Racist violence and the silence of the National Integration Council

By John Dayal 

MANY YEARS AGO some of us founded the North East Centre and Helpline as we thought we should do something to challenge the ingrained racism in many areas of the national capital, and rampant racist violence against young men and women who attended the universities and educational institutions and lived in shared accommodation particularly in houses in the many urban villages of Delhi.

Pic: Bruce K. Thangkhal | NESCH

In quick time, our colleagues researched and documented the extent of the violence, and presented the findings to the national media and the authorities, including the police. The Delhi government and the central authorities were not too keen to listen to us, but the police commissioner of that time, after one horrendous violent incident, agreed to create a single window system so that victims did not have to run around to get their complaints registered.

The Centre and Helpline had, after initial hesitation, the enthusiastic support of the many community unions and organisations that exist. Every tribe, state and religious group has its own union or association, and there is a very strong community feeling among the people living in an almost hostile environment so far from home.  Volunteers manned our phones on an around-the-clock basis, offering counseling and advice. Our teams responded to distress calls from victims of violence, rushing to the scenes of the crime and then to the police station to get cases registered under law. It was in such exercises that we discovered cases of rape not only in Delhi but also in neighbouring towns of the national capital region, including Gurgaon. 

The recent cases of violence against young people from Arunachal and other states comes as no surprise. But the death of the young student from Arunachal Pradesh, is a particularly horrendous incident, and casts aspersions not just on the professional efficacy of Delhi police, but also on its character as there are indications of corruption and partisanship. In fact, the police also emerge as racist. The Delhi High Court has chastised the Delhi police for the shoddiness of its investigations and the forensic probe.  Parliament has condemned the violence, and no less that Mrs. Sonia Gandhi, the president of the Congress Party, has expressed her solidarity with the victims. 

Elsewhere, there have been incidents or racist violence or behaviour against people of African descent, many of whom are students in various colleges of Delhi and some are expatriate workers. Africans had even forty years ago invited the curiosity and then ridicule in North India, which has a fascination for people of European origin with their light complexion. But with the opening of the national economy, the number of persons coming from the African continent has increased, and with it have increased social tensions, which sometimes burst out into open violence. The most macabre was the molestation of two women by a mob in the presence of a minister of the Delhi government who thought the two were drug peddlers or sex workers, as if this allowed physical action against them. 

The government swings into emergency action every time such an incident generates a public outcry, or is taken up in a major way by an otherwise somnambulant media. The single window police procedure seems to have been given a go by [it also existed for domestic and other violence against women] and jurisdictional haggling and often sheer corruption ensure that the police do not act as they should. 

The Union and the state governments do not monitor racist and targetted violence and therefore are ail prepared to formulate any policies or practices to curb it. While there is lip service to secularism, and to gender justice, there is absolutely not a single thing in our school curricula or in the advertisements released on television, radio and newspapers by the Directorate of Audio Visual Publicity of the government against racism and racist violence. 

The Prevention of Communal and Targetted Violence Bill, which was brutally murdered in the Rajya Sabha this week – it was withdrawn under right wing pressure – had some measures against such violence.  The Bill invited the wrath of the Sangh Parivar and its front, the Bharatiya Janata party, who felt its focus on preventing violence against Muslims in some way injured the interests of the majority community. If the Bill had become law, racist crimes would certainly have come under its ambit and it could have possibly worked as a deterrent. 

The National Integration  Council – of which this writer is a member – has failed signally in its charter envisaged by its founder, the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. It meets every alternate year – instead of the six monthly meetings that members stressed were needed. In its last meeting held in the wake if the barbarous violence against Muslims in Muzaffarnagar, the NIC did not refer to the Communal and Targetted Violence prevention Bill at all. In its meeting two years earlier, Home Minister Chidambaram maintained silence as BJP chief ministers butchered the draft bill. The government did not defend it at all, although the National Advisory council drafted it with government concurrence. 

The silence of the NIC in the recent cases of racist violence is deafening. Not that it has a system in place to react to such indents.

And with national polity in a flux, there is little hope that the future will unfold some deterrent laws against such violence.

Share: