Racism raises its ugly head

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

A few incidents of attacks on African nationals in and around New Delhi, one of which resulted in the death of a young man from Congo, has turned the spotlight on the ugly face of racism. Though officials are in a state of denial, conscientious Indians accept that racialism is a reality.

Masunda Kitada Oliver, 23, a graduate student who supported himself working as a French tutor, was beaten to death by three men on May 20. Police said the attack followed a late-night quarrel over hiring of an auto-rickshaw. Two men were immediately taken into custody but 10 days later the third remains untraced.

The African embassies decided to stay away from the Africa Day celebrations by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) on May 25 in protest and to advise their governments not to send new students to India. There were retaliatory attacks on a few Indian grocery shops in Congo. All this forced External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj to act.

She sent out tweets to assuage African feelings and depa Dayuted her junior colleague, VK Singh, to talk to the envoys. Singh offered to meet the envoys once in three months to discuss the problems African nationals experienced.

The envoys were assuaged enough to drop the planned Africa Day boycott. Officials said the minister of state would do an outreach event with African students, along with the embassies concerned, each quarter to reassure them of their safety. But African outrage did not subside. The Association of African Students (ASA) in India scheduled a demonstration in the capital today (May 31) to “get justice and help prevent more tears”.

The official response was too little and too late. Prime Minister Narendra Modi failed to deplore the violence. Sushma Swaraj erred in leaving it to VK Singh, who, as a former Army chief, is no credible guarantor of human rights, to interact with the African envoys. Singh used the opportunity to settle scores with his pet aversion, the non-complaisant media.

Last Thursday, six Africans were attacked with sticks and cricket bats in a Delhi suburb. The victims included a Nigerian priest attached to a local church, a Ugandan woman who runs a salon and a Cameroonian businessman who was in the city for a surgery.

The priest said this was the third time he was attacked. This suggests he may have been targeted on religious grounds.

However, some local residents said there was resentment over the Africans playing loud music.

The police met residents’ association members and asked them not to misbehave with foreigners living in the area. They also met representatives of the Africans and advised them not to play loud music at night.

The Delhi incidents are a manifestation of the deep-rooted prejudice in the society, which the authorities refuse to acknowledge. African nationals are stereotyped as fraudsters and drug addicts. Racist epithets are hurled at them.

Typical of the authorities’ insensitivity to racism is Tourism and Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma’s comment that the Delhi lynching was unfortunate but “even Africa is not safe”. To prove the point, he said when he went to South Africa he was not allowed to go for walks for reasons of security.

In February, a Tanzanian woman was attacked in the city of Bangalore following a road accident. One of the men held in connection with the incident was a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Two years ago Somnath Bharti, Minister in the Aam Admi Party government of Delhi state, personally led a raid on a house occupied by Ugandans accusing them of drug addiction and prostitution.

The first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, had instituted a scholarship scheme to enable young Africans to study in India. Graduates of Indian universities occupied important positions when their countries became free. Many of them had experienced discrimination on the campuses but did not encounter violence.

The ICCR still offers several hundred scholarships to African students. With private universities attracting paying students in large numbers, many cities now have hundreds of African students. Complaints of discrimination are common.

Racism in India is an extension of the centuries-old exclusionary caste system. The demand for fair brides in matrimonial advertisements bear out the ingrained colour prejudice. White foreigners rarely encounter hostility.

The current spurt in racist attacks coincides with the increasing incidence of violence against Dalits, Adivasis and minorities in the wake of the rise of the Hindutva ideology, predicated on the concept of Us and Them. People from the northeastern states, who constitute a racial minority, have come under attack in Delhi and Bangalore in the recent past.

Modi, who played host to 41 African heads of state and governments in New Delhi last year, is due to visit South Africa and Mozambique this year. He must think of some clean-up job at home before that. -- Gulf Today, May 31, 2016.

BRICS seeking greater say

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS), who will gather in New Delhi this week for their annual summit, are expected to pitch for a greater role in world affairs in keeping with their growing clout as newly emergent economies. The main item on the agenda of the summit, scheduled for March 28 and 29, is global governance. While China is not keen on early reform of the United Nations system, it shares the BRICS partners’ enthusiasm for reform of the global financial institutions.

As it happens, the summit takes place ahead of a meeting of the World Bank to choose its next president.  Since the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund at the end of World War II, the former has been headed by an American and the latter by a European.

On Friday President Barak Obama named Jim Yong Kim, an American of South Korean origin, as the US nominee for the post. Two other candidates are also in the field: Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala of Nigeria, whose sponsors include South Africa, and Jose Antonio Ocampo of Colombia, who has been nominated by Brazil.

China recently suggested that a non-American must head the institution. It is not clear if the BRICS nations can agree on a common non-American candidate. Even if they can, the US may be able to ensure the election of its nominee as it continues to wield considerable influence in the global financial system. However, the ideas the BRICS nations are working on may make reform of the system inevitable.

As an institution charged with the task of making resources available to member countries to tide over balance-of-payments difficulties, the IMF has a critical role in helping Europe to overcome its distress. The BRICS nations have already injected a large amount of capital into the IMF but some Europeans are asking for more.

“BRICS’ voice in the IMF must be enhanced if the European countries want it to provide more capital,” a Russian government spokesman said last week. At the New Delhi meet, the group is expected to work out a strategy to link increased participation in the European recovery programme to restructuring of the IMF’s capital base to bring it in tune with the new financial realities.

A parallel initiative envisages the setting up of a development bank of the BRICS nations. A proposal made by India in this connection has evoked a favourable response from Russia and China. India views the proposed bank, which will facilitate indirect investment of foreign exchange reserves of the central banks of the member countries, as an institution with the potential to become a powerful player in global decision-making.

For China, the BRICS development bank offers a platform to expand the international role of its currency, the renminbi. It has been facing criticism from other countries for manipulating the value of the renminbi to maintain export competitiveness.

With the Western economies in the doldrums, the BRICS nations are now the most favoured investment destinations. Their efforts to forge common strategies have set alarm bells ringing in some Western financial circles, particularly investment promoters.

One investment research group, in a recent report, bemoaned that countries like Indonesia and Mexico, which are beginning to rival some BRICS nations in terms of growth and investment strength, are often overlooked in favour of them.

Smaller markets such as Malaysia, Poland and Peru are also surging in importance although their total size is tiny compared to the trillion-dollar economies of BRICS, it said, adding they could be interesting picks for investors.

Against this background, the decision of leading stock exchanges of the five countries to establish the BRICS Exchanges Alliance assumes significance. Beginning March 30, members of the Alliance will begin cross-listing benchmark equity index derivatives on one another’s trading platform.

Initially, members of the Alliance aim to expand their product offerings beyond their home markets and give investors exposure to the other BRICS economies.

While in New Delhi for the summit Chinese President Hu Jintao is expected to formally declare 2012 as Year of India-China Friendship and Co-operation. With memories of the disastrous end of the Hindi Chini bhai bhai (Indians and Chinese are brothers) era, inaugurated by Jawaharlal Nehru and Chou Enlai, still fresh in mind, this slogan is sure to be viewed with scepticism by many people. But the good that can result from renewed friendship must not be lost sight of. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, March 26, 2012.

Scramble for Africa

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh flew into Addis Ababa last week for a meeting with leaders of 15 nations, the Western media proclaimed that India and China were engaged in a scramble for Africa. A section of the Indian media echoed the sentiment. “India now rivals China for top honours in the new Great Game in Africa,” wrote one newspaper.

It is not surprising that those fed on history texts that chronicle the European competition for acquiring colonies should view the Indian and Chinese efforts to expand their contacts with Africa, which are in keeping with their status as fast growing economics, in terms of 18th and 19th century imperial endeavours.

If there is a conflict in Africa today it is not between the two emergent Asian powers but between them and the Western nations which brought the continent under their heel in the colonial era and continue to benefit from the gains of that period.

The United States and seven European countries are among the top 10 trading partners of sub-Saharan Africa. The Asian countries in the list are China and Japan. India does not figure in it at all.

Japan built up its African market as its economy boomed after World War II but chose to remain a junior partner of the West. China, which sets its eye on the African market about two decades ago, is now the largest exporter to the region.

In 2008, when India began efforts to enlarge its economic ties with the region, China was already at the top as an exporter, accounting for 9.8% of all sub-Saharan imports, as against Germany’s 5.6% and United States’ 5.3%. The US remained the biggest importer, receiving as much as 28.4% of all exports from the resource-rich region. China was in the second place, accounting for 13.4% of the exports, having edged past Japan and the European competitors.

At present the US is involved in a desperate attempt to beat back China’s challenge. Last year, as a matter of strategy, the US government decided to stay out of low-end competition with China, which has flooded Africa’s streets and supermarkets with cheap goods, and focus on the sensitive and highly profitable high-tech segment, which includes aircraft, medicine and medical equipment.

The Addis Ababa event which Manmohan Singh attended was the second Africa-India Forum Summit (AIFS). That forum was created eight years after the Forum on US-Sub Saharan Africa Trade and Economic Cooperation (commonly referred to as AGOA Forum, after the African Growth and Opportunity Act of 2000) and the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) came into being.

Following the first AIFS summit, India had set up a pan-African e-network linking 43 countries of the continent. Although a good part of the credit line of $5.6 billion offered at that time for development and capacity-building projects is yet to be utilised, India committed more funds to take up new projects in such areas as information technology, textiles, food processing and weather forecasting.

The keen interest evinced in Africa by both developed and developing countries reflects their faith in the continent’s future. The region has more than 50 countries with a total population of about 1.5 billion. As many as 33 countries classified by the United Nations as “least developed” are located there, but the region’s growth rate compares favourably with that of the world as a whole.

As countries which suffered the ravages of imperialism, China and India have certain advantages over the West in their dealings with Africa. China’s $126 billion trade with Africa puts it way ahead of India, which is seeking to raise its trade from $46 billion to $70 billion in the near future.

The differing circumstances of China and India offer scope for assuming roles that are complementary rather than competitive. This does not mean the scramble the pundits are talking about can be ruled out forever. There are policy makers in both countries whose mindsets have been conditioned by western textbooks.

Past association in the Non-Aligned Movement and South-South exchanges will stand India in good stead as it re-engages with emergent Africa. However, it has to keep in mind a lesson from the earlier period. Many young Africans who studied in Indian universities under a scheme instituted by Jawaharlal Nehru were in high positions when their countries gained Independence. Memories of the subtle racial discrimination they had experienced as students often dulled their enthusiasm for India.--Gulf Today, Sharjah, May 30, 2011.

" I Helped Smear Helen Suzman"

HELEN SUZMAN
The death of South African anti-apartheid activist Helen Suzman reminds NAM contributor Brian Shott of how his encounter with Suzman in his college days taught him a few lessons about humility and self-righteous zeal. Shott is a freelance writer and editor now living in Oakland.

by Brian Shott
Commentary
New America Media

OAKLAND, Calif.--Anti-apartheid activist Helen Suzman died on Thursday at the age of 91. As accolades from around the world pour in, news reports also mention the controversy she sparked on college campuses in the late 1980s.

I'll say. At my alma mater in Connecticut in 1989, we almost rioted when we heard Suzman had been invited to speak -- a fact that, today, fills me with contrition.

Suzman, who helped found South Africa's liberal Progressive Party, was for 13 years the lone voice against apartheid in the South African parliament. She spoke out fiercely against racist legislation, and frequently visited anti-apartheid activists, including Nelson Mandela, in the nation's notorious prisons.

So what was our beef with Suzman at Wesleyan University, a small liberal arts school in Middletown, Conn.?

We and other campus activists were incensed that Suzman opposed economic sanctions against South Africa. Nor did she favor the divestment movement, still going strong in the late 1980s, which pushed colleges and municipalities to relinquish their financial holdings in companies that did business in South Africa.

Suzman argued that such actions were counterproductive and primarily hurt black South Africans.

We didn't care that Suzman met with imprisoned leaders of the freedom movement; she obviously wasn't listening to their nearly unified calls for sanctions. We thought she should resign her ineffectual post in an inherently racist system. And we were convinced that the university chose her to speak as a way of bolstering its refusal to immediately divest.

Fair enough, I suppose, except for the conspiratorial part. But what followed the announcement of her impeding campus speech was despicable.

In the days before Suzman's arrival, campus radicals started a smear campaign in the university's alternative press. I remember editing articles that attacked Suzman, of whom I had never heard. Quotations of Suzman's own words, which I and other politically motivated editors never fully checked, made her sound downright racist.

When the day of Suzman's speech finally came, many students couldn't fit into the campus cinema where she was scheduled to speak. So we demanded a larger venue -- we made a lot of "demands" in those days -- and eventually a crowd of about 300 marched across campus to the chapel. There, black students from Wesleyan's Malcolm X House lined up behind Suzman, who stood at a podium; they and others in the crowd hissed derisively (and some applauded) as she defended her views on sanctions.

And defend herself she did. Suzman had read everything written about her in the in the days preceding her talk. By reading aloud the complete text of her selectively quoted remarks, Suzman revealed a propaganda effort by left-wing students that would have made Joseph McCarthy proud.

She then read a letter from Nelson Mandela, written to her the year before and reprinted the following day in the largest campus paper. Mandela, writing from Victor Verster Prison in Paarl, began "Dear Helen," and continued:
"The consistency with which you defended the basic values of freedom and the rule of law over the last three decades has earned you the admiration of many South Africans. A wide gap still exists between the mass democratic movement and your party with regard to the method of attaining those values. But your commitment to a non-racial democracy, a united South Africa, has won you many friends in the extra-parliamentary movement."

Mandela wrote that he hoped in the future Suzman's voice "will be heard throughout the country free from the constraints which parliamentary convention imposes." He closed, "Fondest regards and best wishes to you and your family."

In the end, in a question and answer session after her talk, Suzman made mincemeat of most arguments for divestment from the campus left. She was like a lion. She destroyed us.

The Nelson Mandela Foundation this week called Suzman a "great patriot and a fearless fighter against apartheid." The African National Congress lauded her as "a thorn in the flesh of apartheid."

Perhaps there's still room for cynicism with respect to the life of Helen Suzman. Certainly many of the world leaders lauding her now did their part to forestall democracy in South Africa while she lived. Obviously a huge number of black South Africans did as much or more, at far greater risk to themselves, to end apartheid; yet most will never be known to the world at large.

One could even point to Mandela's carefully worded letter, wherein he never explicitly states his own opinion. Perhaps her positions angered him, and his hospitality was strategic. But perhaps he deliberately, personally withheld judgment of Suzman and her tactics. A man of his wisdom likely knew how little we know of our power and its effect in the world.

Regardless, he remained polite, and kind.

History suggests that Helen Suzman was wrong to resist the economic isolation of South Africa during apartheid. But it suggests more strongly that she did far more help than harm to the nation's freedom movement. How many of us, in her shoes, would have acted similarly?

Helen Suzman, Nelson Mandela and the passage of time have taught me a little about dignity, humility and honesty -- and how quickly activists of all stripes will trade these away in moments of self-centered, self-righteous zeal.