Opinion Minimum city
Delhi’s casual racism needs to be recognised and rejected.
Delhi, city of migrants, a megapolis made up of the lives and stories of the people who pour into it from various places, should have been an unlikely place for individuals to be branded outsiders, and attacked for being different. Yet, at a metro station this Sunday, a violent mob chanting nationalist slogans bore down on three African students. While the three boys were badly injured and there is ample video footage of the incident, no one has been arrested yet. It was left to the ambassadors of Gabon and Burkina Faso, the home countries of the students, to urge a “fair investigation”. Incidents such as these lay bare the crude, unquestioned racism that thrives in the city.
The metro attack happened in the same week that former Delhi law minister and AAP leader Somnath Bharti was chargesheeted for a midnight raid this January on Ugandan women living in Khirki Extension. In May, a young Nigerian woman was beaten up at a grocery store in Munirka, allegedly by the shopkeeper and other local residents. It is not just African nationals who are at the receiving end of such behaviour. In February this year, Nido Tania, a student from the Northeast, was beaten to death in Lajpat Nagar. Suspicion, verbal abuse and harassment have long followed people from the Northeast and from African countries as they move about in the city. But this everyday hostility may have acquired a more aggressive edge during the shortlived tenure of the AAP government in Delhi. When a law minister leads a vigilante-style attack in the name of justice, and then continues to cast aspersions on members of a particular community, it legitimises and encourages the impulse of the mob.
The law must show zero tolerance for such attacks. FIRs must be filed, offenders brought to book and punished. Victims complain of a police that looks the other way or even participates in the hostility. A deeper change of attitude also has to take place. In social as well as political discourse, Delhi’s casual racism needs to be recognised and rejected.
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