Racism: The Irony of Our Position

We are appalled by a spate of racist attacks and humiliations our ‘Indian’ friends are being subjected to on a daily basis by the 'fair' skinned ‘local’ (so called) populace of Australia, with shameless covert gestures of ‘support’ from the government and its subsidiaries in administration. Now before you question the accuracy of the above statement, let me elaborate on some points that I deem necessary as being of utmost importance:

The Case of ‘Support’ from Oz Government:
The Australian government or any government anywhere in the world can not be a direct accomplice to such acts of violence howsoever remotely they might be connected to a detested idea such as Racism which is bound to touch the sensitive chord of the international community and bring about critical reactions questioning the liberal and democratic ideals of that country. The best way, therefore, out of this embarrassing situation, the Australian Government thought, is to turn a blind eye to such incidents and claim that these are only petty opportunistic crimes and that a person with ‘tan’ being a victim registers as a mere singularity in the otherwise common phenomenon of similar crimes. This would have been an easy escape had the multitude of these singularities, the subsequent protests and the consequent media attention not presented an altogether different scenario than what the Oz govt. would like projected. So what they do is that they stick to their original plan, crackdown on protesters and vigilantes and hope that this would turn down the attention they were drawing. Are you surprised; they got it all wrong, again! The culmination of all their actions being the undue projection of apparent support to the perpetrators by the Oz government which further worsened the situation and piled up more criticism thereof. Instead what they could have done was to humbly acknowledge the presence of racist tendencies in the social mindset and taken due steps at grass root (educational) level to contain the manifestation of this problem into a greater social evil. But I guess there are no Wizards left in Oz to figure it out for them!

The Case of Whites being ‘local’ to Australia:
As I understand it, Australia never belonged to the white race. It used to be a penal colony of Britain or in a manner of speaking a dumping ground for the hardened criminals of Britain. Before them the place had a healthy population of natives. Blame it on their skin tone if you wish, but an entire generation of aborigines was exterminated through sustained genocide effectively eliminating most of the natives and rendering the white race dominance and control. Though Australians (whites) contest this as being false and ideologically motivated propaganda, but I can’t discount it given the present demography of the country and also because parallels can be drawn from what the white race did in America or what they tried to do in South Africa. So this settles the argument that the recent incidents of violence might as well have stemmed from Xenophobia rather than its more abhorred sister idea of Racism. I’ll be a little blunt here but both ways their conduct is not unbecoming of a lineage of criminal inheritance.

The Case of Victims being ‘Indians’ and their tormentors being ‘fair’ skinned:
It must have crossed your mind by now that I am repeatedly stating the victims as being Indians rather than being browns or blacks. I am doing this purposely because had the victims been Pakistanis, Bangladeshis or anyone other than Indians, unfortunately sharing our skin colour or a shade darker we would not have shown an iota of concern. But since these incidents have hurt our national pride, we decided to be astoundingly critical in our reactions. The question here is: are we reacting as Indians or as Browns? For the answer we’ll have to delve deep into our own conscience and be truthful to ourselves (for a change).
We constitute a nation where an entire multi million dollar industry thrives on the demand for fairness inducing cosmetic products. A nation where the father of a daughter has to start accumulating dowry much more hastily if his child is born devoid of the gift of fair skin. Have you ever wondered that had Rajeev Gandhi married a black woman instead, could her bride (widow unfortunately) have managed to be a person of such eminence in the political circles of this great country?
Digging up our own conscience wasn’t such a good idea after all! If we ourselves have given up on us because of our skin colour why do we expect others to stand by us and accept us as we are? It makes us bigger racists than they are. The evil lurks somewhere deep inside our own heart and in our case it is cancerous, eating away its own. Let us come to terms with it, let us learn to see and call ourselves beautiful. Therein lays the cure.