Monika Khangembam is a lucky person; she must thank the internet and the social media that stirred up the empathy of all thinking Indians, thereby taking to task, at least by criticism, the unnamed immigration official who perversely quizzed her to make sure she knew she was actually an Indian.
This was so because it was despite she had all the documents to speak for her, but the officer wanted a test of general knowledge about the country and the State she hailed from: Manipur, which is because of her looks. The needless catechism was more than a case of subtle racism, for it was sadism-subtle may be, if you want to dilute it a bit.
The racist mindset of some people who are xenophobic by nature is understandable. They cannot help their urge to consider fellow Indians from distant parts of the country a little less Indian than themselves because of their ethnic looks, language or culture. It is a pitiable situation when law enforcers get to intervene when acts of discrimination and violence occur to people because of their ethnic background. It exposes the fragments we are and the inherent xenophobia in our psyche. It hurts. It harms our Indianness.
Blame the common man, their ignorance, their arrogance, their latent xenophobia. But what about an officer on duty ostensibly slighting someone on the pretext of doing his duty like it happened in Monika Khangembam’s caseIJ The best chastisement won’t be a disciplinary action, a transfer or a dressing down by a superior officer. Best will be to make the officer sit and contemplate for a while. It would be interesting to quiz him to recheck if his great knowledge of India’s history and geography that might have formed a part of the syllabus that covered the GK papers in the competitive examination he might have written to clear the recruitment test.
Does he still remember the geography of India and the ethnicity of the multitudes of races the macro-cosmic Indian social order is made of- something every school going child is trained to learn and then remember for a lifetime by way of essay writing on the phrase ‘Unity in diversity’ at quite an early stage of his schoolingIJ Isn’t it a concept that our unity is without uniformity and diversity is without fragmentationIJ Isn’t it something we expect every Indian babu to imbue in his spirit when he deals with people from different parts of the country in whatever capacityIJ The best is to make any erring babu, who subtly fails the unitary spirit of the country in this count, reconfirm his selection by at least writing an essay in public on the same topic he might have written countless times in his school and college days. Any reassertion is no public shaming, though it may appear to be so. If you forget the basic lesson of the nation, best is you re-learn the forgotten schooling about the country’s uniqueness, which is its beauty. The diversity of races, each of which is equally Indian like the rest of the others, is no more, no less.
(The writer is an information officer of the Odisha Government)