By: Nadeem F. Paracha
The common typecast of a racist is a fat, white man hurling abuses at ‘niggers,’ ‘Pakis,’ Jews, and gay people. Whereas once communists too figured on the hate list of white supremacists, they have now largely been replaced with Arabs. By Arabs, of course, these racists mean Muslims.
Thanks to organisations like the Ku Klux Klan, the British National Party and groups associated with what is called neo-Nazism, such racists are now sitting ducks. In fact, if one sees a parade of neo-Nazis or a Ku Klux Klan member today, these groups, with their silly looking hoods, costumes, and salutes, look no more than parodies and caricatures of the stereotypical racist.
Theirs is a racism that has become a costume drama, largely harmless. This is especially due to the way western security agencies have dealt with these organisations and also because of the evolving success of the civil rights movement and its many revolutionary initiatives since the 1950s.
However, political, economic and cultural disturbances perpetuated by neo-liberal economics and politics in the last many years are now dragging out a form of racism that has absolutely nothing to do with white power as such. It is not coming from loud white folks. On the contrary, and ironically, it is mostly coming from some of the races and creeds that have historically been under the hammer of white man’s racism: Jews, Muslims, and Asians.
One must also remember that this racism is not really a new invention. It’s been there, strongly engrained in the minds and sociology of its perpetuators for many years. However, it is only now that we have started seeing it raising its ugly head from the depths and cultural undercurrents that it has been brewing in, unchallenged and unquestioned.
The most obvious has been the anti-Arab racism practiced as a state policy by Israel. Its political make-up has always been starkly evident, but it is the way this political policy has gradually shaped the social and psychological mindset of the Jews living in Israel that is worrying. Israeli politicians are very conscious of this mindset and the hold it now has over the majority of Jews living in Israel and elsewhere. That’s why every time an opportunity is afoot for a peaceful settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, this anti-Arab mindset deforms the Israeli response.
It is also this mindset that makes a majority of Israelis vote for men and women who want to continue with Israel’s barbaric raids and incursions into poverty-stricken lands populated by dispossessed Palestinians, and then look towards rigid political myopia and the construction of walls in the face of counterattacks by Palestinian insurgents. It was this mindset that violently ended the most promising deal between Israel and the Palestinians in 1995, when an incensed radical Jew assassinated former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin after he had signed a breakthrough deal with Yasser Arafat.
Further down the undercurrent of this racism lies a form of bigotry that has been part of India and Pakistan’s sociology long before they were two separate countries. It is deeply rooted in India’s ancient caste system, part of which then influenced social relationships between native Hindus and Muslim settlers in the subcontinent. It is a racism exercised by not one perpetuator over the other, but by both. Now hundreds of years old, even to this day, many Hindus and Muslims living in India do not eat from the same plate or drink from the same glass. Both of them classify the other as sub-human.
The most disturbing aspect of this form of racism is the way it is blindly accepted as a matter-of-fact social norm. For example, many offices in India still hire Muslims and the ‘untouchables’ to do the most demeaning chores, and it is an unwritten rule that these employees are not allowed to use cutlery that is being used by other office employees. In Pakistan, such treatment is meted out by Muslims to ‘underclass’ Hindus and Christians. It is an understood rule that they will not be allowed to share cutlery used by their Muslim counterparts and neither will they be allowed to prepare and serve tea or food to their Muslim co-workers.
Even though due to the legacy of the caste system in India, a Hindu discriminating against another Hindu is a well-known social reality. But this nature of racism has not been alien to Pakistani Muslims either. It is as old as Muslim history in the subcontinent, and today it is still alive in even the most educated Muslim households in Pakistan as well.
Domestic servants in Pakistan, even if they are Muslims, will always have separate cutlery. They will have a separate glass, plate, spoons and are always required to sit on the floor. Some believe such actions are mainly due to the ‘unhygienic’ make-up of the class of people who become servants. This may have a grain of truth, but it is obvious that basically this bigotry is yet another expression of the historical racism practiced between Muslims and Hindus of the subcontinent. It has more to do with a deeply engrained and inherent racist mindset that many Muslims and Hindus of the region, sometimes instinctively, have carried into the modern age.
Recently out of such inherent cultural and social racist tendencies, a more conventional form of racism has emerged in India and Pakistan as well. In 2007, Australian cricket captain, Ricky Ponting, complained about some Indian spectators who let out monkey noises at the Australian team’s only aborigine player, Andrew Symonds. If this wasn’t bad enough, the very next day, the South African cricket captain, Gerham Smith, accused a bunch of Pakistani spectators of making ape sounds at some of the South African squad’s black players.
Can you imagine ‘brown’ Asians hurling trashy racist taunts at blacks? This may seem outlandish, but if one closely looks at the class make-up of the racist pretenders, one understands their stupidity. A bulk of them (both the Indian and Pakistani batches), were from well-to-do, middle-class backgrounds. It is this section of the bourgeoisie that has benefited the most from the no-holds-barred, neo-liberal capitalist initiatives in both countries. They are a warped cross between social liberalism and orthodox religious and political conservatism. Perhaps this is why, this class is also known to back quasi-fascist parties like the BJP in India, and the prejudiced nouveau-rich setups in urban Pakistan, most of whom are known to support equally warped conservative characters which we can now see so often on popular television.
In this day and age when material wealth is the main indicator of cultural and social trends (through advertising and the eventual ‘dumbing down’ of trendsetting cultural pursuits), this is a worrying matter. Many will conveniently miss the irony and the self-inflicting comedy associated with the act of Indians and Pakistanis being racist towards blacks. Instead, they will think of it as something to do with ‘patriotism’ or worse, Islam and/or Hinduism.
It needs to be stubbed out at once, before this too becomes part of the contradictory set of racist mindsets already deeply embedded in the people of the subcontinent. It is a case of victims of racism not only becoming racist themselves, but becoming something even worse by cleverly decorating this nauseous frame of mind with distorted religious declarations sometimes in the name of Hindutva and sometimes Ghazwa-ul-Hind.
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