A young Tanzanian woman college student was assaulted on Sunday, her clothes almost torn off her by a mob in Bangalore. Her male companions, and men who came to her rescue, were beaten up. The car she was travelling in was burnt. The Tanzanian students happened to be driving down a road where half an hour earlier a possibly drunk Sudanese man, had knocked over and killed a pedestrian. The Tanzanians were attacked, it is widely accepted, because they were presumed to be linked to the Sudanese – they were all black Africans.
The attack has provoked the usual outrage. It is embarrassment that is likely the root of much of the outrage. Any attack on foreigners is an affirmation of the lack of public safety and rule of law in India. An attack on ethnic Africans, seen as an undifferentiated mass of people rather than nationals of individual countries and of varied cultures, is also an affirmation of Indians’ deep-seated racism. That this has happened in Bangalore – the city most identified with a modern, resurgent India, makes it all the worse. We don’t like to be thought of as racist and we do like to keep up the fiction (for the world outside) that we are a safe, law-abiding country.
Mob violence of the sort the Tanzanian students were subject to is endemic in India. People don’t have to be killed for crowds to gather and violently attack anyone they think must share the blame. Even when it is not easy or simple to allocate blame, the crowd can decide whose fault it is.
Routine violence
The attack on the Tanzanian students in Bangalore (which was preceded by an attack on the Sudanese man) is part of a culture of violence and mob justice that plays out daily on our public thoroughfares. It is made embarrassing, and hence provokes liberal outrage, because it involves foreigners, and foreigners whom we know are objects of our racism.
For the same reason, the embarrassment is compounded at the attack on the woman student in particular and reports that she was stripped naked and paraded in public. But stripping clothes off people, especially women, happens with unseemly regularity in India. Remember Lakshmi Oraon, who was just a teenager when she was stripped naked and violently assaulted on the streets of Guwahati while on a public march in support of tribal rights. A man was beaten and stripped naked by a mob in Mangalore just a few months ago because he was seen in the company of a woman from a different religion. Every year women, particularly Dalit women, are stripped naked in public as punishment for something someone from their community might have done that has irked someone more powerful than them.
These events occasionally impinge on our world, forcing us to sit up and take notice. Our fulminations are expressed in high decibel outrage on television news and in hash tags #shame #ashamed. For the Dalit woman stripped naked in a UP village is a world away from us, but so are African university students forced to live ghettoised lives in our cities. The discomfort we feel, at the attack on the Tanzanian students, is born of the knowledge that the cocoons of liberal privilege that we inhabit and the cosmopolitanism that we lay claim to have no connection to the everyday life of our nation.
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