Why government gaffes have much in common with a racist lynch mob

In the pecking order of proud prejudices within India, Afrophobia - or the racism towards black-skinned African nationals (there are fair-skinned Africans too - such as the whites of South Africa) - is perhaps the very rock bottom of the dirt barrel.

The African, also called the hubshi, the kalua, the blackie, yes, even the Negro, is so utterly unacceptable in the current Indian imaginarium that his/her humiliation, denigration or even death leaves the government confounded rather than vindicated. Unlike Islamophobia, which the Sangh Parivar can reap and sow, fear of the black skin is something that the Virat Hindu, more often than not, covertly shares with the nicer complexioned Indian Muslim. The deep antipathy towards blackness - much like the blankness on Africa - is therefore perpetuated via a blanket denial.

Hence, when a young African man, a 24-year-old Congolese national called Masonda Ketanda Olivier, is beaten to death by a frenzied mob over something as routine as haggling over auto fare in the heart of New Delhi, the government is more discomfited than horrified, or even a bit saddened. 

The hate crime, the latest in a string of such racially-motivated acts of brutalisation, doesn't send the saffronised power corridors of Delhi into a tizzy, but produces that awkward moment when it has to deal with this "embarrassment", fix this pinprick to its Bharat Mata ki jai chanting chest, taint somewhat its "ek nayi subah" of imagined greatness and glory.

It's only a minor hiccup, and certainly not a malaise that must be carefully examined and treated, as far as the current Indian political dispensation, which boasts of having an electoral hold over 43 per cent of the demography, is concerned.

Whether it's the mind-boggling violence against a Tanzanian woman student in Bangalore, or Aam Aadmi Party's then Delhi law minister Somnath Bharti-led attack on Khirki Extension's African residents, or critically injuring a student from Burundi in Jalandhar, Punjab - India's racism register is spilling over its pernicious pages.

There's an idiotic incomprehension and rank ignorance at the heart of it all, so much so that even the minister of external affairs, Sushma Swaraj, is compelled to tweet (the one-stop answer to all public relations highs and lows) that MEA would "launch a sensitisation programme to reiterate that such incidents against foreign nationals embarrass the country".

When I came to know about the unfortunate killing of a Congo national in Delhi, we directed stringent action against the culprits.

— Sushma Swaraj (@SushmaSwaraj) May 25, 2016

On the other hand, MoS external affairs, the inimitable VK Singh, has been busy brushing off the racist murder of Masonda Ketanda Olivier by a lynchmob as a mere "minor scuffle which escalated". The Union culture and tourism minister, Mahesh Sharma, has gone one step further to categorically declare that hate crimes and serial racist assaults notwithstanding, India is doing perfectly fine because "even Africa is not safe".

This, despite marking a customary "Africa Day" or inviting as many as 52 dignitaries, among them several heads of states, from the African Union to talk trade with India.

Clearly, Africa still exists as a "dark continent" on the map, as a lamentable continuum of the most despicable stereotypes, in the minds of most Indians, who are increasingly obtaining their twisted ideas of the world from a steady diet of the unsteady social media, that has tangled the past into a pretzel of mala fide misinformation.  

And instead of building newer bridges of awareness and shared cultural ties to rectify the situation, our elected representatives prefer to hide behind the fig leaves of denial, proclaiming loudly that racism is non-existent in the hypernationalist 21st century India not because it's deeply discriminatory but because it's "embarrassing".

Though Swaraj's tweets fare marginally better than either Sharma's or Singh's, it's, regrettably, far too cosmetic to have any real sensitisation impact, other than possibly resulting in perhaps yet another shindig that will be paraded and added to the list of Modi government's airy achievements.

This historical tone deafness has been brought to fore not only in the same old repetitions of rehearsed racism, reading out the tired script of Afrophobia that the martial Hindu now shares with the white supremacist in Trumpland or even in Xi Jinping's China, it is also most glaringly highlighted when the government, in its obsessive bid to self-celebrate, chooses a key anthem of the Civil Rights Movement era protest marches of the 1950's-60's as a conclusion to a six-hour-long jamboree to showcase this regime's rarefied feats.   

This, barely hours after Olivier's killing, just a few kilometres from the site of that shindig at India Gate.

More than insensitivity, this is the fallout of a dogged refusal to understand the historical origins of current discriminations. As Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay asserts, that "Hum Honge Kamyab", the Hindi translation of the Civil Rights decades gospel hymn "We Shall Overcome", is picked, shorn of its raging history of anti-colonial solidarity and anti-racist stance, to highlight the successes of a regime that has been constantly criticised for its extreme intolerance towards religious, caste and coloured minorities, speaks of a staggering ignorance and a tendency to flatten out the uneven and uncomfortable terrains of pre- and post-independence international movements against British and European imperialism.

That such governmental gaffes have much in common with a lynch mob that kills a man because his skin colour makes it uncomfortable cannot be denied any longer.

It is hardly moved when scores of black men and women make it clear that they want to take to the streets and protest this growing climate of fear and insecurity in which their bodies are no longer safe.

If it cannot guarantee safety, security and dignity for African nationals in its own borders, then on what basis will it complain when an Indian gets brutalised in US, UK or Australia?

The truth, however, is that India does not want to complain.

Because India now wants to free itself of "playing the victim" - that old Nehruvian game of harping on the colonial trope by acknowledging its ravages, political, socioeconomic and ethical, on South Asia, Africa, Latin America - it cannot, by any means, club itself with the league of victim nations and continents. In fact, India wants to believe that the Virat Hindu, by the sheer dint of his software-facilitated soft power, has magically risen above this ignominious gang of black and brown bodies that can still be victimised.

Hence, even though the routine discriminations against Sikhs, Hindus or Muslims of Indian origin will continue unabated in countries such as the US, UK or Australia, the Indian regime would deal with the issue in exactly the same manner: by denying its gravity, by underplaying the old structural antipathies and emphasising the present-day euphemisms such as "cooperation", "commercial ties", or bilateral exchanges.

Bodies such as Masonda Ketanda Olivier's, or Stephen Lawrence's, or Trayvon Martin's, are reminders of India's own current complicity within this new regimen of global discrimination. As cheerleaders for Donald Trump come out of the Indian closets, so does their brazen disregard for the hard-fought rules of equal rights and respect.

The ever dispensable black bodies, ever brutalised, ever forgotten, ever dismissed as inessential to History, is exactly what Kendrick Lamar, easily the most talented rap artist in world, sings about.

Unfortunately, in the larger scheme of things, India now wants to be seen alongside those building the walls, be it on Mexican or Palestinian lands; not the ones trying to conserve the painstakingly built bridges of memory, love, anti-racist and secular solidarity.