This refers to the editorial, “Discard racial mindset” (February 6). Racism runs deep in the Indian society not just against African students but also against its own citizens. Wide-scale discrimination meted out to the students from the North-East is well known. Given such scandalous state of affairs, brutal attacks like the one on Yannick Nihangaza, a student from Burundi in 2012, or the recent one on a Tanzanian girl in Bangalore, should not be surprising.
If people in Australia or Britain are selectively ‘racist’ against Indian students studying there, then the assault on African students or the students from the North-East, who come to the mainland to study, is no less than racism. Instead of blowing our own trumpet of ‘tolerance’ or accusing others of practising ‘racism’, we should at first learn to clean our own backyard. Else, India will end up as a classical case of ‘pot calling the kettle black’.