Aravind R
2020 The year India chose to flood the Twitter and Instagram accounts with the global trending hashtag “#BlackLivesMatter”. The year India chose to remain silent on the police brutality against the Anti CAA protesters and students of Jamia and JNU. The year India chose to remain helpless for the migrant labourers dying on road. However many of us seem to be interested only to respond to the call for Black Lives Matter.
What is Black Lives Matter?
Black Lives Matter is an International Human Rights movement which campaigns against the atrocities against the black community across the globe that had begun in 2013 when George Zimmerman shot dead an African American teen named Trayvon Martin. This has recently gained momentum as a 46-year-old George Floyd was choked to death by the White Forces.
The Incident deserves our support and a call for justice to be served. But for many Indians and to be specific, right wing supporters, teenagers seeking social media attention and celebrities; it’s just another opportunity to showcase their fake solidarity and concern for the people thousands of kilometres away, when they fail to address the regional issues of minority conflict, Islamophobia, police brutality, casteism and the never ending list in their home country. “An important movement in US was thus reduced to a desi farce – Rachel John (The Print)”.
The question of ‘why?’ hypocritical.
Let’s go with the timeline in the title; Police brutality and extrajudicial killings in India are no new news especially for the people of Jammu and Kashmir, and only to add to its feathers we have the latest attacks on students of Jamia Milia Islamia, Aligarh Muslim University and the Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Citizenship Amendment Act protesters in Delhi. This raises the question of missing solidarity hashtags or concerns from the same people who have now woken from their deep sleep. Where were the solidarity hashtags or concerns for the migrant labourers who were abandoned by the Government or fashionably called the 56-inch government? No wonder why, because they tend to go with what is more trending and eye-catching and remain silent when leaders like Kapil Mishra and others askes public to engage in violence.
Racism and Indian Society
A BBC news dated May 20,2019 talks about how a Dalit man got killed for having eaten in front of the upper caste communities in a remote village of Tehri in Uttarakhand. Yes, you read it right as Uttarakhand and not Minneapolis. This received no attention and got confined to a single column news in some local daily in the country, going unnoticed. No voice raised as they won’t give you any brownie points for these local issues. And now who is more eligible than the celebrities to condemn the racism in US, when they themselves asks the society to have a glowing white skin through various fairness cream advertisements. And for that matter you also have white skinned person as a hero and a black person as the villain in the film, and for that case any film industry. Indians always have the notion of fairness linked to white skin, which is evident in the way most of them treat the blacks or be it the case of North East Indians who are treated as foreigners by some. To be honest we also have an unspoken truth of the North-South divide within the country, where the hot discussions of Hindi imposition, and national language comes into picture with a step-motherly treatment to few states. All these makes clear that racism is a global phenomenon and one has to fix the near and dear, rather than taking the easier route of social media campaigning.
Summing up
“A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.” — Dr Martin Luther King Jr. This has a deep meaning for all of us to imbibe. Standing in solidarity with the “BlackLivesMatter” is appreciable but it seems to be hypocratic when one doesn’t raises his or her voices against the atrocities happening right under his nose in the home country.
(Aravind is a B.Com Final year student at Christ University, Bangalore)
