The protests that broke out in the United States’ Minneapolis on May 26, in response to the killing of 46-year-old African-American George Floyd, allegedly by the white Minneapolis Police Department personnel, soon translated into a worldwide movement and series of protests against the systemic racial oppression of dark-skinned people.
Despite the odds of the coronavirus pandemic rattling the entire world, protestors covered with face-masks have been on the streets of over thousands of major towns and cities of the world. Not only the placards carried during the protests mentioned ‘black lives matter’ in bold, but also innumerable people rallied behind #BlackLivesMatter on social media.
As this incident sparked a major conversation around the issues of racism and color-based discrimination, Indians also did not shy away from calling out the heinous act of police brutality in the United States. Whereas the movement majorly revolves around acknowledging and checking on one’s white privileges, it is not monolithic.
It is intriguing to remind the Indians of the disparate variations of systemic privileges that go unchecked, more than often we even realize. Though constitutionally discrimination of any kind is impermissible, there are at least three vivid and prevalent forms of discrimination based on one’s religious, caste, and ethnic/color-based identity in the Indian context among others. The panacea to stand against these forms of discrimination may be drawn from the sprawling ethos of the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
Religious Discrimination
“Racism is not restricted to the color of the skin. Not allowing to buy a home in a [housing] society just because you have a different faith is a part of racism too”, commented former Indian cricketer Irfan Pathan adding on to the Indian debate on racism.
India’s colonial history may even be a communal one. The bloody memory of communal violence at the brink of India’s partition during the Indian independence that simultaneously gave birth to the ‘Muslim state’ Pakistan, is rooted deeply in the Indian minds. It is responsible for creating an unmitigable chasm between the two predominant religious communities of the country, Hindus and Muslims, the latter being the minority. Add on the top of that the political culture of Indian democracy, that has time and again abused the deep-rooted communal discord and religious identities for electoral gains!
“Numerical majorities can become predatory and ethnocidal with regard to small numbers precisely when some minorities (and their small numbers) remind these majorities of the small gap which lies between their condition as majorities and the horizon of an unsullied national whole, a pure and untainted national ethos. This sense of incompleteness can drive majorities into paroxysms of violence against minorities…”, writes celebrated political philosopher Arjun Appadurai in his book Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger.
As a result, both implicit and explicit forms of biases are formed against the Muslim minority community in the Indian context. From food to fashion and habit to hygiene, when the perceptions against the Muslims in India are already colored with biases, the likelihood of deluding negativity about the minority community is both pressing and alarming.
“Muslims were the target of 51% of violence centered on bovine issues over nearly eight years (2010 to 2017) and comprised 86% of 28 Indians killed in 63 incidents, according to an IndiaSpend content analysis of the English media”, reports Hindustan Times.
“Muslim dairy farmers are no less devoted to their cattle than Hindus; in the majority of lynch attacks (such as of Pehlu Khan) the animals are transported for dairying, and not for slaughter, and nothing explains the sudden outbreak of lynching in many corners of the country under the present ruling dispensation (98% of cow-related lynching since 2010 occurred after 2014)”, opines Harsh Mander, while calling out the false rationalization of the horrific cases of lynching in the country.
Caste-Based Discrimination
The Vedic system of varnasrama results in occupational segregation among caste hierarchies based on heredity. Whereas the Shudras at the lowest rung of the ladder are made to serve the Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas, the outcastes, known as Dalits (officially, called the Scheduled Castes) remain even beyond the reach of the ladder.
In sophisticated urban-circles of upper-castes, people are often heard saying ‘caste does not matter to me’. The apparent caste-unawareness of the upper-caste largely stems from the imminent caste privileges of these upper-caste people. The very fact, the upper-caste people do not have to live through the subtle and blatant forms of discrimination based on their caste-identities means that they can afford to not know about its prevalence in present-day India.
Despite such obliviousness of caste in the urban domain, the filling of matrimonial columns and websites with caste-based requirements and seclusion of utensils of household helpers are not new to many of us! As a matter of fact, a joint survey conducted by the Lok Foundation and Oxford University reveals that 93 percent of the urban respondents with arranged marriages, only 5 percent has a family member married outside their religion, and over 70 percent of them in their twenties declared inter-caste marriages still unacceptable for their children.
“Caste and reservations: the two words are yoked together in public discourse. A conversation about caste in urban India ends up being about reservations. If the interlocutor happens to be privileged, he or she attacks the very idea as undermining “merit”. History, reason, and even the facts of the case are at issue so that a defender of reservations begins on the back foot, having first to explain the idea of merit as birth into privilege and the opportunities opened up by unearned social capital. The arguments that ensue have no neat endings”, remarks author Anand Teltumbde in his celebrated book Republic of Caste.
As per the 2018 report published by Amnesty International, as of 2016, at least 40,000 crimes against the Scheduled Castes were reported. Several among those incidents were reportedly perpetrated by the members of dominant castes against the Dalits for transgressing perceived caste-boundaries such as accessing public well and temple premises. The same year, Amnesty International also reported that 65 percent of the total cases of hate crimes in India are perpetrated against the Dalits.
The National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights activists claimed to end caste-based discrimination, by drawing the equivalence between caste and racial discrimination at the 2001 World Conference against Racism in Durban. The attempt remained unsuccessful due to the reservations of the Government of India.
An online Change.org petition with over 500 signatures urges to consider that the lives of minorities and Dalits matter too and can be treated at par with the occurrences of racial discrimination. The open letter pleads to the Prime Minister of India “…to definitely act on issues of caste discrimination and admit to the global community that caste discrimination is included in racial discrimination… condemn what happened to George Floyd on behalf of all of us from India”.
“It is a good time for people in India to understand and to point out to the government that racial discrimination is not only what you see in America. It is the same as how so-called ‘untouchables’ are treated in India.” said Henri Tiphagne of People’s Watch, the organization behind the petition.
Discrimination based on Skin-colour and Ethnic Identity
Colourism in India is an inevitable product of its colonial history. Despite gaining freedom, a sense of the superiority of light-colored skin-tones of the Aryan race has seeped into the Indian psyche.
Hence, as the part and parcel of society, it features not only on the matrimonial match-making businesses but also reflects in the fact that the Indian fairness cream industry stands at a whopping $450 million, as of 2016. Down the line, Indians are prone to drawing an awkward symmetry among the factors of skin color, caste, and social status. Though hard to generalize, it reflects an aversive mindset towards dark-skinned people especially belonging to the lower castes and class groups.
From Bollywood celebrities to cricket stars, the promotion of fairness products in India has always earned them easy money! In the lieu of the criticisms aimed at the fairness product market, Unilever has decided to rebrand its popular fairness cream ‘Fair & Lovely’ by dropping ‘Fair’ from its name. On a similar note, the matrimonial website Shaadi.com has removed the skin color filter on the website platform. While these are positive changes towards better inclusivity, the popular demand for such products/filters are still undented.
The recurrent patterns of attacks on Africans at the behest of the rumors of their drug peddling are not unfamiliar to us. In 2017, followed by the attack on five African students nearby the national capital, the African Heads of Mission called the attacks “xenophobic and racial”.
Even within India, people from South India hailing from the Dravidian race have been often mocked due to their dark skin-complexion. “If we were racist, why would we have all the entire south…Tamil, Kerala, Karnataka, and Andhra…why do we live with them? We have black people around us”-politician Tarun Vijay’s desperate yet ironic attempt at safeguarding India’s reputation on international television, followed by the attack on the Africans in 2017, has been a blatant reminder of India’s racist attitude.
Similar has been the exclusionary attitude that is prevalent in India for the people hailing from the North-eastern states of the country. In 2014, the killing of Nido Taniam, a 20-year-old student from Arunachal Pradesh at the heart of Delhi sparked a massive row against the racial discrimination of people from the states of North-East.
In fact, during the coronavirus outbreak in Delhi, people from India’s North-Eastern states have alleged racial targeting and labeling as “corona” owing to the similarity of their appearance with Chinese people. The reported genesis of the virus outbreak has been the Chinese city of Wuhan in early December 2019.
The reality of discrimination in India and around the world are highly intertwined and often intersectional. Multiple identities may come in consonance to form an unescapable oppressive edge. For example, the impact of discrimination may be manifold for a Dalit man hailing from a socio-economically poor background and a darker complexion and it may be even more if she is a ‘woman’.
It is a fairly complicated sociological purview and may not always appear as easy. But merely a constructive conversation may be greatly effective in order to at least become aware of ‘who’ one is! Knowing the ‘self’ is the first step towards that, even if that means plucking the sedimented prejudices out of it. In the end, all it requires is to acknowledge and be aware of what privileges one has and how to positively strive towards equity in the generations to come.
Agree to disagree with me? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.