By Sandip Roy

It is good that Sushma Swaraj is “deeply pained over the shameful incident with a Tanzanian girl in Bengaluru”. It’s good that some people have been arrested for it.

However, it is imperative to call a spade a spade. This is not just an ‘incident’ any more.

When there was a spate of attacks on Indian students in Australia, it was racism, plain and simple. What happened in Bengaluru is nothing less. More than an incident, it exposes an old toxic seam of racism and xenophobia rooted in us. While Swaraj is right to try and reassure all foreign students, the racism that Africans face in India is particularly virulent.

African Elephant in the Room An enraged mob allegedly dragged a 21-year-old Tanzanian woman out of her car, beat her, stripped her and paraded her while local police stood by and watched. Then they torched the car she was in. Her crime? She was African. A Sudanese man had run over and killed a local resident. The Tanzanian girl paid the price. That’s not to say the horror here is that it was a case of mistaken national identity and some Sudanese man should have been beaten black and blue.

The Deccan Chronicle has reported about rising tensions between African students and local residents; African students complain about being called names, overcharged by taxis and rejected by landlords. Locals complain about African students who drink and party and drive rashly while police look the other way.

That actually makes them sound like some Bollywood stars we know —and love. But no one typecasts all stars for the sins of a few. But however real the sources of tension, there can be no excuse for a lynch mob. Not in Dadri. Not in Bengaluru. Not in Khirki Extension.

It’s never okay for a politician to lead a midnight raid on African residents even if he thinks he’s on a righteous crusade against prostitution and drugs as former Delhi law minister Somnath Bharti did in January 2014. It does not matter if the local community supports him.

Riots often have community support. It does not legitimise them. To stigmatise an entire community as criminal for the actions of some is racism. It’s baffling why it’s so hard for us to understand that at home when we easily understand it abroad. As Indians, we are quick to cry racism when called ‘dothead’ or ‘Paki’.

But we dismiss the racism in our carelessly tossed epithets like ‘hubshi’ as just a manner of speaking. We are blind to the prejudice buried at the heart of a compliment like ‘She’s beautiful even though she’s dark’. We can blame it on our erstwhile colonisers. But they have been gone almost 70 years and we cannot keep hanging all our hang-ups around their necks.

Mira Nair made Mississippi Masala in 1991about the scandal that erupts when a young Indian woman in the American South falls in love with a black man. Some 25 years later, the film should feel dated, but it does not.

It is easier to blame these incidents on criminal elements, lax policing, on drugs and alcohol, than on our racist streak. It’s easier to frame these stories into familiar narratives: the fight between a Congress government in Karnataka and the Bharatiya Janata Party at the Centre. Or the one-upmanship between Arvind Kejriwal and Narendra Modi.

Tear Those Racist Genes Even the lynching in Dadri could be placed into a ‘comfortable’ context of Hindu-Muslim intolerance that lets most of us off the hook. But when the intolerance is so ubiquitous that it rises above familiar fault lines of party, religion and caste, it becomes almost unremarkable. It’s just us. We are like that only.

Years ago, the perfectly well-meaning head of the Indian students association at my small university town in the American Midwest warned us, fresh-off-the-boat students, that in America, you have to be careful of two things. Don’t hold hands with a male friend, they will think you are gay. Don’t live on the east side of this town, that’s where the ‘blacks’ live. He would have bristled if he had been called racist or homophobic, and none of us called him on it either. We took it as good big brotherly advice.

It would be overreach to say that there is a dotted line that leads from that to the horror in Bengaluru. But there is a connection. And the longer we ignore it, or peg it as a ‘law and order’ problem, the more it festers.

Just consider this. While we have energetic social media arguments about whether an African American star like Beyoncé showing up in a Coldplay video in a ‘zardoozie’ of an outfit, all hennaed-out as a Bollywood rani, is an act of cultural appropriation or not, some of our fellow citizens are stripping and thrashing Africans who live in our midst because in the eyes of a mob, one dark-skinned African is as good as another.

There is something truly rotten about that. This is our heart of darkness and we have to own up to it. We are like that only.