By Maya Palit
Foot-in-mouth is a gross understatement for the trip that Tarun Vijay has been on. Speaking on a television panel on Aljazeera‘s channel The Stream, the former BJP MP was trying to convince the world that the vicious spate of attacks on African communities in Noida was not, in fact, racist. Which is essentially the same sentiment that Sushma Swaraj communicated a couple of days ago — that arbitrarily beating up men and women from Nigeria and Kenya was a crime, certainly, but not a racist crime.
But Vijay also used some incredible deductive reasoning to back himself up. His ingenuous logic was that Indians can’t be called racist because ‘we’ are unimaginably benevolent in our sheer tolerance of black people in south Indian communities: “If we were racist, why would we have the entire south (India)? Which is you know, completely Tamil, you know Kerala, you know Karnataka and Andhra. Why do we live with them (if we are racist)? We have blacks, black people around us.” When the backlash began, he then fell over his feet to explain that he had never actually called south Indians ‘black’ — he would never ever do that.
If you’re waiting for the patakas to go off, don’t hold your breath. Because while the brutal incidents in Noida have triggered several relevant debates about why this country treats black people so badly and what to do about their safety, some of the reactions to Vijay’s assinine remarks are just sad. One article defends Vijay, claiming that he has expressed solidarity with Dalit peoples and OBCand by default, then, can’t be accused of racism.
But even his critics leave you yawning, because they limit the concept of racism too. The DMK leader TKS Elangovan, while criticising Vijay’s inherent racism, then started to list all the people in south India who don’t have dark skin: “Our leader Dr Kalaignar is fair, Jayalalithaa was fair. Racism is not in colour and that Tarun Vijay should understand. He has chosen the wrong word while describing South Indians.”
Of course, the real and incredibly urgent issue — why Indians behave so differently with white and black people, and how to even begin to alter this — has been diluted in this breathless and clownish race to be the least racist person around.