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21 Oct, 2014

Why and how has multicultural India become racist? – Hindustan Times

On October 15, Michael Lamjathang Haokip, a 26-year-old Manipuri youth, was attacked by a mob and asked to speak in Kannada in Bangalore. He was reminded during the scuffle that he ‘was not in China, but India’.

The very next day, in Delhi’s Sikanderpur area, two Naga youths were mercilessly thrashed with cricket bats and hockey sticks and allegedly told, “If you guys from Manipur and Nagaland come and stay here, we will kill you.”

These two incidents come close on the heels of another racial atrocity in Delhi. Last month, three African men were nearly lynched to death by a mob in the Rajiv Chowk Metro station after they objected to being photographed and commented upon by fellow commuters.

For a country as diversely populated as India — where a multitude of communities following different cultures inhabit greatly varied geographies, where the nuance of ‘unity in diversity’ is oft quoted and rhetorically celebrated — such blatant racial attacks are bound to evoke a number of questions, with the most basic being ‘why?’.

Read the rest: Why and how has multicultural India become racist? – Hindustan Times.