Radhika Iyengar - Are Indians racist?
For him, everything
proves everything else. The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes
across, confirms his lunacy: Greil Marcus in The dustbin of history
See notes on ideology, below - DS
Students from various
African countries residing in India carry a palpable, visceral fear. In January
2016, an angry mob set a Tanzanian woman’s car on fire in response to a
Sudanese running over an Indian woman in Bengaluru. Back in 2014, the capital’s
law minister, Somnath Bharti, led a police raid on the African community
residing in Delhi’s Khirki Extension, under the belief that it was a drugs and
prostitution camp. The African women belonging to various countries including
Uganda, Nigeria and Congo were arrested and humiliated, many of them compelled
to urinate in public for drug tests. India has a racism
problem, particularly against Africans, and it is in denial. This racism does
not stop at Africans alone. At its most fundamental level, our racism is
essentially, a “dark skin” syndrome.
If there was any
doubt, former BJP MP Tarun Vijay put all confusion to rest. In a panel
discussion on Al Jazeera’s The Stream, the former MP who heads the
India-African Parliamentary Friendship Group, spoke about how Indians could not
possibly be racist, since they were once victims of racism under the British
rule. When an African student on the panel, Mina Wumbey, commented that Indians
attacked Africans solely because of the colour of their skin, Vijay appeared
calm and distant. As a perfunctory remark, he conveyed that he could understand
Mumbey’s anguish, but soon after went on to rubbish her accusation. “To say
that Indians can be racist is the most vicious thing,” he told Wumbey. It
appeared as though he was taking a personal umbrage to what she had said.
It’s important to note
the strong, loaded adjective Vijay used to describe her acquisition – ‘vicious’
– a strategic maneuver to shift the focus from the main issue and turn the
tables – in this case, against the Africans. But Vijay’s disrespect
is not limited to Africans alone. To assuage the rage held by the Africans in
India, Vijay tried to build appalling equivalencies between them and those who
belonged to South India. “If we were racist,” he argued, “why would we have all
the entire south, which is completely – you know Tamil (sic), you
know Kerala, you know Karnataka and Andhra – why would we live with them? We
have black people around us.”
His response is a dangerous affirmation and
double-edged too. First, it is an egregious insult on the people from the
South, some of whom are dark-skinned; and underscores how deeply entrenched the
idea of ‘dark-skin’ is in our psyche. Second, it alarmingly reiterates the
government’s unwavering stance that Indians aren’t racist. Those who challenge
this stance are often ridiculed and then questioned about their patriotism – a
classic modus operandi employed by the government in the recent past. Keep in
mind, Vijay is a spokesperson of the BJP. Photographer Mahesh Shantaram has
befriended, closely followed and photographed Africans living in India . His
series titled, The African Portraits, which has been widely
exhibited, has tried to use his work as the means to give a voice, an agency to
his African friends.
When Shantaram openly challenged Vijay’s default
assumption that Indians weren’t racist, Vijay’s first attack was to question
whether Shantaram was Indian. Shantaram pulled out his passport to confirm his
nationality. Then, Vijay went on to berate Shantaram for counter-arguing him. “You are denying your
whole nation, you’re denying your ancestry, you’re denying your history, you’re
denying your culture and you’re trying to be ‘good’. That’s very bad,” Vijay
told Shantaram, in a paternalistic, authoritative tone. “Don’t spread poison
and divisionist (sic) attitude,” he continued. “It’s every
easy to spread poison, it’s very difficult to start healing. This is a moment
when we must be healing the wounds, occurred because of any kind of bad
behaviour or mistake.”
Vijay’s language holds
a magnifying glass over the government’s indifference to the situation – he
calls it a “mistake”. This incident however, cannot be trivialized as a mere
mistake. It is a grievous crime and should be looked at as such. What Vijay
carries is a hazy vision of “healing”, for healing can only begin when the
country, more importantly its government, accepts the problem that challenges
the very essence of humanity. Unless we accept the problem, there can be no
solution. Until the government remains in denial, the attacks against Africans
will continue.
http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/web-edits/are-indians-racist-ask-tarun-vijay/Extract from A matter of time - An essay on ideology and terror
Arendt (Origins.. pp. 606-607) suggests
three elemental features in all ideological thinking; the element of motion, of
emancipation from reality, and of logical consistency deriving from an assumed
first premise. The first develops as a concern with history and generally comes
with a claim to understand the past and calculate the future. The present is seen
as fleeting and unstable. All ideologically driven action is calculated in
order to ‘construct’ the future. The calculation could be in the name of or for
the sake of the Class, the Nation or the People, but in each case, the entity
deemed to be the Subject of History is in perpetual motion, developing by some
inbuilt law (known to the wise leaders) towards a glorious future. The second element
(emancipation from reality) implies the training of followers in the habit of
dismissing, ignoring or explaining away all aspects of experience that disturb
the ideological world-view. For example, if X act of terror is damaging to the
‘image’ of this or that vigilante group, the truth about event X will not be
addressed. Rather, it will be re-cast as an enemy plot; and if a massacre of
innocents has taken place, the blame for it will be shown to rest with the
innocents themselves, or their ‘community’. In one blow, the consistency of the
world-view will be upheld and the purity of the radical ‘movement’ maintained.
This relates to the third element - of consistency, or working with inexorable
logic from a first premise. This could be a sweeping statement about the
inevitable victory of the preferred Subject (class, nation, religious
community). Once established, everything that happens serves merely to confirm
the premise – if there are no pink elephants to be seen, it is because we are
snapping our fingers to keep them away.. and so forth. To these three elements,
I would add a fourth, the central place of calculated violence (what Albert
Camus called crimes of logic, or historical murder), without which the
ideological cause in question cannot be advanced. (From A matter of time - An essay on ideology and terror)
********
Extract from Leszek Kołakowski; Modernity on endless trial; (1990); Chapter 20. Why an Ideology Is Always Right; p 233-4: It seems at first
glance that ideologies enjoy the same privilege of immunity to facts and the same
proficiency in absorbing them, since the frame of meaning they give to human destiny
is as unfalsifiable as the meaningful order of the world in the believer's perception.
If I decide that the whole of history consists of acts of class struggle and that
all human aspirations and actions are to be explained in terms of this struggle,
then there is no way in which this principle could be conceivably refuted… Needless
to say, once you decide that world history is defined by the struggle between Jews
and Aryans, your interpretation will be as
infallibly verified by all the facts as is the theory that whatever people do is
'ultimately' reducible to class interest, or the theory that all events, both natural
and human-caused, reveal the divine guidance of the universe. The intellectual
attraction of an ideology with universalistic pretensions is precisely that it is
so easy. Once you learn it, which you can always do in no time and with no effort,
everything is given sense and you are the happy owner of a key that unlocks all
the secrets of the world… (ideologies) live on bad faith in that they pretend to
offer an explanation of the world in the very acts of bigotry and fanaticism. They
want the facts to confirm them in the same way that scientific hypotheses are confirmed,
being thereby compelled to distort and conceal unfavorable facts. They are supposed
to possess absolute truth and to be testable at the same time. While religions have
often had recourse to lying, this is not an inherent part of their cognitive status,
since their content is essentially unverifiable; ideologies, on the other hand,
carry a built-in necessity of lying and cannot survive otherwise. Unlike religions,
ideologies are not beyond science; they are positively anti-scientific.
Thus the prowess of each
in absorbing all the possible facts is different. Ideologies are not only bound
to devise techniques of lying, but when the facts cannot be concealed, they also
need a special psychological technique that prevents believers from seeing
these facts, or shapes a peculiar form of double consciousness within which facts
may be not only dismissed as irrelevant but also actually denied.
More on ideology:
Also see
EVGENIA LEZINA - The revival of ideology in Russia
The Republic of Silence – Jean-Paul Sartre on The Aftermath of War and Occupation
The Republic of Silence – Jean-Paul Sartre on The Aftermath of War and Occupation
