What kind of curry are they ‘bashing’ anyway – a north Indian roghan josh, a Sri Lankan seeni sambol, a Bengali machher jhol or a Kashmiri rista? —AFP

RACISM is not about targeting a diversity of Asians or blacks or Jews by white beer louts, whether as state policy or as part of deep-rooted social prejudice, which can be prompted by a variety of factors.

There is a verifiable tendency among those at the receiving end of entrenched racism in one part of the world to emulate their tormentors elsewhere.

Israel, for example, came about as a European solution to centuries-old anti-Semitic practices that got honed into a pseudo science in Nazi Germany. However, the unspeakable bigotry of Europe seemed to only embolden rightwing Jews, or Zionists, to inflict the bias they suffered at the hands of William Shakespeare, in a subtle way, or Martin Luther and Adolf Hitler, more brutally, on a new quarry in another context. Israel’s atrocities against Palestinian Arabs, who comprise both Muslims and Christians, testify to the prevalence of an unacceptably gory racial relay race.

Mahatma Gandhi campaigned against racism in colonial South Africa, and he won a few significant battles there for the Indian diaspora. In the process he brought together Hindus and Muslims settled there in a collective cause. He then returned to India where he instantly became a key leader of the national movement against British rule.

And yet Gandhi failed to cleanse far too many of his own people of their own subcutaneous penchant for racism, which lingers on in a time warp in South Africa and at home. An Indian student of history who was returning last week from New York to New Delhi told me about the racism of an Indian woman traveller who shifted to a seat next to her from the assigned one where a black woman would be her companion.

You would have thought that since the blacks and the coloured people of South Africa were both at the receiving end of the Apartheid regime, they would share a degree of fellowship as comrades. In practice this was not entirely the case. There were some Indians who did join the black people’s struggle against white racism, but there were others who preferred to serve the Apartheid regime to suppress the black majority.

In fact, a special category was created for complicit Indians in South Africa’s notorious tricameral parliament, where they had no voting rights but were still considered a notch above the black majority, who continued to be denied the false cover of even that third-rate parliamentary system.

Offended by the inclination of so many Indians to join Pik Botha’s tricameral parliament a black South African composer wrote a song, which portrayed the country’s Indian population as abusing black people and being more racist than the whites.

A barrage of criticism led to Mbongeni Ngema’s song AmaNdiya – Zulu for Indians – being banned by South Africa’s radio stations and record shops. But it took a while before Nelson Mandela got Ngema to apologise for the lyrics. This anti-black syndrome is not peculiar to Indians. It affects other South Asian countries too, notably Pakistan.

At home Indians are just as divided between high principles and moral subversion. Mahashweta Devi single-handedly brought down the Left Front in West Bengal, once the conscience-keepers of public morality, to its knees by opposing the land-grab in Nandigram against the state’s poor peasants. In her words Articles 1 to 30 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights find no resonance in Indian society.

‘Whatever I say here, is born of decades of day-to-day experience of India’s poor,’ the octogenarian writer said in a lecture on India’s tribal society, a variant of Australia’s Aborigines as far as their treatment goes.

‘Theirs is a faceless existence. They are in India from ancient times, for thousands of years, yet mainstream India has continually refused to recognise them. In the tribal society there is no caste division, no dowry system, divorce and widow remarriage is socially sanctioned. They are, after centuries of oppression and neglect, still so civilised! Yet we have simply refused to recognise their worth, have made them bonded slaves in the unorganised sectors, have evicted them from land wherever we have founded industries, or built dams.’ Is this racism, if not then why did we slam the Australians for mistreating the Aborigines?

There can be no denying the fact that Australia has its share of practising racists and beer louts. There was a time when England and Canada were notorious for Paki-bashing, which frequently, and contrary to the implicit suggestion, meant any South Asian target, including, of course, Indians.

A recent upsurge in attacks by white youths in which Indian students were beaten, robbed and abused in Australian suburbs (and on one occasion by some Lebanese expatriates too) is akin to the Paki-bashing of yore – except that it is now called Curry-bashing and seems to apply exclusively to the targeting of Indians.

This would call for an objective sociological analysis. Are there specific categories of Indians that are attacked by the alleged louts? Does it have to do with the economic meltdown in that country – whereby Indians are perceived to be better off than their Australian counterparts in terms of jobs, among other coveted resources? Why are Pakistanis and Bangladeshis spared the ordeal, when they were foremost among the targets in the Paki-bashing days? How are they treated?

We know that Pakistanis are picked out for separate treatment, as was on display recently in the mysteriously unexplained terror plot scare in London whereby the students are now awaiting possible deportation orders. Does it mean that Indians and Pakistanis will fight their battles separately against the collective might of mutating racism? I do not agree with the Indian editor who bragged churlishly that he did not see anything in common between Indians and Pakistanis.

In any case, for all practical purposes churlishness is not the answer to the problem at hand. Innocent Sikhs were targeted in New York because the average American would not know the difference between them and the turbaned followers of Al Qaeda. It is how the world (including the white beer louts) perceives us that counts.

I can bet my last penny that the lumpen youth who targeted Indians in Melbourne would not know the difference between a Pakistani or a Bangladeshi, an Indian or a Sri Lankan. And what kind of curry are they ‘bashing’ anyway – a north Indian roghan josh, a Sri Lankan seeni sambol, a Bengali machher jhol or a Kashmiri rista? There is something wrong about the entire narrative so far.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

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