India is truly an amazing county with much to recommend for tourists from all over the globe by way of its cultural sites, natural beauty, art, history and food. Unfortunately, it has also been ranked as the most dangerous country, for the second year in a row, for foreign tourists — especially women travelling alone.
Various countries, including the United Kingdom, explicitly warns its citizens from travelling to certain parts of the country with only essential travel advised to other parts of the country. The United States, though, presents a more nuanced view. The overall picture that is presented is that there are many hazards in India.
Other countries, such as Australia and Canada, presage its citizens to “exercise a high degree of caution” before travelling to India. The reasons cited for a travel advisory on India are many — from religious and sectarian violence, sexual attacks on women, including verbal and physical abuse, kidnapping, extortion to thefts of personal belongings, including passports.
Most people have failed to fathom the reasons behind such behaviour from certain sections of Indians.
Until 1991, India was a closed economy with very few connections with the outside world. Post-liberalisation, the world, in its quest to grab its large market, has rushed in, leading to an economic boom and rapidly changing demographics all over the country.
While city-dwellers were brazen with their know-it-all attitude, people in the suburbs had no means of grasping the mores of the neophytes in their midst, which opened up cultural and economical faultlines filled with racial and cultural stereotypes, which often turned violent and utterly racist, like last week when a 21-year-old Tanzanian student was stripped and beaten up in Bengaluru.
A Sudanese student told a news channel after the incident that racist name-calling was common and that most Indians became angry just by seeing them. Such anecdotal evidence has led many to define the incident as a hate crime and a racist smear.
Cities like Bengaluru, Mumbai and even Pune are often cited by Indian political leaders as examples of global diversity, thanks to their bustling public sector, technology companies and fashionable high-streets, where the prattle of global and Indian languages greet tourists. But these places are also mired with pockets of cultural chauvinism that is often ignored.
The likely reason for this hostility is an unceasing fear of age-old social structures getting barged by new ideas, which many believe will loosen their cultural moorings, and such feelings are often linked to religious bigotry.
So stereotypes, compounded by a lack of trust, persist, having severe social and now even global ramifications. The recent attack on the Tanzanian woman by an angry mob, after a Sudanese student had run-over a resident, is an ugly manifestation of cultural tensions that are often ignored in the name of globalisation.
Media reports often highlight how foreigners, especially students, face racial discrimination in most Indian cities. In March last year, three African youths, including a girl, were thrashed in a Bengaluru suburb in an incident that locals linked to drunken behaviour.
In the same month, the city police in Bengaluru said 540 African nationals had overstayed their visas, as they launched a hunt to track them down. In another incident, an Australian couple was allegedly harassed because the man sported tattoos of a Hindu deity. He was let off following an apology, after a clash involving local politicians.
In July 2015, six Nigerian female students were taken into police custody when they approached a police station to register a complaint against a bus conductor, who had misbehaved with them.
In January 2014, Somnath Bharti, the then law minister of Delhi, famously led a vigilante group into the house of some African women, and in utter violation of law, humiliated them and accused them of prostitution and drug-peddling. That same year, in September, three African students were beaten up at the busy Rajiv Chowk Metro station in the heart of New Delhi after an altercation with other passengers.
In reality, the insecurity of ‘otherness’ is not limited towards foreigners or Africans alone, but is often manifest even against Indians who are seemingly different from the rest in terms of their physical features. Particularly those coming from the Northeastern part of the country face rejections in various places. Their lives have become a daily struggle to tackle this chronic alienation.
In 2014, an engineering student from Manipur was attacked by men who demanded he speak in Kannada or get out. In 2012, violence in the state of Assam cast its ugly shadow in far-off Bengaluru, leading to thousands of people from the Northeast trying to flee the south Indian metropolis, before things normalised.
The sudden explosion of cultures, both from within and abroad, at their very doorstep has unnerved many Indians — particularly those who profit from such socio-economic prejudices. The people in general, and the government in particular, must own up to social transformations and propagate healthy dialogues. Only then can one hope to be part of a truly globalised India.
Archisman Dinda is a journalist based in Kolkata, India.