Why Nigerian national, who was tied and beaten, did not report assault
Details coming to the fore a day after a video of a Nigerian national being tied to a pole and mercilessly beaten went viral add to the horror of what our national capital has come to be.
The 24-year-old youth, who was caught and brutalised by residents of Malviya Nagar on charges of attempting to rob a house, did not lodge a complaint about the crime to the Delhi Police for a full two-week period.
The police came to know about the crime only when the video depicting the barbarity went viral.
DCP (south) Ishwar Singh told the media that a complaint regarding the incident was received at about 4.10am on September 24.
Singh told The Indian Express: "When local police reached the spot, Ahmad was bleeding. Residents told us that while fleeing the spot, he fell on the ground and suffered injuries to his head and body. Instead of telling us that he was beaten up, he hid the fact. He did not share any details except his name and the country he comes from."
That the police could not differentiate between injuries received from falling on the ground and being beaten up by a mob is a matter that too would need detailed investigation. The more pertinent issue at hand is why a man beaten up so savagely did not complain to the authorities. Why did Ahmad - as the DCP claims - "hide the fact"?
We would not approach the authorities for justice only when we don't repose enough trust in the systems that promise us fairness of treatment.
When Africans were rounded up and beaten up in Greater Noida, exemplary punishment should have been meted out to the perpetrators. We should have made an example out of the hate-mongers sending an unequivocal message that racism has no place in India. But the message that went out from our Parliament was an encouragement for racist elements in the country because of whom our heads hang in shame.
BJP MP Tarun Vijay gave racist elements a certificate by saying that Indians can't be called racists as they live with black people from south India.
When African nations showed the mirror to India, foreign minister Sushma Swaraj gave the country a clean-chit saying not all attacks on Africans were racist in nature implying that some attacks were ok.
We are angry when a foreign national becomes a victim of snatching in India because we are worried that tarnishes our image as a country globally but if the foreign national sports a black skin tone we choose to look the other way. Some people for us are children of lesser gods.
A common retort to allegations of hatred and racism is that "Nigerians" are drug peddlers in India posing as students. That turns the question on us. Why are we so sensitive to the alleged drug peddling by Africans? Why doesn't the drug menace in Goa caused by Russian, European and Israeli communities, apart from of course the usual suspects - Nigerians - get us equally (if not more) enraged? What scares us about the colour black when it becomes part of someone's skin tone?
In a column published in The Hindu, Samuel Jack, president of the Association of African Students in India highlighted the problem of typecasting black people. "Indian kids smoke in public places. Yet when we smoke, we are always supposedly smoking marijuana or weed, when there are many Indians who smoke the same. How can Africans playing loud music be an excuse to beat them up and complain to the police when Indians do the same?" This is not an argument we can push under the carpet. We must as a society, as a people and as a country face it.
Our intolerance towards people who look and live different has reached its nadir. But in failing Africans, we have also failed ourselves as a nation. That Ahmad and members of his community in India had no faith in the country's much-acclaimed democratic processes is a sad testimony to how we treat our guests.
Also read: Nigerian getting tied and beaten up is just another shameful day in Delhi