'What if Rajiv had married a Nigerian?' Indians are racist, Giriraj Singh is right

You’ve heard of Giriraj Singh. More importantly, you’ve heard Giriraj Singh. The BJP MP who believes Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s critics should be bundled off to Pakistan. He who declared last year that ’terrorists belong to just one community’ at an election rally. The man PM Modi publicly rapped over the Pakistan comment, but who was later inducted into the cabinet as the minister of state, MSME. After nearly a year-long sabbatical from shooting from the hip, he is back in action. In a video being broadcast on every channel Singh has been caught asking if Congress would have accepted a Nigerian woman if Rajiv Gandhi had married one. “If Rajiv had married a Nigerian woman, would Congress have accepted her? If Sonia had not been white, would the party have accepted her?” he asks, smiling ear-to-ear, deeply pleased with what he assumes is a pithy question. While the comment is perfectly logical in Singh’s world full of skewed ideas about nationalism, what is perhaps interesting is the reaction it elicited from the people around him. The moment he had finished his statement, everyone around him burst out into an enthusiastic bout of cackling. Singh and his peers must have been particularly pleased at having hurled a rich insult, accusing the Congress of being racists on one hand and shallow, White-obsessed on the other. [caption id=“attachment_2182405” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Giriraj Singh. IBN Live.[/caption] In fact, with his accusation, Singh displays a curious form of xenophobia. Although he is accusing the Congress of being racist, his suggestion that the party wouldn’t have embraced a Nigerian, obviously comes from his own reservations about the nationality - as if Nigerians are the pits. And the reaction it elicits bears testimony to a larger suspicion of Nigerians in general. Of course it’s also true that a great section of the country’s people’s are unable and unwilling to even distinguish Black people based on their countries. The uncomfortable truth is Singh’s comment reveals a culture of xenophobia in India that makes it perfectly right to suggest that Nigerians are a bunch of people who will be rejected by default in India. His comment comes in the wake of far too many incidents that bear out exactly that conclusion. Most recently, three students of African origin, were attacked by a mob at a Delhi Metro station. They were beaten up with rods and sticks, bitten and escaped with grievous injuries on their heads and arms. The attackers had said that the three had passed lewd remarks at a woman in the station. The three youths from Gabon and Burkina Faso denied the charges. The Indian Express quotes one of the victims as saying, “They kept calling us ‘Nigerians, Nigerians’ before the police. I told them we were not Nigerians.” The students alleged that a group of Indian men in the metro were taking their pictures and making faces at them. When they protested it started off an altercation. Since no woman came forward to allege harassment by these men, there may be some truth in the African students’ version of the story. A while back BBC had reported on the rampant discrimination black people face in India. It quoted a Nigerian man married to an Indian as saying, “When they go to rent flats in a normal building they are told - ‘you are a black man, you are Nigerian, and you are not wanted’. This is racism.” It was just a matter of time that the xenophobia, normalised in certain sections of the society, would enter the mainstream political narrative of the country. In January last year, AAP MLA Somnath Bharti had ambushed a house and tried to evict the Ugandan women who lived there. He accused them of being prostitutes and drug peddlers. The women also had to undergo a urine test. What was perhaps more shocking than Bharti’s actions was how the residents of Khirkee Extension, where the incident took place, backed him unequivocally. In a discussion organised in the neighbourhood with its residents and some other people, moderated by Sagarika Ghose on CNN IBN, the residents dubbed the women suspicious characters and became aggressive when they were told that their suspicions had no basis in reality. Singh’s comment falls in the same tradition of racism. In fact, the country’s latent racism has always manifested itself while critiquing Sonia Gandhi. Firstpost’s Lakshmi Chaudhry noted in an earlier article: “Being a foreigner is clearly Sonia’s first and gravest sin – a fatal flaw that forced her to refuse the prime ministership back in 2004 – the first democratically elected leader in India to do so… Part of this gut-level dislike for Sonia is a genuine regret at the bankruptcy of Indian politics – and that of the Congress Party – that we had to turn to a foreigner-turned-Indian citizen to lead our nation. But to her shriller critics, she is no less than a foreign agent, the physical embodiment of that perennially evoked spectre of the “foreign hand”.” India is perhaps no different from several other countries while treating foreigners with suspicion based on stale stereotypes. However, with politicians like Giriraj Singh in the fray, we may that eclipse the rest in the department.