Editorial: We are all racists

By M H Ahssan

Over the last few weeks, the world has come face to face with Australian racism. Australia has some of the toughest anti-racial legislation in the world, just as we have some of the most draconian anti-casteism laws. But legislation does not make a society less racist, less communal or less casteist.

Only steady social change, continuous interaction between communities, a liberal education system and empowerment of the downtrodden can do that. But that's a long process.

What the race attacks Down Under tell us is that no one in the world is immune from us-versus-them tribalism. Racism and xenophobia have been a part of the human mental make-up for thousands of years.

Originally developed as a protective device for tribes to stay together against common enemies in the fight for survival, racism today serves no existential purpose. But mental attitudes shaped millennia ago cannot be erased in a few decades. This is why we all need to cultivate a little bit of humility when we discuss other people's racism and biases.

Most societies merely delude themselves into believing that they have put racism behind. But discrimination survives in some form or the other. The Scandinavians and northern Europeans thought they had licked the problem, only to discover Denmark (remember the Prophet cartoons?) and Holland developing a frightened, racist fringe.

They are growing more intolerant of the African, and especially Islamist, influx. If they looked less racist before, it was probably because the number of non-whites in their population was minuscule.

Racism is always directly correlated to the size of a minority. When the numbers are small, minorities are often well-treated because they appear non-threatening (even quaint) to the majority. But when the numbers grow, intolerance grows with it as the majority starts fretting about its own identity.

In India, the Parsis are everybody's favourite minority because they are too small to matter. But Muslims are seen as a major threat because of their rising levels in the population. In Pakistan, Hindus are a microscopic community, but not in Bangladesh. This is why we have seen more anti-Hindu discrimination and pogroms in Bangladesh than in Pakistan.

The short point is that no society anywhere has really ended racism or communalism or casteism to this day. What the western democracies have achieved is the ability to deal with the issue in a more sophisticated manner, by making overt racism and discrimination illegal. Their strong legal systems help mitigate the rougher aspects of racism. But beneath the surface, the problem continues to lurk.

I have a simple yardstick with which to measure actual racism or bigotry in a society: immigration. Countries that place the highest emphasis on restricting immigration (from other communities) are likely to be the ones that are most racist.

By this measure, China, Japan, the Arab nations and Israel, and the European Union are likely to be the most racist -- in a descending order. America and India would be the least racist. America has the most liberal immigration policies and India houses the largest number of economic and religious refugees in the world (in the north-east, West Bengal and Bihar, courtesy Bangladesh; and in Tamil Nadu, courtesy Sinhala chauvinism in Sri Lanka).

Before we pat ourselves for this, let's remember that this is not because we are any less bigoted than the rest. Rather, our lackadaisical approach to security and national interest enables everyone to enter the country, and vote-bank politics takes care of the rest.

Curiously, the caste system -- despite its underlying bigotry -- may also be serving as a bulwark against overt racism. The fundamental tenet of caste is that everyone has a category to belong to (barring the hapless "untouchable" Dalits). This means Hindu society has always accepted diversity as a necessity, if not as a virtue. It is inclusive in the narrow sense of the term, and exclusivist otherwise.

Caste, while being discriminatory and hierarchical, allows a salad-bowl of communities to develop in their own way. The world does not have to learn caste from India, but it still needs to understand that the future of every nation is a salad-bowl, where communities will maintain their distinctive character even while larger unities unfold over decades of togetherness, melded by market forces, democracy and demography.

The world has to learn to celebrate diversity even as India has to learn a different virtue: how to prevent diversity from degenerating into narrow-minded clannishness.

One mistake we should avoid is to put racism in a category of its own. In terms of its deleterious effects, it is no different from discrimination based on caste, gender, age, political affiliation, religious or linguistic chauvinism. All emanate from the same root cause of human fears and insecurity. That is the issue that needs addressing in any society.