Govt must abandon righteous denial
Not just Tarun Vijay, the former Bharatiya Janata Party MP, but most Indians would be horrified to learn that a conference of American foreign service officials held in New Delhi in 1949 recommended that as many black diplomats as possible should be posted to newly independent India. They would have been shocked to hear Larry Wilson, the American consul in Bombay, “a big, genial-looking café-au-lait-coloured Negro”, whisper awestruck to Saunders Redding, a black writer on a State Department lecture tour, “Man, we’re dealing with coloured people in a coloured country!”
The conviction of being a white Aryan nation, which lies at the core of the many layers of complexes in the Indian psyche, is part of a profound disinterest in what others think, feel or say. As the German-born United States ambassador, John Gunther Dean, put it with surprising perspicacity, foreigners are irrelevant to India because India is wrapped up in India. An outward-looking country like Britain recognises failings in its dealings with outsiders and passes a Race Relations Act to ensure justice. Although Article 15 of the Constitution does prohibit discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth, the law hasn’t been codified on the subject. Despite brutal attacks on Africans, the persecution of many northeasterners, and Mr Vijay’s obnoxious remark about “black” South Indians, the racist charge is righteously rejected, especially by zealots in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and allied organisations.
The saffron brigade isn’t alone at fault. It might be most arrogant and intolerant but the failing cuts across the political spectrum. When Loy Henderson, an early US ambassador to India, cabled Washington in 1948 to warn that Jawaharlal Nehru was “constitutionally unhappy” unless he was leading a global union of coloured peoples, he may not have realised that Nehru would not relish his global constituency being limited to only coloured people. In 2014, Delhi’s erstwhile law minister, Somnath Bharti of the Aam Aadmi Party, led a police raid against “prostitution” against the residents of Khirki Extension where a substantial number of citizens of Nigeria, Uganda, Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo lived. Several African women were humiliated and made to urinate publicly for drug tests while a video reportedly showed Bharti urging the police to arrest them.
More conventional Americans than Dean cannot grasp the dogged attitude to race and colour in a land that calls its caste system varna (colour) or the pathetic longings of those who identify India with only Aryavarta which the Manusmṛti defines as “the tract between the Himalaya and the Vindhya ranges, from the Eastern Sea (Bay of Bengal) to the Western Sea (Arabian Sea)”. The US diplomats who recommended sending only blacks to India would have known better if they had read of Bhagat Singh Thind, a Sikh immigrant who unsuccessfully petitioned for citizenship claiming to be “a descendant of the Aryans of India, belonging to the Caucasian race (and, therefore) white...”. Rejecting his plea, the court ruled that although Indians might be Aryans, they were not white as Americans understood the term.
There was another misunderstanding when P.V. Narasimha Rao visited the US in 1994. He was speaking at Harvard, and 36 rooms had been booked for him and his 50-strong entourage, including 25 Special Protection Group members, at the Four Seasons Hotel. Fearing Khalistani, rebel Kashmiri or Tamil Tiger assassins, the Prime Minister’s security chief asked the hotel management not to allow any South Asian near him. Apparently, one non-white was the same as another for the hotel’s general manager who decided, according to the New York Times, that “no African-American could carry (Narasimha Rao’s) bags, no Asian could clean his room, no Latinos could serve him his food.” He “had to be served by whites only, American or European.” White Americans thought this presumptuous. Non-whites were outraged. An African-American night bellman and porter were assigned other duties and each given $178 in lieu of the tips they might have received from the Indian party complained of discrimination.
The affair became a cause célèbre. It enabled the Americans to distract attention from their own prejudices and take a moral stand against India. The New York Times moralised that “the US government has an interest in knowing whether a foreign head of state has been fostering racial discrimination here.” Michael T Duffy, chairman of the Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination, thought the episode “too outrageous to be true,” especially since the US was celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling dismantling segregation. Perversely, the Tarun Vijays and the BJP would have been gratified by the controversy which, ironically, presented India as an ultra-white entity that would not tolerate coloured people. The New York Times version, mistaken though it was, appeared to bear out the RSS-BJP illusion of a white country that condescendingly tolerates the so-called black people of South India. One can understand now why so many Nagas, Manipuris, Mizos and others feel unwelcome and insecure in other parts of the country. Africans in our midst are stereotyped as drug addicts, drug peddlers and – worse still – cannibals.
India explained to the Americans that it had not asked for discrimination “on the basis of race or colour” and the aggrieved porters dropped all charges. The hotel apologised and promised a $75,000 package of reforms including educational programmes on anti-discrimination legislation, more minority group managers, weekly discussions with minority workers and a brandnew consultant for diversity training. Eventually, the commission pronounced itself satisfied.
Another common misconception is that the situation on the ground matters less than what a celebrity says about it. When a 28-year-old Congolese student was beaten to death in Vasant Kunj in New Delhi in May 2016, Sushma Swaraj intoned piously, “India is the land of Gandhi and Buddha… we can never have a racist mindset”. No one seems to have told her that India gave short shrift to both seers: a Hindu murdered Gandhi, and Hindu monarchs like Ajatashatru of Magadha stamped out Buddhism with repressive force. Similarly, the recent attacks on Africans prompted the external affairs ministry to imply that such violence was impossible because of “the deep belief of the government and people of India (in) vasudhaiva kutumbakam (the whole world is one family)”. True, most Indians would eagerly embrace whites as close kin, but many caste Hindus are unlikely to allow black Africans (and north-easterners) any position more exalted than that of servants.
Perhaps education, prosperity and greater interaction with the world will cure Indians of a blinkered view that is really rooted in ignorance and which generates delusions. But there can be no correction without summary deterrent punishment for offenders. That means the government must abandon its present stance of righteous denial and admit a serious flaw in Indian society that prevents us from seeing ourselves as we really are.