A look at racism in medical hub, India

 “You get into the lift and they all come out,” explains this Kenyan we shall call Jane because she did not want to be identified. Jane accompanied her sister to India for a medical check-up. She says she and her sister encountered racism firsthand at an Indian hospital with a major international wing.

“You’d expect that the people there are at least trained to be professional or used to seeing blacks around,” Jane tells The Standard.

She said they would often be deliberately skipped as they waited in line to see the doctor.

“You’ve been in the queue for an hour to see a doctor, then someone walks up to his secretary, speaks in Hindi, and then you’re suddenly being skipped,” she says.

Jane’s is not an isolated incident of racism in India. In March, five Nigerian men were attacked by a mob in India’s Noida city after a 19-year-old Indian student died of a drug overdose.

Media reports stated that the mob accused Nigerians of supplying drugs in the area. The men were also accused of cannibalism. In January 2016, a Tanzanian woman was stripped and paraded around naked in Bangalore. The previous year, a woman of African origin was gang-raped in a moving car in East Delhi. A year ago, a Congolese man was beaten to death over an auto-rickshaw dispute.

While Eugene, who visited India for a medical check-up, did not encounter racism in the southern part of India, the north told a different story.

Boarded plane

North Indians often stared at Eugene and his family and tried to sneak photographs of them. “They kept trying to touch my sister’s and mother’s hair,” Eugene tells The Standard.

In 2015, Cheryl Tikolo boarded a flight from Chennai to New Delhi. She found that her seat was broken and informed the flight attendant, who told her she would be allowed to change seats once everyone had boarded the plane. An elderly couple of Asian origin walked in and frowned when they saw her.

The two called the flight attendant and were told their problem would be sorted out. Cheryl later noticed that the elderly couple had been moved while she had been told that there were no more seats.

India’s anti-blackness has historic significance and dates back to the years before the British Raj and Gandhi’s time.

It is India’s 2,000 year-old-caste system that perhaps has played a big role in shaping the mindset and perceptions of many Indians. Indian author and activist Rita Banerji spoke to The Standard about India’s caste system and the history of the country’s racism.

India’s caste system, which dates back to the Vedas (ancient Hindu scripture), is a hierarchy based on colour, with a colour assigned to each caste.

“Brahmins were white, Kshatriyas - the warriors, were brown, Vaishyas or the businessmen were yellow, and the Shudras or slaves - the lowest caste - were black,” explains Banerji. The Vedas were brought into India by invading light-skinned Indo-European Aryan groups from central Asia.

“The so-called Aryan groups violently attacked the indigenous population and referred to them in disdainfully racist terms with descriptions such as ‘bull-lipped’ and ‘flat-nosed’ and equated black with evil,” she explains. “The vicious racism was shocking for me,” adds Banerji. She has talked about India’s racism in her book, Sex and Power.

Despite India’s history of racism, academics blame the British “for teaching India racism” and many contemporaries refer to it as a colonial hangover.

“I do think that historians in India, even the left liberal ones, have done us a great disfavour by selectively choosing to ignore this history of racism in their zeal to create a magnificent picture of our ancient history and past,” Banerji says.

The people of India take pride in their ancestors, which may be the reason many of them overlook the country’s history of racism.

“Maybe that’s what makes it difficult even for eminent historians to really look this truth in the eye and talk about whether racism stems from the roots of the caste system, or even the terribly racist role Gandhi played in creating a colour line,” says Banerji.

Racism and anti-blackness has made its way to contemporary India through Bollywood as well as the Indian beauty industry. Bollywood has a tendency of portraying most of its African characters as either drug lords or criminals.

The beauty industry spreads the message of anti-blackness with its sale of a wide range of fairness products.

“The country’s obsession with fair skin is no secret. We have fairness creams, fairness face wash, fairness soaps, stuff to make your underarms fair,” writes editor Anurag Verma of Huffington Post India in his article, Why Are So Many Hindi Songs Written On Fair-Skinned Women and So Few On Darker Skin?’

India’s External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, issued a statement following the attack on the Nigerian students, stating: “The attack cannot be called racist before any probe is completed.”

Indian youth and activists showed their solidarity with Africans. Many took to the Association of African Students Facebook page to offer their apologies and show their support.

“Sorry for any misbehaviour from our side,” wrote Satyam Bharti. “It is shameful to see to see such attacks in India. These are not reflective of Indian values,” wrote another Facebook user.

Others expressed their frustration at the double standards of India’s racism which condemned the killing of an Indian engineer in Kansas while seeing nothing wrong with racist attacks on Africans in India.

Indian students took to the streets of Bangalore to protest against the Tanzanian woman’s attack.

With the outrage expressed by India’s youth and activists, there is perhaps a beacon of hope that change is on the way. Slowly, but surely.