Racial discrimination in India? Really??

Yesterday, I read a news in Firstpost that –Union home minister Rajnath Singh was addressing to students on the eve of Teacher’s Day in Pune and a student from South Sudan complained about racial discrimination faced by him. He said, “Whenever we go out in public places, especially in some college campuses, people call us ‘Aye Kaalia or Blackie’.” 

I was not shocked to know about this, but it concerned me. Thousands of students, graduates from India are going to western countries daily for education and work. Thousands of laborers are going to Gulf countries, Europe, America to earn their meal. Many of them are already victim of this racial discrimination.

Many times Indian government shame these countries for not treating Indian citizens equally. We get frustrated when we hear the news like some doctor or engineer is killed out of racial discrimination. I will tell you one incident. Four months back, one of my friend got internship in Australia and when we came to know about this, we mocked him, “don’t get killed, we don’t want to hear your news from television.” 

Conversation like this happens in fun mode, still that shows the deep impression of those news in our mind. Racial discrimination in India is surely not that extreme. It is just limited up to mocking someone about their color. But why this also should happen?

This is the huge loss for India on economic basis. As tourism industry get affected by such news. Also students from foreign countries would not be enthusiastic to pursue their higher studies in India, if such news popping up very frequently. More than economic, it is also enormous loss for India on moral grounds. 

I can see, poisonous seeds of British colonial legacy germinated in here. We have to remove them completely. And this will not just happen by changing names of Bombay to Mumbai or Madras to Chennai, or changing names of Connaught and Curzon road to something else. We have to address this ‘obsession of paleness.’ (I will not use word fair here)

_Digvijay Patil. 

'People call us Kaalia': Foreign student questions Rajnath on racial discrimination