India is struggling with an increasingly high-profile race problem.
A few weeks ago a Congolese student, Masunda Oliver, was brutally bashed to death with a rock in an upmarket suburb of New Delhi, allegedly by a group of three young men.
India’s government is scrambling to respond – promising a swift prosecution and paying for Masunda Oliver’s remains to be flown back to his family - but many see the attack as part of a border issue.
Reports of racism, discrimination and violence against the hundreds of thousands of Africans who work and study in India have dogged the country for years. The Feed found reports of at least eight attacks on Africans in Delhi in the days following Oliver’s murder.
Africans say they face slurs on the streets, have trouble finding landlords who’ll rent to them, and often face jeers of ‘kaliya’, a derogatory term for black people. Many say the authorities are little help, claiming they are often stereotyped as drug dealers and prostitutes, even by police.
This most recent incident has ignited the race issue like never before. African embassies in New Delhi have threatened to pull out of cultural events and demanded the government address “Racism and Afro-phobia.”
The government is attempting to contain the fallout, while at the same time denying the country has an issue with race.
The foreign ministry told ambassadors that criminal attacks should not be seen as racially motivated and officials have met with African students in New Delhi, saying they’re are committed to safety.
External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj has been engaging in fervent twitter diplomacy.
It’s not enough for some.
"Indians are racist," one Nigerian woman told the Times of India. "Someday we may face the same fate as the Congolese man. When I call home in Nigeria, I tell my family to treat Indians badly. They don't deserve to do business and live freely in Africa."
She may not have been the only one to pass on the message. The Indian government says that Indian shops in the Congo have been vandalised, possibly in retaliatory attacks.
Le Congolais reported that an Indian man was beaten in the Congo’s capital of Kinshasa several days after the attack in India.
"Our compatriots are stoned and killed like game in India. The past week, a young Congolese man was killed by Indians. That's why we wanted to react as killing or beating one of them, so that this situation now cease,” the paper reported one local as saying. “Justice must be done, and we'll do it our way.”
Saying India was the land of Gandhi and Buddha, Minister Swaraj said that India could “never have a racist mindset.”
“These were not premeditated acts against a particular community, rather these were spontaneous attacks perpetrated by anti-social and criminal elements,” she said in a statement to African diplomats.
But it isn’t the first time that violence against Africans has made the news in India.
In February a mob in Bangalore chased and assaulted a Tanzanian student, setting fire to her car. The woman had stopped at the scene of an accident; a Sudanese man had run over a woman sleeping on the roadside.
He was beaten by the crowd, his car also torched. She had no connection to the man.
Last year, two groups of Africans were attacked by a mob in Bangalore wielding beer bottles and cricket bats. Authorities claimed it wasn't related to race, saying it was just a neighborhood dispute.
In 2014 video emerged of a crowd in a Delhi metro station attacking three African students, shouting nationalist slogans as the students sought refuge on and in a police box.
The crowd accused them variously of sexual harassment, or making an “anti-India” comment. The students themselves said they had been brought to the police box after getting in an altercation with other passengers who were taking photos of them. Police said no complaints against the students were ever filed.
“Given the pervading climate of fear and insecurity in Delhi, the African heads of mission are left with little option than to consider recommending to their governments not to send new students to India, unless and until their safety can be guaranteed,” said Eritrean Ambassador Alem Tsehage Woldemariam.
For Australians, the current debate in India might be all too familiar. In 2009 more than 1,000 Indian students protested in Melbourne, demanding Australia do more to stop racist attacks on Indian students.
After a series of attacks on Indian students, Australian universities saw a significant drop in enrollments from the country. That time, it was Indians asking if Australia had a race problem.
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