In the late 1960s in Pakistan, during the uprising against Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s military dictatorship, the Left that led us infused the concept of ‘internationalism’ and ‘universal human rights’.

The concept of ‘cultural appropriation’ or segregation based on colour was alien to my teenaged comrades.

The concept of tribal identity or communities based on skin colour was a ‘reactionary’ concept - a primitive idea that we thought had been given a death knell by the 1948 UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights.

The student uprisings in France and the UK and the African struggles of Algeria and the Congo were part of us, as was the Vietnamese war against American occupation and the Prague spring that was crushed by Soviet tanks.

Some of us spent time in prison. Others gave their lives, shot dead during street protests. Our parents could not understand why we read Marx, Mandela and Mohandas Gandhi instead of Muhammad.

But we did recognize anti-Black racism as put forward by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and W. E. B. Du Bois, the American civil rights activist who was one of the founders of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.

It is in this context that I was shocked to read two recent news items.

The first was about delegates at a United Nations Agency, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) calling on the UN committee to ban the appropriation of Indigenous cultures.

As a person of Indian descent, does my wearing a suit infringe on the indigenous rights of Britons? How about Madeleine Slade, the British colleague of Gandhi, who wore a sari and covered her head as she accompanied The Mahatma on his 1931 voyage to Great Britain?

What is worrying is that this fashionable upper middle class segregationist tribalism has now found favour in Canadian universities where it is being celebrated as some latter-day civil rights movement turning Jim Crow on its head.

On Monday, the Toronto Star reported that two African-Canadian students at the University of Toronto, Jessica Kirk and Nasma Ahmed, were organizing U of T’s first-ever ‘Black graduation ceremony’, an event restricted to students of the right skin pigmentation.

No graduates of Scottish, Chinese, Indian or dare I say English ancestry will be permitted. What next, ‘No-White Days’ at Canadian universities?

The news was greeted among liberal circles and the Left as if Toronto had just discovered not one, but two Rosa Parks. As if the two women were reincarnations from apartheid-like Birmingham, Alabama students of 1963.

Wrong. This is not a step forward.

In Lenin’s words, it is ‘One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.’ Its political ignorance steeped in make-believe victimhood in a society that has made such shenanigans possible.

Today, as Professor Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto explains, “The black community in the United States is the 18th wealthiest community -- the 18th wealthiest nation on the planet.”

Both the NAACP and the Civil Rights Movement were open to Whites, Jews, and people of all colours. The U of T ‘Blacks-only’ graduation ceremony is an insult to Rosa Parks, Mandela, Dr King, Bobby Kennedy and Gandhi.

In fact, it is a vile attempt to divide us into races in a post-racist society. If the two organizers of the Blacks-only graduation do wish to make a point, then let them stand in solidarity with Black Darfuris today facing genocide at the hands of the Arab Janjaweed jihadi militias.