Discrimination in India when Indians judge the west for Racism
I am seeing lots of people from India raising slogans like “Black lives matter” and blaming the west for the prevailing racism these days. If any of you think America or the west is full of people who are racists, Please think again. Because they are discriminating people who are from a different country or origin. And we Indians are discriminating our own fellow countrymen for millennia. So I can assure you that this form of discrimination is far worse than the one in west.
I am going to mention people of India when I point out the mistakes that we do. Because that’s how we stereotype, don’t we? We call white people ‘Racist’ and Muslims ‘Terrorist’. We inherited this from our parents and they from their parents. Also we inherited some more dogma which makes us the worst people on earth than racists and terrorists.
Let’s see how discrimination started in our beloved nation. Every human being on this world does 2 things predominantly. Consuming it’s resources and excreting waste. So if there is a civilization which is born out of the blue, it will definitely have 2 primary jobs open for it’s people. A farmer and a sanitary worker. Without these 2, a civilization can not survive the test of time. We badly needed people to make sure that the waste is kept out of the city. This involved all the menial jobs like gutter cleaners, scavengers and sweepers. And if the population is a meat consuming population we have someone who herds the animals and someone who butchers them.
There were some lazy but very clever men who neither wanted to do these jobs nor wanted to protect and fight for the civilization. Simply put they were not strong enough to do either. But they had a trick no other in the civilization had learnt, writing. They can read, write and speak. And hence the strong ones who ruled the civilization listened to whatever they said. Because their knowledge played a vital role in governing, conducting commerce and predicting stuffs like when the seasons will arrive. If you were a king of a civilization during 200 BC, and imagine a guy marches up to you saying it will rain continuously from tomorrow. And if it really did, would you make him your minister or not? So now he has complete control over the ruler and he can make rules that will save his group of people from doing the menial jobs and participating in wars. And they gave birth to the castes to keep this going for ages.
So we have been doing this for centuries, before the west knew about a thing called Racism. Do you know Africans in Rome were treated equally during these conventional times? So if someone talks about fighting racism but his/her forefathers invented discrimination in the name of castes, all I can do is smile.
So we all study in schools or colleges, where under privileged students also study. How many of you have a friend who lives in a small hut? Who will you choose as your friend? Someone who has ironed and clean shirt or someone who stinks because his father doesn’t know what an UPS is. Isn’t that worse than Racism? So if you are talking about abolishing Racism in the USA, think about that student in your college who really wanted to be your friend, but you didn’t choose him/her. Will you as a parent allow your child, to be friends with a bunch of under privileged children at school?
We still have people in India killing their own sons and daughters for committing to inter caste relationship. But the west has people allowing their daughters and sons to find a partner in a different race. I am certain that they won’t kill their children for doing it. How many of us has allowed our children to marry someone from a different caste or religion. We know how tough it is to convince our parents to marry someone from a different state of the same nation.
People of India still treat their servant maids like slaves. Because most of them are from an under privileged background. How many of them are allowed to eat on the dining table or even worse allowed to enter the kitchen? Have you ever had your lunch on the same dining table with your servant maid? Can you? Imagine if your CEO asked you to sit on the floor and eat, while he dines on the table.
I have noticed people of India getting up when an under privileged citizen sits next to them in public transport. I have seen people not eating sweets or food shared by an ‘untouchable’ community. We are far worse than the west, so I think we should fix ourselves before we blame someone else.
But the current generation is trying to come out of this pandemic called discrimination and I tip my hat to them. No one these days apply for a caste certificate or community certificate which is nothing but the same Vedic period varna system with English alphabets. But it will take at least 2 more generations for India to completely eradicate this disease.
Till then before your type the words “Black lives matter” think about your Indian brother or sister whom we and our parents discriminated. And let’s not utter the word caste or community in front of our children like we try to stop swearing in front of them. As people of a nation who worry what the society might think, we should understand that someday India will be in a blameable position like the west now. And we should make sure our children won’t have to fight on the streets at a time when their lives might be in danger.
Vande mataram.
