France riots: How racial prejudice is inherent to systems and schemes of West

It is all about a police officer on duty shooting dead an Algerian descendant youth named Nahel for jumping the traffic and disobeying orders to stop. Obviously, like many others of his ilk the world over, especially in the western world, this unnamed officer too forgot that he was living in an era of mobile phone cameras and social media journalism, if the latter could be called so. To put it simply, instantaneous riots erupted first in the immediate neighbourhoods and then across the country. Earlier in the year, France’s left-wing parties and trade unions had joined hands to protest President Emmanuel Macron’s ‘pension reforms’, which had brought the nation to a near-halt. In the end, Macron had his way, but not before triggering the kind of sentiment that was ready to be exploited at the drop of a hat — or, a shot from a police officer’s gun while on duty. At last reports — or, television videos — the riots had degraded into plain and simple looting of fashion stores, one after the other, in national capital Paris, otherwise known as the global capital for the world’s ‘bold and beautiful’. Caught unawares by the turn of events — for which neither he, nor the security agencies were prepared — all that President Macron could do was to appeal for calm, describe both Nahel’s killing and later violence as ‘unforgivable’ but had added another adjective ‘inexplicable’ to describe the former. He naturally had to cancel his official visits to Brussels for an EU summit and to Germany — to attend to the unbelievable situation on hand —  or, was it all in the making? With the second name not publicised, Nahel, 17, has become the current symbol of racial volatility, whether or not his killing was racial, as the protestors have made it out to be. Only a detailed investigation could prove it, if at all, but the air of permissiveness prevailing for law-enforcement officials especially to brand migrant populations as ‘unruly’ and act according to their inherent institutional prejudices is possibly next only to that prevailing in the US. America is also the nation to which ‘revolutionary’ France had ‘exported’ democratic instincts and gifted the ‘Statue of Liberty’ in a bygone era. As activists, often times non-migrant locals, point out, this is the third such death this year, preceded by the death of 13 of them the previous year, under near-similar circumstances, not always jumping-traffic but episodes in which the use of gun by the police officer at hand was not otherwise justified. There is an unmentioned air of permissiveness when the other party is a French youth of African or Arab descent. Dejection, frustration There is thus an air of outright dejection and frustration, and also volatility, ready to burst at sudden provocation, not all of them emanating from law-enforcement per se. There are issues that involve larger government policies, where the police force is not involved, but as elsewhere in the world, especially the democratic world, the police force is the face of it all, especially whenever they ‘act’, at times without justification and mercy. Looking at it rather philosophically, nay, sociologically, it is all in the system, so to say. Nations like France and the US ‘nurture democracy’ in ways their schemes and systems work. There is a lot of hard-talk on the outside, but inside, racism has taken deep-roots. White men in the case of the US, too are ‘migrants’ from an earlier generation, equally in search of a future, a fortune. They got it by massacring ‘American Indians’ by their thousands and tens of thousands. Having ‘cleansed’ their surroundings of the ‘natives’ or the ‘aborigines’, they pulled their conscience out of the closets and spread goodwill across the Third World. All along, they had forgotten that there were still old skeletons in their cupboard, ghosts that refused to go away. Racial prejudice in the case of the West is inherent to their systems and schemes. In France, no one has termed Nafel death as one, as yet, pending investigations, and his grandmother, for instance, has publicly appealed for calm, but the rioters are mostly French of African and Arab descent. If they don’t have bread… The chances are that French law-makers would talk about more migrant-curbs without addressing much of the evil that is already in their midst, in the form of inherited racism that may date back to centuries. They may need to do some fresh literary research Marie Antoinette’s famous lines, ‘If they don’t have bread, let them eat the cake,’ to know how much they know of the ‘other side’ to be able to feel their way, and then do something about it, here and now. It is disconcerting thus when the West rebukes nations like India on human rights violations of one kind or the other. But for the West to preach from the pedestal and deliver pulpit homilies in a holier-than-thou attitude is not on. Already, in the case of India, neighbouring Sri Lanka has backed New Delhi’s open charge that Canada (for instance) is ‘driven by vote-bank politics’. External Affairs Minister (EAM) was referring to Canadian politico-governmental sympathy and support for ‘Khalistani groups’, and their calculated indifference to anti-India actions, starting with the terror-attack on Air-India flight 182, ‘Emperor Kanishka’, in which all 329 on board perished, as far back as 1985. Sri Lanka has its woes vis a vis the ‘international community’ (read: West) on allegations of human rights violations and war-crimes. It dates back to what the Sri Lankan state wants the world to accept as the nation’s own ‘war on terrorism’, the longest and hardest one at least until the US-centric 9/11 aerial terrorism of Osama bin-Laden captured global imagination and wrath. Not doing enough At a Buddhist religious ceremony in Sri Lanka more recently, Chinese ambassador Qi Zhenhong asked the nation to ‘stand up for its rights, to gain respect, and end bullying’. No one needs to read too much into such homilies of an non-western, anti-western kind, especially when coming from China, which is otherwise seen as a ‘regional bully’ by most nations, including India. Yet, on issues such as those haunting nations like Sri Lanka, at the UNHRC and elsewhere, independent of each other, India and China, for instance, may have ‘common interests’ to take on the West, however mildly or strongly as it befits their overall position, bilateral and multilateral relations. It’s what happened recently on Russia’s Ukraine War issue in the UNSC and UNGA. However, China and Pakistan have always voted against the western resolution — which was taken forward by the UK when the US under President Donald Trump walked out of the UNHRC for a time. That way, it remains to be seen how India is likely, or unlikely to react, when Sri Lanka or any of its other neighbours is the target, and how they react when India is targeted, in return. The writer is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator. Views are personal. Read all the Latest News , Trending News ,  Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.