The week a Tanzanian woman was stripped, beaten and paraded naked in Bengaluru , an African restaurant situated in the basement of a south Delhi building in a congested middle-class colony appears almost deserted.The owner of the restaurant, John, is about six-feet-five and built like a professional basketball player. As he watches a Korean action flick on the television, all by himself, John — who is from Nigeria — says he is scared.The problem, he says, is not that he cannot take care of the situation should a mob decide to target him. The problem is that, if that happened, he would not be able to restrain himself any longer, having faced racist abuses and violence for the last three years he spent in India. He is scared of how mad he might get.The last major attack happened when he was in Tirupur, Tamil Nadu. “I was returning from the market and a group gathered around me and started abusing me. Then they hit me and I let that go as well,” says John, who draws a parallel between the manner in which Dalits are still attacked and persecuted in some parts of the country.“They treat me like a half-caste here. If I raise this hand, they will die. But then my African people here will blame me for having caused another controversy and may even ostracise me. So I bear this humiliation in silence,” says the athletic African in a baritone.As is nearly always the case, there was no provocation from his side. All he has to do is to walk on the street to be greeted “Ey Kaalu”. Recently, a child went missing from one of the homes neighbouring his restaurant.Soon a group of people from the neighbourhood barged in with policemen and 10 people at the restaurant, including him were detained. “They kept us at the station for a night, beat us up before releasing us the next day by when the child had returned home.”John does not want to provide more details about himself or get photographed for this article because he feels he could become the target of a racist attack any time. The Nigerian says that there is now agreement among the people from Africa that India is the worst country for them. He cannot understand this behaviour as there are thousands of Indians who live in Nigeria and they are never targeted by the local population there.Cut to Khirki Extension in south Delhi, where, in an apartment in which it would be difficult to place more than three table tennis boards, Somalian refugees Mohammed Abdul Rehman , 23 and Abdullah Idris, 16, share space with their uncle.The flat betrays the arbitrariness in their lives with half the space being occupied by dumped furniture and the remaining partitioned area — where they live — amounting to nothing more than a couch, a television, a table with enough space to place two mugs and a laptop. Almost every visible object in the flat is layered with dust.Rehman came to India eight years ago. He says after having dealt with incessant hostility for a few years, he decided to learn Hindi in order to ingratiate himself with the locals but that has not worked. Rehman is a better speaker of the language than many Indians whose mother tongue is not Hindi. “Yeh log kya kya nahin bulate hain mujhe…‘kaalu’, ‘bandar’, maa behen ki gaali dete hain aur phir thappad marte hai (they abuse me and call me blackie, monkey , and also use derogatory language and slap me).”The curly-haired youngster says that now that he has learnt Hindi, life has become more miserable since “you can understand the insults word by word”. According to his cousin Idris, it is difficult to even walk on the street. “If we go to a store, they stare at us.And they always attack us in groups.” Adds Mohammed: “You can recognise the hate in their eyes.” Rehman also says that in his country, Indians are welcomed “but here we are treated like monkeys. It will take thousands of years for Indians to understand how this affects us”.Abdullah also makes a connection between racism and caste but insists that Africans are treated far worse than Dalits who become victims of caste-related violence.“Yes, there are some things common between race and caste discrimination. But they cannot treat even Dalits in India the way they do to us because they do have rights. We are not even from India and we are treated as if we have no rights,” says Idris.Many Africans that ET Magazine tried to speak to just stared back harshly or replied harshly that they wanted to be left alone. There is palpable sense of anger against the attacks among almost every member of the African community.Dalit activists suggest that the colour bias is largely on account of the fact that India has had the caste system in place for about 2,000 years and the Dalits and tribals who were placed at the bottom of the hierarchy are for the most dark-skinned.“When I see a black person, I see my own image — in him. I see a Dalit. Caste is not race but the impact is similar,” says Dalit activist Chandra Bhan Prasad.Prasad adds that there are a few factors that are common in the humiliation still meted out to Dalits in some parts of the country. “Here I speak from my experience: a landlord’s 10-year-old boy would call elderly Dalit people by their name to give orders and they would call him babuji in return. They (those who ill-treat people based on caste identity) cannot easily differentiate between a Dalit and non-Dalit in an urban context. But (for those who instigate attacks) you can find a Dalit in a black person easily on account of the skin tone,” says Prasad arguing that there is an inherent feeling of racial superiority against dark-skinned people in India.Actor Nandita Das , who has campaigned against discrimination against the darkskinned, says that she has had directors and camera persons telling her that “it would be good if I made my skin lighter as I was playing an educated upper-class woman! If I get told all this, despite most people knowing my stand, I wonder what the other dark women are subjected to. Without exception, I have stood my ground, as I really do feel comfortable in my skin…literally!” Suraj Yengde, a Dalit activist who is also an associate at the department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University , says that he has seen people from India talk disparagingly of Africans even in their own country.“Many middle-class upwardly mobile professionals (mostly from privilege castes) working in Africa make fun of or either have a strong feeling towards Africans — usually negative — calling them names like kaale, dehati, good for nothing, and so many that I cannot write it here. Africans are sort of untouchables for them. On the contrary, if a Dalit professional goes to Africa, they try to find allies in Africans.” Yengde, who is based out of Johannesburg in South Africa to pursue his PhD, says the reason he went to Africa was to engage with Africans.“I wanted to learn more about African societies, not necessarily with the stereotypical image that Europe has of Africa, but to find common ground between citizens from India who have faced caste atrocities and Africans.”The Harvard scholar says he finds it odd that in the past the Indian government has blocked debates over caste issues at the United Nations (UN).In the early 2000s, for instance, the Indian government objected to the notion that discrimination by caste is the same as racism, which was brought up at the UN Conference against Racism in Durban.That, however, didn’t stop the UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination passing a resolution against caste in August 2002 at a UN convention in Geneva. However, seven years later at the same conference, the efforts to treat caste-based discrimination at par with racial bias did not yield dividends perhaps because the issue of caste is difficult for an international audience to comprehend.Those who object to equating caste with race point out that as different castes can be of the same race, caste biases do not qualify as racial discrimination; also, they contend that categorisation by race is a Western concept, unlike caste.Yet, for a country that was righteously indignant about apartheid in South Africa, the inability to deal with its own form of discrimination may smack of denial of hypocritical proportions.