March, the Congress Member of Parliament had introduced the bill in the Lok Sabha. The bill signifies that there be no discrimination against the people belonging to the weaker and the poorer sections of the society on the grounds of caste, creed, religion, sex, color, place of originality etc. The bill guarantees protection to the weaker sections like the scheduled caste and the scheduled tribes, who are always exposed to irrational abuse and violence for mundane reasons. It provides measures for redressal and provisions for compensation and exemplary awards. 

The Caste Disabilities Removal Act, 1850

This particular law was passes in the British India under the rule of East India Company in 1850. This law gave people the freedom to convert from one religion to another with all the equal rights. The conversion of the religion would not take away their rights, especially inheritance. This law gave a clear view that a person will not be denied his right of inheritance to the parental property, even after he under goes a conversion of religion. For example, a child of Hindu will still be considered a Hindu even after the conversion in terms of inheriting property. 

The Prevention Of Atrocities Act (Scheduled Caste And Scheduled Tribes), 1989

This law was passed on September 9 th , 1989. This law protects the SCs and the STs from the discrimination and exploitation. It provides protection to the weaker sections from atrocities, abuse, brutality and ruthless violence. It lists around 22 offences which would come under the category of discrimination like denial of access to drinking water, safe hygienic conditions, edible food, access to hospitals, education, entry into temples etc. Section 14 of SC/ST Act provides for the speedy trial courts so that the members of the OBC and other tribal communities get speedy justice and do not remain defenseless. There is no provision for an anticipatory bail for offence committed under the act as per the new Section 18(a). 

Black Lives Matter Movement

Black lives matter is a platform which was established in the year, 2013 after the horrific and tragic killing of Trayvon Martin on 26 th February, 2012. It is a platform founded to reveal how the black are always suppressed by the whites. Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African American teen was killed by George Zimmerman, as a result of fatal shooting, in Sandford, Florida. Instead of being held accused for second degree murder charges, after a lot of deliberation, Zimmerman got acquitted and walked out freely. He claimed that he shot Martin as self defense and the jury found no probable evidence. This shows the racial prejudice against the black community. There was no justice given to the murder of Martin. Zimmerman got his freedom out of a murder and this revealed how the self-defense law prevailed in the favor of Zimmerman. It’s very clear that the supremacy of the whites always prevails no matter what. Black lives matter movement is a platform where people demand justice for the lives of the black. They emphasis on the issue that even the black lives matter and they should be a given a chance to speak up and fight for themselves. It reveals the truth of the dominance of the whites over the black. 

In the light of the recent events, the racist murder of George Floyd on 25 th May, 2020 has sparked a revolution against racial discrimination worldwide. George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American was killed in Minneapolis, by a police officer, named, Derek Chauvin who had his knees pressed against the throat of Floyd for nearly about 8 minutes and 46 seconds, until he was no more. Three other officers named, Tou Thao, J. Alexander and Thomas Lane were also involved in the killing. The police had been called upon after a grocery store made a call to the 911 stating that Floyd used fake currency to buy a packet of cigarettes. As the officer handcuffed Floyd, he lied down on the ground. Soon after that, Derek Chauvin suffocated Floyd, by applying a lot pressure on his back and neck. Floyd complained that he was having breathing problems and also that he was claustrophobic, in spite of this knowledge, Derek Chauvin still placed his knees on Floyd’s neck with an intention of assaulting him while Floyd was breathing his last. Derek is charged under an offence of second-degree murder and the rest 3 are charged under an offence of abetment of murder. This is a clear incident of brutality and ruthlessness. 

Article 2 of the Human Rights Act talks about the right to life, except for the death penalty which is provided under the law. No person has been granted the right to deprive another person of his own life. The law guarantees the protection of life of every human. All lives matter, be it black or white. There should be no discrimination when it comes to the protection of one’s life, because life is important to each and every one. It is a definite and absolute right. No one can come and just snatch it away from you. 

The blacks have been poor victims of racial killing, murders, sexual harassment, abuse, bullying or maybe to every other possible crime. The killing of George Floyd on the basis of his race was a pure representation of the abomination and dislike faced by the people of a deeper skin tone. The merciless killing led to a huge uprising of protests by the citizens in America, thousands of people opposed the lockdown in Britain and many other parts of the world and marched away in groups to demand justice for Floyd. People are mourning and grieving over the death of an unarmed, innocent man who was begging for his life. The people are overwhelmed and are in a raging fury. Cities which used to be peaceful and calm, are now filled with rallies, marches, protests etc. This incident has brought people from worldwide to come together and act against the illegal and unjust racial killing. Even on online platforms, like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook etc. people are using hashtags like “BlackLivesMatter”, “GeorgeFloyd”, “Icantbreathe” etc. to inspire people all over to come up and fight for the rightful justice. 

Police killings and police violence in the U.S have emerged as a serious problem. Another reason of the killing of George Floyd is police brutality. The police misuse their power and end up claiming the lives of the innocent civilians. The area of focus is mainly on the people who belong to a black race. The National Vital Statistics system released a report stating that police brutality and police killing stands as the sixth leading reason of death. Police killings lead to 1.6% of the death of the black people who fall under the age group of 20-24. A black man has a greater risk of getting killed as compared to a white man. Public reports have found out that lives of 52 of every 100,000 men and 3 of every 100,000 will be claimed by the police. The judicial system should implement stricter laws to reduce the cases of abuse of power by the higher authorities and police officers. The police departments should definitely be held accountable for their utmost misuse of their power. 

I would like to conclude this article by saying that yes, racial prejudice does exist in our country. India being such a complex and diverse nation, is bound to have some differences between the people, be it the facial features, the skin color, the language, the caste or the religion. But these mere differences do not serve as a ground for discrimination. India is widely known for having varied cultures, traditions, ethics, religions, languages, communities etc. On one hand, we say that we are proud of living in a country so beautiful and diverse that it embraces people belonging to different cultures and traditions and on the other hand, we go freely discriminating and spreading racial prejudice against the people just because they belong to a different community or ethnic group, for instance the North East Indians who belong to the Tibet Mongoloid ethnicity. How ironical is that. Our Indian society has a pre-determined assumption that skin tone preferences have to exist no matter what. They are reluctant in accepting the fact that being dark is beautiful and that the dark is entitled to the same amount of dignity and respect that a fair would receive. Person will a lighter skin tone will always be preferred over a person with a deeper skin tone. This leads to the elimination of opportunities for the black people in every field, be it education or employment. They are a constant subject to hate crime due to their skin color, which makes them feel unsafe and threatened in their very own country. Its high time that the spread of racial prejudice and hatred against the blacks should be stopped, stricter law should be implemented and enforced.

Derogatory comments, racial slurs, racial insults, racist killings etc. should cease to exist. We should embrace and appreciate the people for who they are and not on the basis of how they look. Skin color or caste do not define the character of the person, passing judgmental comments on their skin color and looks does nothing good, but makes them feel isolated and alienated from everyone else. Just like the fair, the brown and black people are also God’s creation and there is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. After all, Lord Krishna and Lord Shiva are also known to be the dark-skinned Dravidian Gods, dark, yet beautiful. 

• Dr. J N Pandey (Constitutional Law of India)
• The Constitution of India, 1949
• https://indianlaw.org/
• https://scroll.in/
• https://caravanmagazine.in/
• https://journals.sagepub.com/
• https://www.britannica.com/
• https://www.thehindu.com/
• https://www.thoughtco.com/
• https://www.researchgate.net/

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African victims of racism in India share their stories

‘The law of mobs is always there,’ says one student, describing racist attacks on Africans in Greater Noida.

Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India – As his auto-rickshaw pulled up at Pari Chowk, the monumental roundabout at the navel of Greater Noida, 24-year-old Imran Uba’s mind was on the scoop of chocolate he was planning to order at a nearby ice-cream parlour.

It had been that kind of a day, pleasantly aimless – a Monday without classes to attend or assignments to complete. The springtime afternoons were already hot enough to slow things down in the National Capital Region, which groups Delhi and its sprawling, skyscrapered satellites.

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But Imran found Pari Chowk bristling with energy. A public march for a teenage boy who had died that weekend had become an angry protest of perhaps 500 people.

Imran, who comes from Kano in northern Nigeria and studies at Noida International University, neither speaks enough Hindi to have caught the gist of the protesters’ chants, nor reads it well enough to have clocked the slogans on their banners, so it didn’t occur to him that he might be at risk.

But he did notice a shiver of intensity shoot through the mob – because that was what the protesters had now become – and then, suddenly, that it was focused on him. 

As the crowd moved toward him, he caught the word “Nigerian” again and again, though he knew they would have called him that if he was Sudanese, or West Indian. It just meant that he was black.

He stopped walking and stood with his arms pinned to his side, terrified. Imran is quite tall but narrowly built; in this pose he looks small and young. There was nothing he could do, he reflects, because there were so many of them. He remembers the view from the ground, the kicks striking his stomach and head. The next scene he recalls was a hospital room.

Nobody could offer him an explanation, or even a narrative, for the violence until another wounded African man showed up at his bedside the next day and told him the story.

The story involved an accusation of cannibalism before there had even been a death. High-schooler Manish Khari went missing on a Friday evening. He would reappear, unwell and disoriented, the following morning, but by then a crowd of Khari’s community members had already burst into the home of five Nigerian students and reportedly searched their refrigerator. The Nigerians, they alleged, had killed and eaten Khari.

READ MORE: Being African in India – ‘We are seen as demons’

When the boy died in hospital on Saturday, his family demanded that the police file murder charges against the Nigerian neighbours. Familiar stereotypes – Africans as drug peddlers and kidnappers – hardened into “facts of the case” in the gossip on the street. But by Sunday the accused had been released. The police confirmed that they had found no evidence against the Nigerian men, although the investigation into Manish Khari’s death is stalled, awaiting the results of post-mortem testing.

But lack of evidence made little difference   to the mob. On   that   Monday, the crowd at Pari Chowk was hoisting banners demanding the eviction of Nigerians from their rented housing in Greater Noida. That was when Imran happened upon them. 

Three other African men were hunted down that evening inside the nearby Ansal Plaza mall, and attacked on camera.

Here is another way the story has been told, again and again, in different words: a match was struck in a racist tinderbox in the backyard of India’s capital.

But that’s not a version the Indian government seems likely to accept. At the time of writing, the Ministry of External Affairs and police representatives stand by an official denial of the racial character of the attacks.

‘You’re not exactly safe’

The same Monday, not very far away from Pari Chowk and Ansal Plaza,   Elaine Tiende, a Cameroonian MBA student, drove to the market with a couple of friends to buy cooking oil.

The market, Jagat Farm, is frequented by Africans, of whom there are several thousand living in Greater Noida – the majority of them students.

Some shops at Jagat Farm are African-run, selling African food and cosmetics, and offering African hair styling. On that day, though, the Africans’ shops were shuttered. Elaine and her friends appeared to be the only black people there.

As they left with their bottle of oil, Elaine noticed subtle movement: locals clustering, tracking the three of them with their eyes. In French, Elaine told her friends: “The minute I open the car, you lock yourselves inside.”

WATCH: Racism against Africans in India

She felt alarmed, but she walked at a measured pace. “In my culture we have a thing: If a dog is watching and you run, that dog will chase you,” she says.

A man blocked her path as she tried to reverse her car; she blasted the horn, then slid the car into gear and made him jump. “They really banged my car up in the back, pretty bad,” Elaine says. She shows me   the damage: shallow dents and paint transfer. Nothing serious except a record of violent intent.

When she got home, her landlady greeted her at her door with worrying news. Locals – “they call them Gujjars, I think,” says Elaine, referencing the traditionally agricultural caste dominant in Greater Noida – had been there, looking for her. The landlady offered to lock Elaine and her flatmates in; they agreed.

It was the first time Elaine had been a victim of physical aggression in India , but it wasn’t the first time she had felt threatened.

She had arrived in Delhi as a patient at one of the capital’s respected private hospitals. She had been in a serious car crash and needed a series of surgeries, some of them cosmetic. “I looked pretty bad,” she says.

She had assumed that her injuries were what drew all the stares. But when she recovered, the stares didn’t stop. “Sometimes they look at you,” she says, “like you’re something good to eat.”

In class at Sharda University, which has one of the biggest African student bodies in Greater Noida, Indian friends whispered to her, “That person’s not your friend.” Behind her back, she was told, some classmates talked about Africans as cannibals and people-snatchers. “It was basically advice from an Indian to a foreigner: Keep your distance. You’re not exactly safe.”

“It’s frightening,” she says, before laughing: “But there’s comfort: Not all of them are like that.”

During the six days after the incident at Jagat Farm, she left the house just once, and then only with a police escort. On her third day behind drawn curtains, Elaine broke and called her parents, whom she had hoped to spare the worry. “My father immediately said: The moment you can step out of that house, you take a flight back.”

READ MORE: Africans decry ‘discrimination’ in India

‘The law of mobs is always there’

Elaine wasn’t the only African in Noida under self-imposed house arrest the week after the attacks. After news of the Pari Chowk and Ansal Plaza assaults broke, the Association of African Students in India (AASI) posted a volley of notices via Facebook and WhatsApp instructing members not to go out. “The situation around the city is still VIOLENT,” read one post, dated Wednesday, March 29.

Abdou Brahim Mahamat, AASI senior adviser and former president, had little doubt it was a necessary caution. When he got word that the protest march for Manish Khari had “degenerated”, Abdou paid the nearest rickshaw driver whatever he asked for to rush him home along the back roads. “Rumours spread fast in the communities,” he says, adding: “[In India] the law of mobs is always there.”

Since Abdou began his architecture degree at Sharda University in Greater Noida four years ago, he has been a kind of distant witness to several   attacks on Africans by Indians. In 2014, a New Delhi mob cornered and thrashed three students from Gabon and Burkina Faso in a metro station, accusing them of harassing Indian women.

In his studio flat, postered with sketched blueprints and study notes, Abdou flips open his laptop and pulls up online video footage of the assault. “If my friends or African community members somewhere in India feel unsafe, I can feel it also,” he says. “Their pain is my pain.”

Abdou was plugged into the AASI WhatsApp nerve centre when, last year, a mob in Bangalore dragged a Tanzanian student from her vehicle, stripped her and set her car alight, after a Sudanese man she had never met was implicated in a fatal road accident.

In May, he was in meetings with representatives of the Ministry of External Affairs after a 23-year-old Congolese man called Masonda Ketanda Olivier was beaten to death in an upscale Delhi neighbourhood. A week after his murder, a spate of assaults left seven Africans injured in Delhi’s Chhatarpur area.

After the latest attacks, Abdou and his fellow AASI officers were in crisis management mode, liaising between the police and stranded students, handling calls from reporters, communicating with embassy staff.

Racism: An undiagnosed ‘sickness’

At a meeting of African student representatives with Superintendent of Police Sujata Singh, the mood is cordial, and the coffee is served in tiny china cups. Abdou and his colleagues thank Singh for the measures her force has instituted; they seek assurances and are given them.

Police officers will continue to provide security to worried African students, says Singh, and she herself is “just a call away”. But the situation is now under control; “your people” should feel free to leave their homes. Six of the attackers are in custody; 60 had been identified by local spies and from CCTV footage. These “goons” are running scared, she told me in a later interview.

At the end of the meeting, a grey-haired Nigerian nanotechnology PhD student called Chris Onuegbu stands, and after remarking that he had been impressed with the police in recent days, makes a request for a public condemnation of the attacks from the police and the government. Singh responds: “It will be there. We are very particular about your security.”

No one seems to doubt the sincerity of Singh’s commitment, or the reliability of her advice. But, as Chris explains after the meeting, it isn’t enough. “Government must be seen to come out in every seriousness,” he says.

READ MORE: Shock in India over mob attack on Tanzanian student

On March 31, the heads of African diplomatic missions in India issued a blistering rebuke to the Ministry of External Affairs. They had reviewed historic incidents of violence against Africans and concluded that “no known sufficient and visible deterring measures were taken by the government of India”.They found that the Greater Noida attacks were “not sufficiently condemned by the Indian authorities”. They were in agreement that the aggression was “xenophobic and racial in nature”. They would call for an independent investigation by the UN Human Rights Council.

On April 5, the response of Sushma Swaraj, the minister of External Affairs, came in an address to parliament. The African envoys’ statement was “unfortunate and surprising”; India was committed to ensuring the safety of all foreign nationals in the country. “Please do not say that the crime was motivated by racial reasons till the inquiry is over,” she said.

A couple of days later, a former MP from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, Tarun Vijay, made headlines when he offered his own denials on Al Jazeera’s The Stream. “If we were racist, why would we have all the entire south … Tamil, Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra … why do we live with them?” he said, referencing the often darker complexions of southern Indians. “We have black people around us.”

Over the phone, Abdou responded: “If there is a sickness in your body and you do not recognise it, then you cannot get the proper treatment.”

Everyday racism

Long before the attacks, Nigerian chemistry student Zaharaddeen Muhammad had learned to expect daily abuse on the streets of Greater Noida. “Hey bandar,” he hears: hey monkey. Hey kalu, hey habshi: children call out derogatory names for black people.

The accusations after Manish Khari’s disappearance weren’t the first time he had been told that people who looked like him were cannibals, but, he says: “It hurt, seriously. I bitterly cried for that.” He speaks softly and looks tired. “You know, Afghans are here. They don’t face such challenges, such insult.”

In Delhi, a feminist movement is agitating against sexist, infantilising university hostel rules. But here, at Sharda University’s Mandela Hostel, Adetutu Deborah Aina, a 33-year-old Nigerian lawyer and PhD student, says that the curfews and tight security make her feel safer, especially after she was harassed by a first-year student at another Greater Noida university. She had given him a questionnaire for a piece of research she was conducting. He called her and said he would fill it out if she slept with him. “Are you seeing the insult?” she asks, angry hands gesticulating. “It’s because I am black.”

His calls didn’t stop; she grew afraid that he would try to break into her room and alerted campus security. “They think that all Africans are prostitutes,” she says.

Out in public, strangers might grab at you, children tug at their parents’ hands and point, or duck away to hide, explains her friend Kumba Mbage, a 26-year-old Gambian law student. People sprint to overtake you, just so that they can turn and stare from the front. “Sometimes, the looks they give you – you’d prefer they just beat you up and you die.” She and Deborah laugh at the bitter hyperbole.

Still, there is a silver lining. Everyday Indian racism has given Kumba a concept of race, of “blackness”, of Pan-African pride and solidarity, she says. At home in The Gambia , there was no question of race. Everyone was the same.

“You come to India, and ‘Nigeria’ is like a metonymy for Africa. Africa is like one thing, and the whole thing is just reduced to blackness.” She reads the hatred she has encountered as a projection of self-loathing by a population that spends more on skin-lightening cream than Coca-Cola. “I have learned something from their ignorance,” she says. “I see myself more clearly for it.”

Enlightened ignorance

The word “ignorance” is on many lips in Greater Noida. It feels like a kind of situational irony here, in India’s shiny new education hub. Ansal Plaza, the site of three of the attacks, is papered over in banner adverts for private schools and colleges, many of them “international”, and sits just outside an area called “Knowledge Park III”. Schools such as Sharda University take out ads in Nigerian newspapers, selling themselves on their cosmopolitan credentials.

But a manager at Ansal Plaza’s KFC, witness to the mob attacks, says the Gujjars of Greater Noida are not part of this outward-facing, aspirational universe. They are uneducated villagers who, he says, got wealthy too quickly when the developers moved in. They tended to read cultural difference as cultural affront, and to police it with the sort of language that he could not bear to repeat in front of me, a woman.

Chris Onuegbu, the Nigerian nanotechnology researcher, says: “I don’t think that this emanated from the enlightened class of society,” and describes the “local Indians” as “people who have never left, and never want to leave, the four walls of their own society”. It tallies with Superintendent Singh’s view that the problem is in essence a cultural clash, a deficit of trust, which must be remedied by opening wider channels of communication between foreigners and locals.

But the implication that ignorance is restricted to the illiterate classes bothers Kumba. It sounds like a kind of justification, an excuse to her. “Some people here are very educated, and they still don’t like blacks,” she says.

Of course, elite racism might not shout kalu, bandar, habshi on street corners. It might, for that reason, be easier to deny. According to Samuel Jack, president of the AASI, it might exist in the denial itself. “If you don’t address the problem,” he tells me on the phone, “you are almost promoting it.”

Praying for peace – and wisdom

The Sunday after the attacks, at a church service held in the auditorium of one of Greater Noida’s plush private schools, a Congolese woman called Ruth sings into a microphone: “And if our God is for us / Then who could ever stop us.”

On stage behind her, Elaine Tiende is on back-up vocals. The congregation sways, their palms raised. An African woman in a red kurta points to the ceiling and closes her eyes; a little Korean girl fans out her skirt and twirls in the back row.

This church, Elaine says, has been the best part of her experience in India. “I came to the land in the world that knows the least about Jesus and I found him here,” she laughs.

Despite her father’s pleas, she won’t go home until she finishes her degree in a couple of months. But once she graduates, she won’t come back to India: “Not for any reason. Whatsoever.”

This is the memory of India that she, and many other students in Greater Noida, will take back home with them. Kumba and Deborah say they would urgently counsel Africans studying in India. “The indignity you face every day. It’s too much. It is not worth it,” Kumba says.

When I met Imran, who spent most of his term’s tuition fee on hospital bills, he was considering leaving partway through his degree, although he has since decided to stick it out.

This negative legacy is something the African student leaders have warned of. Abdou, who, despite the difficulties and feelings of isolation says he would remember India as “incredible”, explains: “These people who come here, they are the future leaders. They could build that connection [between India and their country]. But not if they treat us like this.”

Elaine hasn’t quite worked out what she plans to do after her degree, other than go home. But when I ask her if she is worried about missing classes recently, she dithers modestly for a second before flashing a grin and declaring: “No, I’m not worried. I’m smart.” I learn that since she arrived, broken-bodied at Delhi airport, she hasn’t only undergone multiple surgeries and navigated a degree, but she has also juggled a full-time traineeship at a logistics firm and started a business manufacturing maternity clothes for export to Cameroon.

For the next month, she plans to keep her head down, and shuttle between work, school, church and home. She is more worried, she explains, for the Africans who have years left in Greater Noida. She gestures at the church’s empty seats. As many as half of the Africans she usually sees here on Sundays haven’t made it today.

After the sermon, the pastor, an Indian man, addresses the absence: “Many of our African brothers are not here, and we pray for them – for their safety and security,” he says. Then the congregation forms a circle, links hands and prays for the families back in Africa worrying about their children, and for peace. They also pray for the wisdom of the authorities.

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Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation

1. religious freedom, discrimination and communal relations, table of contents.

• The dimensions of Hindu nationalism in India
• India’s Muslims express pride in being Indian while identifying communal tensions, desiring segregation
• Muslims, Hindus diverge over legacy of Partition
• Religious conversion in India
• Religion very important across India’s religious groups
• Near-universal belief in God, but wide variation in how God is perceived
• Across India’s religious groups, widespread sharing of beliefs, practices, values
• Religious identity in India: Hindus divided on whether belief in God is required to be a Hindu, but most say eating beef is disqualifying
• Sikhs are proud to be Punjabi and Indian
• Most Indians say they and others are very free to practice their religion
• Most people do not see evidence of widespread religious discrimination in India
• Most Indians report no recent discrimination based on their religion
• In Northeast India, people perceive more religious discrimination
• Most Indians see communal violence as a very big problem in the country
• Indians divided on the legacy of Partition for Hindu-Muslim relations
• More Indians say religious diversity benefits their country than say it is harmful
• Indians are highly knowledgeable about their own religion, less so about other religions
• Substantial shares of Buddhists, Sikhs say they have worshipped at religious venues other than their own
• One-in-five Muslims in India participate in celebrations of Diwali
• Members of both large and small religious groups mostly keep friendships within religious lines
• Most Indians are willing to accept members of other religious communities as neighbors, but many express reservations
• Indians generally marry within same religion
• Most Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Jains strongly support stopping interreligious marriage
• India’s religious groups vary in their caste composition
• Indians in lower castes largely do not perceive widespread discrimination against their groups
• Most Indians do not have recent experience with caste discrimination
• Most Indians OK with Scheduled Caste neighbors
• Indians generally do not have many close friends in different castes
• Large shares of Indians say men, women should be stopped from marrying outside of their caste
• Most Indians say being a member of their religious group is not only about religion
• Common ground across major religious groups on what is essential to religious identity
• India’s religious groups vary on what disqualifies someone from their religion
• Hindus say eating beef, disrespecting India, celebrating Eid incompatible with being Hindu
• Muslims place stronger emphasis than Hindus on religious practices for identity
• Many Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists do not identify with a sect
• Sufism has at least some followers in every major Indian religious group
• Large majorities say Indian culture is superior to others
• What constitutes ‘true’ Indian identity?
• Large gaps between religious groups in 2019 election voting patterns
• No consensus on whether democracy or strong leader best suited to lead India
• Majorities support politicians being involved in religious matters
• Indian Muslims favor their own religious courts; other religious groups less supportive
• Most Indians do not support allowing triple talaq for Muslims
• Southern Indians least likely to say religion is very important in their life
• Most Indians give to charitable causes
• Majorities of Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Jains in India pray daily
• More Indians practice puja at home than at temple
• Most Hindus do not read or listen to religious books frequently
• Most Indians have an altar or shrine in their home for worship
• Religious pilgrimages common across most religious groups in India
• Most Hindus say they have received purification from a holy body of water
• Roughly half of Indian adults meditate at least weekly
• Only about a third of Indians ever practice yoga
• Nearly three-quarters of Christians sing devotionally
• Most Muslims and few Jains say they have participated in or witnessed animal sacrifice for religious purposes
• Most Indians schedule key life events based on auspicious dates
• About half of Indians watch religious programs weekly
• For Hindus, nationalism associated with greater religious observance
• Indians value marking lifecycle events with religious rituals
• Most Indian parents say they are raising their children in a religion
• Fewer than half of Indian parents say their children receive religious instruction outside the home
• Vast majority of Sikhs say it is very important that their children keep their hair long
• Half or more of Hindus, Muslims and Christians wear religious pendants
• Most Hindu, Muslim and Sikh women cover their heads outside the home
• Slim majority of Hindu men say they wear a tilak, fewer wear a janeu
• Eight-in-ten Muslim men in India wear a skullcap
• Majority of Sikh men wear a turban
• Muslim and Sikh men generally keep beards
• Most Indians are not vegetarians, but majorities do follow at least some restrictions on meat in their diet
• One-in-five Hindus abstain from eating root vegetables
• Fewer than half of vegetarian Hindus willing to eat in non-vegetarian settings
• Indians evenly split about willingness to eat meals with hosts who have different religious rules about food
• Majority of Indians say they fast
• More Hindus say there are multiple ways to interpret Hinduism than say there is only one true way
• Most Indians across different religious groups believe in karma
• Most Hindus, Jains believe in Ganges’ power to purify
• Belief in reincarnation is not widespread in India
• More Hindus and Jains than Sikhs believe in moksha (liberation from the cycle of rebirth)
• Most Hindus, Muslims, Christians believe in heaven
• Nearly half of Indian Christians believe in miracles
• Most Muslims in India believe in Judgment Day
• Most Indians believe in fate, fewer believe in astrology
• Many Hindus and Muslims say magic, witchcraft or sorcery can influence people’s lives
• Roughly half of Indians trust religious ritual to treat health problems
• Lower-caste Christians much more likely than General Category Christians to hold both Christian and non-Christian beliefs
• Nearly all Indians believe in God
• Few Indians believe ‘there are many gods’
• Many Hindus feel close to Shiva
• Many Indians believe God can be manifested in other people
• Indians almost universally ask God for good health, prosperity, forgiveness
• Acknowledgments
• Questionnaire design
• Sample design and weighting
• Precision of estimates
• Response rates
• Significant events during fieldwork
• Appendix B: Index of religious segregation

Indians generally see high levels of religious freedom in their country. Overwhelming majorities of people in each major religious group, as well as in the overall public, say they are “very free” to practice their religion. Smaller shares, though still majorities within each religious community, say people of other religions also are very free to practice their religion. Relatively few Indians – including members of religious minority communities – perceive religious discrimination as widespread.

At the same time, perceptions of discrimination vary a great deal by region. For example, Muslims in the Central region of the country are generally less likely than Muslims elsewhere to say there is a lot of religious discrimination in India. And Muslims in the North and Northeast are much more likely than Muslims in other regions to report that they, personally, have experienced recent discrimination.

Indians also widely consider communal violence to be an issue of national concern (along with other problems, such as unemployment and corruption). Most people across different religious backgrounds, education levels and age groups say communal violence is a very big problem in India.

The partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 remains a subject of disagreement. Overall, the survey finds mixed views on whether the establishment of Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan alleviated communal tensions or stoked them. On balance, Muslims tend to see Partition as a “bad thing” for Hindu-Muslim relations, while Hindus lean slightly toward viewing it as a “good thing.”

The vast majority of Indians say they are very free today to practice their religion (91%), and all of India’s major religious groups share this sentiment: Roughly nine-in-ten Buddhists (93%), Hindus (91%), Muslims (89%) and Christians (89%) say they are very free to practice their religion, as do 85% of Jains and 82% of Sikhs.

Broadly speaking, Indians are more likely to view themselves as having a high degree of religious freedom than to say that people of other religions are very free to practice their faiths. Still, 79% of the overall public – and about two-thirds or more of the members of each of the country’s major religious communities – say that people belonging to other religions are very free to practice their faiths in India today.

Generally, these attitudes do not vary substantially among Indians of different ages, educational backgrounds or geographic regions. Indians in the Northeast are somewhat less likely than those elsewhere to see widespread religious freedom for people of other faiths – yet even in the Northeast, a solid majority (60%) say there is a high level of religious freedom for other religious communities in India.

Most people in India do not see a lot of religious discrimination against any of the country’s six major religious groups. In general, Hindus, Muslims and Christians are slightly more likely to say there is a lot of discrimination against their own religious community than to say there is a lot of discrimination against people of other faiths. Still, no more than about one-quarter of the followers of any of the country’s major faiths say they face widespread discrimination.

Generally, Indians’ opinions about religious discrimination do not vary substantially by gender, age or educational background. For example, among college graduates, 19% say there is a lot of discrimination against Hindus, compared with 21% among adults with less education.

Within religious groups as well, people of different ages, as well as both men and women, tend to have similar opinions on religious discrimination.

However, there are large regional variations in perceptions of religious discrimination. For example, among Muslims who live in the Central part of the country, just one-in-ten say there is widespread discrimination against Muslims in India, compared with about one-third of those who live in the North (35%) and Northeast (31%). (For more information on measures of religious discrimination in the Northeast, see “ In Northeast India, people perceive more religious discrimination ” below.)

Among Muslims, perceptions of discrimination against their community can vary somewhat based on their level of religious observance. For instance, about a quarter of Muslims across the country who pray daily say there is a lot of discrimination against Muslims (26%), compared with 19% of Muslims nationwide who pray less often. This difference by observance is pronounced in the North, where 39% of Muslims who pray every day say there is a lot of discrimination against Muslims in India, roughly twice the share among those in the same region who pray less often (20%).

The survey also asked respondents about their personal experiences with discrimination. In all, 17% of Indians report facing recent discrimination based on their religion. Roughly one-in-five Muslims (21%) and 17% of Hindus say that in the last 12 months they themselves have faced discrimination because of their religion, as do 18% of Sikhs. By contrast, Christians are less likely to say they have felt discriminated against because of their religion (10%), and similar shares of Buddhists and Jains (13% each) fall into this category.

Nationally, men and women and people belonging to different age groups do not differ significantly from each other in their experiences with religious discrimination. People who have a college degree, however, are somewhat less likely than those with less formal schooling to say they have experienced religious discrimination in the past year.

Within religious groups, experiences with discrimination vary based on region of residence and other factors. Among Muslims, for instance, 40% of those living in Northern India and 36% in the Northeast say they have faced recent religious discrimination, compared with no more than one-in-five in the Southern, Central, Eastern and Western regions.

Experiences with religious discrimination also are more common among Muslims who are more religious and those who report recent financial hardship (that is, they have not been able to afford food, housing or medical care for themselves or their families in the last year).

Muslims who have a favorable view of the Indian National Congress party (INC) are more likely than Muslims with an unfavorable view of the party to say they have experienced religious discrimination (26% vs. 15%). Among Northern Muslims, those who have a favorable view of the INC are much more likely than those who don’t approve of the INC to say they have experienced discrimination (45% vs. 23%). (Muslims in the country, and especially Muslims in the North, tend to say they voted for the Congress party in the 2019 election. See Chapter 6 .)

Hindus with less education and those who have recently experienced poverty also are more likely to say they have experienced religious discrimination.

Less than 5% of India’s population lives in the eight isolated states of the country’s Northeastern region. This region broadly lags behind the country in economic development indicators. And this small segment of the population has a linguistic and religious makeup that differs drastically from the rest of the country.

According to the 2011 census of India, Hindus are still the majority religious group (58%), but they are less prevalent in the Northeast than elsewhere (81% nationally). The smaller proportion of Hindus there is offset by the highest shares of Christians (16% vs. 2% nationally) and Muslims (22% vs. 13% nationally) in any region. And based on the survey, the region also has a higher share of Scheduled Tribes than any other region in the country (25% vs. 9% nationally), and half of Scheduled Tribe members in the Northeast are Christians.

Indians in the Northeast are more likely than those elsewhere to perceive high levels of religious discrimination. For example, roughly four-in-ten in the region say there is a lot of discrimination against Muslims in India, about twice the share of North Indians who say the same thing (41% vs. 22%).

Much of the Northeast’s perception of high religious discrimination is driven by Hindus in the region. A slim majority of Northeastern Hindus (55%) say there is widespread discrimination against Hindus in India, while almost as many (53%) say Muslims face a lot of discrimination. Substantial shares of Hindus in the Northeast say other religious communities also face such mistreatment.

The region’s other religious communities are less likely to say there is religious discrimination in India. For example, while 44% of Northeastern Hindus say Christians face a lot of discrimination, only one-in-five Christians in the Northeast perceive this level of discrimination against their own group. By contrast, at the national level, Christians are more likely than Hindus to see a lot of discrimination against Christians (18% vs. 10%).

People in the Northeast also are more likely to report experiencing religious discrimination. While 17% of individuals nationally say they personally have felt religious discrimination in the last 12 months, one-third of those surveyed in the Northeast say they have had such an experience. Northeastern Hindus, in particular, are much more likely than Hindus elsewhere to report recent religious discrimination (37% vs. 17% nationally).

Most Indians (65%) say communal violence – a term broadly used to describe violence between religious groups – is a “very big problem” in their country (the term was not defined for respondents). This includes identical shares of Hindus and Muslims (65% each) who say this.

But even larger majorities identify several other national problems. Unemployment tops the list of national concerns, with 84% of Indians saying this is a very big problem. And roughly three-quarters of Indian adults see corruption (76%), crime (76%) and violence against women (75%) as very big national issues. (The survey was designed and mostly conducted before the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic.)

Indians across nearly every religious group, caste category and region consistently rank unemployment as the top national concern. Buddhists, who overwhelmingly belong to disadvantaged castes, widely rank unemployment as a major concern (86%), while just a slim majority see communal violence as a very big problem (56%).

Sikhs are more likely than other major religious groups in India to say communal violence is a major issue (78%). This concern is especially pronounced among college-educated Sikhs (87%).

Among Hindus, those who are more religious are more likely to see communal violence as a major issue: Fully 67% of Hindus who say religion is very important in their lives consider communal violence a major issue, compared with 58% among those who say religion is less important to them.

Indians in different regions of the country also differ in their concern about communal violence: Three-quarters of Indians in the Northeast say communal violence is a very big problem, compared with 59% in the West. Concerns about communal violence are widespread in the national capital of Delhi, where 78% of people say this is a major issue. During fieldwork for this study, major protests broke out in New Delhi (and elsewhere) following the BJP-led government’s passing of a new bill, which creates an expedited path to citizenship for immigrants from some neighboring countries – but not Muslims.

The end of Britain’s colonial rule in India, in 1947, was accompanied by the separation of Hindu-majority India from Muslim-majority Pakistan and massive migration in both directions. Nearly three-quarters of a century later, Indians are divided over the legacy of Partition.

About four-in-ten (41%) say the partition of India and Pakistan was a good thing for Hindu-Muslim relations, while a similar share (39%) say it was a bad thing. The rest of the population (20%) does not provide a clear answer, saying Partition was neither a good thing nor a bad thing, that it depends, or that they don’t know or cannot answer the question. There are no clear patterns by age, gender, education or party preference on opinions on this question.

Among Muslims, the predominant view is that Partition was a bad thing (48%) for Hindu-Muslim relations. Fewer see it as a good thing (30%). Hindus are more likely than Muslims to say Partition was a good thing for Hindu-Muslim relations (43%) and less likely to say it was a bad thing (37%).

Of the country’s six major religious groups, Sikhs have the most negative view of the role Partition played in Hindu-Muslim relations: Nearly two-thirds (66%) say it was a bad thing.

Most Indian Sikhs live in Punjab, along the border with Pakistan. The broader Northern region (especially Punjab) was strongly impacted by the partition of the subcontinent, and Northern Indians as a whole lean toward the position that Partition was a bad thing for Hindu-Muslim relations (48%) rather than a good thing (39%).

The South is the furthest region from the borders affected by Partition, and Southern Indians are about twice as likely to say that Partition was good as to say that it was bad for Hindu-Muslim relations (50% vs. 26%).

Attitudes toward Partition also vary considerably by region within specific religious groups. Among Muslims in the North and West, most say Partition was a bad thing for Hindu-Muslim relations (55% of Muslims in both regions). In the Eastern and Central parts of the country as well, Muslim public opinion leans toward the view that Partition was a bad thing for communal relations. By contrast, Muslims in the South and Northeast tend to see Partition as good for Hindu-Muslim relations.

Among Hindus, meanwhile, those in the North are closely divided on the issue, with 44% saying Partition was a good thing and 42% saying it was a bad thing. But in the West and South, Hindus tend to see Partition as a good thing for communal relations.

Poorer Hindus – that is, those who say they have been unable to afford basic necessities like food, housing and medical care in the last year – tend to say Partition was a good thing. But opinions are more divided among Hindus who have not recently experienced poverty (39% say it was a good thing, while 40% say it was a bad thing). Muslims who have not experienced recent financial hardship, however, are especially likely to see Partition as a bad thing: Roughly half (51%) say Partition was a bad thing for Hindu-Muslim relations, while only about a quarter (24%) see it as a good thing.

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Is India a racist country?

April 07, 2017 12:15 am | Updated 01:07 am IST

BANGALORE - 05.06.2013 : Celebrating diversity... A 19-year-old law student from NLSIU has filed a complaint against Hindustan Pencils at the consumer court accusing the company of racism for producing a skin tone crayon that depicts only Caucasian skin, in Bangalore on June 05, 2013. Photo: K. Murali Kumar.

The Indian government must acknowledge there is deep-rooted prejudice

Samuel Jack

Samuel Jack is president of the Association of African Students in India

In India, racism is practised in some quarters and by some Indians. This is evident in the manner in which we are treated when we seek extension for our visas, in the problems we face in getting accommodation in the country, and in the general treatment of viewing us with suspicion. The prejudice and stereotypes are all too apparent. When we seek accommodation, most landlords come out with an emphatic ‘no’ without offering any explanation. We are left with little choice and make do with what we get. We are faced with a situation where we cannot even communicate with our neighbours in case of an emergency. How do we talk with each other with so many stigmas attached to us? How do we even begin to counter the prejudices?

Bias linked to caste system

To an outsider like myself, when I begin to process this blatantly discriminatory attitude, I find that this racism is linked to the prevalent caste system which is very hierarchical. Black people, Dalits and untouchables somehow seem to be linked to this caste system which is discriminatory and excludes people. Indian kids smoke in public places. Yet when we smoke, we are always supposedly smoking marijuana or weed, when there are many Indians who smoke the same. How can Africans playing loud music be an excuse to beat them up and complain to the police when Indians do the same? I am not saying black people don’t smoke weed or don’t do drugs but isn’t that true of others too? So, why single us out? Why do people here become aggressive when they see us on the streets? Students from the Northeast face the same problems like us.

Is Punjab’s drug problem because of us? The State is reeling under a drug crisis affecting many young men. In Goa, the drug problem is largely due to Europeans and Russians who, along with local leaders, peddle drugs, but will India discriminate against them? They give some donations to NGOs and nobody dares speak against them.

The Class XII student who passed away in Greater Noida recently unfortunately died of a drug overdose. He was an addict. You will be amazed to see what Indian school children are smoking. Unfortunately, Africa becomes a binary for most Indians. The impression is that we hail from a backward continent, which is simply not true. Some African countries have better human development indicators than India and have a robust democracy. Indians went as indentured labour to the African continent and elsewhere. If that is an acknowledged fact, how do Indians reconcile with their racist attitude towards us? If Indians went as indentured labour and Africans were treated like slaves, isn’t there a common history of discrimination that binds the two?

The wrong colour?

Right from when we land here, our colour becomes an excuse for Indians to display all their prejudices. An extension of our visas which should not take more than seven days takes at least three months for us. Police verification becomes an excuse for extortion. Policemen keep calling at odd hours.

We are deeply disappointed and hurt that the Government of India has not condemned the attacks against us. The government must say this is wrong and that it will deal with it in an appropriate manner. The government has to acknowledge there is a deep-rooted prejudice first. It is only after you acknowledge the problem that you can address it.

But the Government of India appears to be in denial. Due to the hostility of some Indians, the number of African students coming to study in India may come down.

What we are witnessing is the conflict of cultures which is a law and order problem, not racism

Rakesh Sinha

Rakesh Sinha teaches political science at Delhi University and is president of the RSS-affiliated India Policy Foundation

Some sporadic incidents cannot, and should not, lead one to brand any society as racist. Of course, one cannot deny that there has been some violence against people of African origin in some parts of the country. But a majority of these incidents have not been motivated by the colour of the nationalities involved. The reasons are sex, drug trafficking and behaviorial patterns which unsettle the structured values cherished by locals. A society’s multi-culturalism depends on the blending of empathy and reason. Chances of conflicts are higher when empathy and reason diminish. What we are witnessing is the conflict of cultures which is a law and order problem, not racism.

The case of Western societies

Racism is a negative value of life which is not a part of the Indian psyche. That said, no society or nation can claim to have achieved a completely ideal stage where its citizens are on their best behaviour. Whether a society is racist or becoming racist can be judged only by the collective consciousness of larger masses. Unprovoked incidents against Indians or Asian nationals in the form of violent attacks in Canada, the U.S., Australia, New Zealand tell us that all is not well with the melting pot of Western societies either.

The notion of the Other is historically rooted in the Western civilisation trajectory which erupts whenever societies face an economic or political crisis. While the notion of egalitarianism rests easily with elites there, this feeling does not find resonance with the masses. There is a huge disconnect between academic discourse on egalitarianism and social realities.

India’s history and the psychology of its masses have remained unchanged for as long as one can remember. During the anti-colonial movement, leaders of the freedom movement wisely secularised the struggle against colonial forces. Indians had no problem when two westerners, George Yule (1888) and William Wedderburn (1889) became presidents of the Indian National Congress (INC). Acceptance is the norm in Indian society.

There is an interesting observation in the 1911 Census report that Indians had no problems stating their religion. However, what mattered to most surveyed was social status. Historically, India has welcomed people of different races and creeds. The INC participated in the anti-apartheid conference in 1927 in Brussels.

We are one family

It is this credo of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the whole universe is one family) which led Indians to embrace victims of religious or racist persecutions. In 1931, as the Census data revealed, there were 24,000 Jews and 109,754 Parsis in India. They played a significant role in our freedom movement and in economic activities that shaped India. In the first session of the INC, there were nine Parsi delegates, and two each from the Muslim and Christian communities, of a total of 72. Their representation kept swelling in successive Congress sessions. Moreover, there has been consensus for Anglo-Indian representation in Parliament. The fundamental rationale underpinning this has been one of cherishing diversities.

However, in India there have been clashes between Dalits and upper castes and some violent incidents against students from the Northeast. But drawing a parallel with racism would not be correct. Racism is based on hatred which makes conciliation between people of different groups virtually impossible. Spiritual democracy is the basis of our secularism and our multi-culturalism negates perpetuation of conflicts. These have little to do with race.

Early education is an important field for providing the basis for independent and critical thought

Sanjay Srivastava

Sanjay Srivastava is professor of sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth

The remarkable 1952 novel Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison is about the experience of being black in the U.S. Its opening paragraph has the following lines: “I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me”.

The novel’s protagonist goes on to say that “the invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with who I come in contact”.

What is the peculiarity of the Indian eye that makes blackness such an invisible – that is, insignificant – thing as to take an axe to it when it seeks normal, human visibility, expressing the same desires and anxieties as those who think of themselves if not as completely white then at least something like possessing whiteness?

Confront the ‘messy’ present

We could, for a start, begin with history. There are, by now, a number of books and exhibitions about an Indian past that was apparently far more tolerant of blackness. Historians speak of an easy intermingling between Indians and people of African origin, with Indian noblewomen taking African men as lovers, and slaves being raised to the status of rulers.

But to invoke history is to only add to the problem of Ellison’s protagonist’s invisibility in the Indian present. History is easy. It is the present that is messy. A certain kind of, albeit well-meaning, history has convinced us that we were, in fact, good and tolerant in the past and hence that goodness must lie somewhere submerged among us, only needing minor prodding to emerge as joyful guiding light of the present. Indians love history because it allows an exit route to not having to deal with the present.

To the extent that 20th century racism has been addressed in the West, it is not through constant references to the Black Madonna in Christian iconography and Shakespeare’s Othello in literature. No. It has been done through addressing the root causes and reasons for intolerance in the present.

We in India refuse to deal with our present because history is such everlasting comfort.

Strategies for the present

What of the present, then? We could begin with school education. This crucial realm is one where ideas of the false basis of race and racism are almost never touched upon. While it is more difficult to influence attitudes in the domestic sphere, early education is an important field for providing the basis for independent and critical thought. But our social science school books continue to deal with ‘tribes’ – a category that flows on to blackness in general – in terms of their proximity to ‘civilisation’. The term itself – its bloody history, for example – is hardly ever examined. We are willing to put up with the ‘uncivilised’ as long as they know their place. We might also consider another strategy for the present. Our cities are now places where we increasingly have declining tolerance for strangers. We primarily extend courtesies to those we know, and exhibit hostility to those outside our circles of familiarity. Do we not need an education on how to live with strangers? Accounts of the past – fascinating and important in themselves – are about the past. The past is, actually, another planet and cannot be a guide to what is to be done now.

As told to Anuradha Raman

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racism in India

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Annual Review of Anthropology

Volume 51, 2022, review article, the laboratory of scientific racism: india and the origins of anthropology.

• Lesley Jo Weaver 1
• View Affiliations Hide Affiliations Affiliations: Department of Global Studies, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, USA; email: [email protected]
• Vol. 51:67-83 (Volume publication date October 2022) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-041320-024344
• First published as a Review in Advance on June 01, 2022
• Copyright © 2022 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved

Anthropology, especially biological anthropology, owes its origins to the scientific study of human racial differences. That dark history is well-acknowledged and, when it is taught, usually begins with the racism of early figures, such as Johann Friedrich Blumenbach or, more recently, Earnest Hooton, and exonerates itself through a turn toward antiracist scholars such as Frank Livingstone and Franz Boas. Rarely, if ever, is this origin story critically appraised. This article aims to complicate the origin story of biological anthropology by examining how colonial subjects were involved in the development, testing, and refinement of racial theory, and thus of biological anthropology itself. Taking India as an example, I trace how Indians and the caste system were first the subjects and eventually the interlocutors of racial scientific theory and testing. This reorientation, I argue, is important for developing a more expansive and accurate version of the discipline's history and also for shining a light on its relevance to contemporary global racial conflict.

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Friday essay: ‘why is it always on public transport?’ – racist threats have shaped, but not defeated me

PhD candidate, education and identity, Victoria University

Disclosure statement

Preeti Maharaj has her own educational consultancy company. She is a member of the Australian Education Union.

Victoria University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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I am 14. It is 1991. It is a Wednesday. I am in Year 9.

“N—-r! N—-r!”

To get to school in inner-city South Melbourne from Sunbury in the outer northwest, it takes me an hour and a half. I have to catch two trains, a tram and then walk. This is the price for a brown immigrant girl of attending a select-entry girls school.

I am in my school uniform. I am reading. I glance up and see that everyone is looking at me. I can’t remember how long it takes me to realise that I am the n—-r. I am at the end of the carriage, facing the torrent. I can tell by the hunched backs of the commuters that he is standing behind them. I can see their terrified faces. I cannot see him.

“Go back to where you came from. We don’t want you here.”

All the clichés are spewing out. Even the most pedestrian words of racism have a visceral impact. I do not know then how much this one moment, layered over all the other moments, will shape me. I do not know that it will imbue my cells with a fear and shame that I know rationally I should not have, but that will become wholly and silently mine.

‘Ignore him, dear’

I am 14 and I am ten. As I listen to him ranting at the train door, I remember the sharpening of cane knives at night while the men take turns keeping sentry in the early days, when we do not know if the friendly tourist destination all Australians love will have a civil war. I remember two military coups that teach me that the country of my birth does not want me or mine. I remember the media blackouts, roadblocks and curfews . . .

I remember my kaka, my father’s brother, his wife and two young children leaving the country overnight with my aaji, my maternal grandmother. If one of us gets out, then maybe one day, the rest of us can get the others out. The day after they leave, the military grounds the planes. Then no one can get out. Getting out becomes a dream for most Fiji-Indians. I remember an army raid and a friendly man in uniform holding a gun to my head, telling me and the other children to keep playing Monopoly while the other friendly military men search the house.

I remember all this as a stranger shouts at me to go back to where I came from and calls me names. This is the period when my life becomes a tangle of tenses that exist simultaneously.

I put down the book as we approach a station, and the elderly lady next to me gets up and touches my hand gently. She has spots on her hand.

“Ignore him, dear. Don’t listen to him. We don’t all think that way.”

She gets off the train. I panic. I look at everyone left on the train. I search for the adults. No one makes eye contact. I am in my school uniform. I wear glasses that are too big for my face. I have unruly long black hair. I am awkward. I am a child. I am alone.

Threats of violence

I am 35 and I am 14. I am a teacher. I share this story with my class. The Somali hijabi students laugh and their eyes glow with sympathetic understanding.

“Miss, public transport. That’s where it always happens.” “Miss, for me it was on a tram.” “Miss, someone tore off my hijab.” “Miss, why is it always on public transport?”

I am 40, I am ten and I am 14. I unravel. I resign as an assistant principal. I take a term off work. I cannot think. I can only cry. I cannot stop crying. I see two psychologists before I realise I will have to find one who understands me. I finally find her. She looks like one of my cousins.

“When you were a child, who was the adult you talked to about your feelings when you were distressed and needed reassurance?”

I do not understand this question. I ask my parents. They too do not understand this question. For our people, the Girmityas, the indentured labourers taken to Fiji from India to work the cane fields, it has been about generations of survival. If you have clothes, access to food and are safe from harm, then it is obvious you are loved. Generations of our children, surrounded by adults yet wholly and silently alone.

I do not know then that he is holding a broken glass bottle, that he will block my exit from the station, that I will not be able to get out, that I will by this stage be sobbing and incoherent, that he will push the train conductor who tries to help me off the platform onto the train tracks, that the police will be called and that they will laugh because they know him but say they cannot do anything.

I do not know then that for the rest of my life I will be scanning crowded spaces, alert, always looking for him. These threats of violence shape my life.

“Go back to where you came from.” “We don’t want you here.”

‘It is the talking back that matters’

I am 39 and I am 14. I am reading. I am on the 96 tram to St Kilda. I am standing near the door. I hear him. I remember. I put the book away. I look up. I am ready.

He is shouting at a brown man for sitting in the wrong seat. The brown man moves seats. He continues shouting. The brown man speaks with an accent and is being mocked and threatened. The brown man tries to make himself smaller. I look around the tram, I see others on the tram who look like me. I speak.

My broad Australian accent protects me but speaking up means making myself a target of violence. I take that chance. My words are not important; for me it is the talking back that matters. This time, there are others who join in and we win. I tell my students this story as well. Teenagers love a good smackdown redemption arc.

I am 45, I am 35 and I am 25. I talk to immigrant taxi drivers. I tell them things will get better, that my father and his two brothers did the same work when they first came to Australia. I reassure them their dreams for their children were also my parents’ dreams and they mostly have come true.

Hours spent across decades, passing on what it is like still growing up in Australia, huddling and talking in taxis that light up the driveways of homes I have rented across all four of Melbourne’s inner quadrants.

I am 22, I am 14 and I am 10. I start teaching and meet teenagers who have experienced dislocation, dispossession and displacement. Some, like me, have lived through the threat of violence, others have been witness to violence, some are survivors of violence and every other combination you can imagine that should never happen.

I spend two decades in classrooms in high schools, creating safe spaces to share our stories. Because my life is a tangle of tenses.

This essay is extracted from Growing Up Indian in Australia , edited by Aarti Betigeri (Black Inc.) and published on July 2.

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Racism is a clear and deadly reality in India

Long-held prejudices are working against india's economic interests, says rashmee roshan lall.

IIndian students stage a vigil in support of Tanzanians who were assaulted by a mob in Bangalore. Maniunath Kiran /AFP

India has a problem with racism. It suffers from it. And it practises it. For the second time in less than three months Indian officialdom is scrambling and occasionally backsliding on attempts to explain away the latest attack on Africans – a murderous assault on a 29-year-old Congolese French language-teacher in Delhi. Masonda Ketanda Olivier died.

Something similar happened a few months before. In February, there was a mob attack on a Tanzanian student in Bangalore. The young woman was stripped and paraded in front of onlookers. She subsequently accused India of “ingrained racism” as did her country’s envoy. That time, the Indian government created a Police-African Students Community platform, for regular “interaction … so that similar incidents do not occur again”.

They did, and this time, Indian foreign minister Sushma Swaraj herself tweeted that a “sensitisation programme” would be launched to prevent “such incidents against foreign nationals [that] embarrass the country”.

She didn’t provide details and it’s worth noting that she didn’t use the “r” word either, but there we have it. India is embarrassed by the focus on its racism. It would rather the problem just went away. Except that it can’t because it’s real.

Many Indians do behave in a racist and occasionally a violently racist fashion to people darker-skinned than them. There are insulting names for Africans, African-Americans and Caribbeans, all of whom may be jokily referred to as “bandar” (monkey) by grinning urchins and yokels. And there is the now-derogatory term “habshi”, a corruption passed down through the ages of the word “Abyssinian”. Back in the 1990s, a black BBC reporter on assignment in India described the monkey taunts that accompanied his passage through a small town. He was alternately appalled and amused but didn’t come to any harm. That was before the age of social media, when racist excesses didn’t easily become an “embarrassment” on the international newsfeed.

Not so the killing of the Congolese teacher. And the next assault, within days, on a handful of Africans – including a student, a priest and his wife and baby – in a village close to the capital Delhi. They were not isolated incidents. There have been several across the country and some Indian newspapers have detailed the perpetrators’ lack of remorse and their criticisms of Africans’ perceived drunkenness and depravity.

Last week, it got to the point that African diplomats spoke out. They took the unusual step of seeking postponement of the Indian government’s big-ticket Africa Day event. Eventually, most of them turned up but not without issuing a rebuke. They said they were considering asking their governments “not to send new students to India, unless and until their safety can be guaranteed”.

India's reputation

The implications are enormous – in terms of PR, politics and trade. India wants to build new relationships with African countries in an attempt to influence a whole generation and have more sway on the continent than China. Prime minister Narendra Modi has instituted extra partnerships to bring Africans to India to study or to train. In the past three years, 25,000 Africans have studied in India.

The new controversy could not have come at a worse time. Mr Modi is soon to travel to Africa. In October, his government hosted the India-Africa Forum, which was attended by all 54 African countries and seen as a success. Everything seemed to be going well in India’s bid to secure African good wishes as it still lobbies for status as a UN Security Council permanent member.

The holloness

And yet, it’s hard to see a real partnership emerging when, as Nigeria’s acting high commissioner Sola Enikanolaiye put it, notions of brotherhood and solidarity “ring hollow”. The unstated reference is to the hollowness of India’s professed warmth towards Africans and the solid reality of its racism.

It has often been noted that Sonia Gandhi would have been less acceptable as an Indian daughter-in-law had she been from Uganda, not Italy. That was true back then, nearly 50 years ago when the young Sonia Manio married Rajiv Gandhi, and it remains the case today. This is largely because many Indians like the “fair and lovely” template and are prone to thinking of blackness as ugly and a sign of backwardness.

It’s noteworthy that Mahatma Gandhi, product of an age of racial hierarchy, displayed this attitude throughout his time in South Africa. According to a recent book by two South African academics, the Mahatma regarded black people in much the way Winston Churchill regarded him. Churchill called the leader of the Indian freedom movement a “half-naked fakir”. Gandhi, according to authors Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed, said black Africans lived a life of “indolence and nakedness”.

But racism towards Africans also has deeper, more disturbing roots. In India, darker people are associated with the lower castes and Africans in India suffer from society’s long-held prejudices.

This does not mean India can do little about the seemingly racist strand within its DNA. Racism is taught, it is learnt behaviour towards persons with dissimilar physical characteristics, American writer Alex Haley once said. For India to unlearn it, the propensity to be racist must first be identified by the right name. And then fought hard. There must be severe punishment for racist violence and societal disdain for covert (or overt) racism.

It won’t be easy and will take a long time. But that may be better than seeing racism as a mere embarrassment.

Rashmee Roshan Lall is a writer on world affairs

On Twitter: @rashmeerl

More from this author:

■ Can Congress ever be relevant in India again?

■ In our age of distrust, who do you have faith in?

■ What has commerce got to do with government?

■ The West is trapped in a violent Islamophobic cycle

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Published: Friday 25th of January 2013