With the controversies raging in Australia
over alleged racism by an Indian cricket player against an Australian,
there are many journalist who are making the most of the opportunity to
to further stoke up the issue – for motives selfish and / or not entirely honest.

Photograph: Sydney Morning Herald

This is one of them from the Guardian Unlimited

India in denial – Mike Marqusee

The response of the BCCI to the cricket row in Australia illustrates
the problem of entrenched racism in India – January 8, 2008 11:00 AM

Racism, towards people of African origin and and more broadly towards people with darker skins, is commonplace and vivid in south Asia, yet rarely acknowledged.

Visit Indian offices and factories, hotels, cricket grounds or airports, and the colour hierarchy leaps out at you. The higher up the managerial scale you go, the more likely you are to find lighter-skinned people. As a white-skinned visitor from the west, I can’t count how many times strangers have boasted to me with pride of their offspring’s fair complexion. Children with darker skins are often teased as “blackies”. Matrimonial adverts frequently emphasise fairness.

Skin lighteners are sold in vast quantities. Advertisements for “Fair and Lovely” skin whitener adorn cricket grounds and intrude endlessly on TV cricket coverage. In one of them, an earnest, dusky-coloured young female cricket fan is transformed by the application of skin lightener into a star cricket commentator.

I doubt if this author really comprehends what constitutes racism?
Yes there is colour hierarchy in Indian society, even to the point of discrimination
but that is not “racism”.
We Indians also believe anything made abroad is better, how does he define that?

The corollary to the authors logic,
Indians by nature bow to fair skinned people, so the Indian team acknowledge
the other 10 players in the Australian team are a “superior” race,
it is Symonds who is the only “inferior” individual.

That is ridiculous.

But as the laws of cricket now recognise, racist abuse is an offence of a special magnitude. If Harbhajan did call Symonds a “monkey“, then it was absolutely necessary for Australian captain Ricky Ponting to make a formal complaint, and for International Cricket Council (ICC) referee Mike Proctor to punish Harbhajan accordingly.

The Board of Control for Cricket in India’s (BCCI) statement on the Harbhajan ban read more like an emotional defence of Indian cricket and India as a whole than a considered response to the referee’s ruling.

There are abuses and swearwords and their are racial abuse.
Every time a person swears at another of a different race,
does that become a deliberate “racist” insult.

Had Harbhajan called Ponting a monkey, would that too be a racist jibe?
It is alleged that Hogg had called an Indian player a bastard – is that a racial insult?

Indians equate stupidity to asinine behaviour.
If an indian calls a white /black person a donkey
does that insult the intelligence of the other or his race?

The match referees has accepted the word of five “white” players
and ignored the evidence of two “coloured” players
with not a shred of corroborative evidence.
Is that a discrimination?

What an enquiry was to prove without doubt as
1. the alleged abuse had taken place
2. to racially insult was the deliberate intent.
I do not see that has been proved against Harbhajan Singh.

Colour hierarchy in south Asia is rooted in the history of caste and labour. (Incidentally, seven of the 11 who played for India at Sydney were of Brahmin background, though Brahmins make up only about 7% of the Indian population.) Colonialism, in which all Indians, however elite, found themselves on the wrong side of the colour bar, entrenched the value of whiteness and its associations with power and privilege. As the US shows, modernisation and GDP growth do not necessarily dissolve colour distinctions, and in their much-vaunted upward mobility, the Indian middle classes do not appear to have abandoned the old prejudices. Indeed, since so many now prefer to identify with their western counterparts rather than their impoverished compatriots, these prejudices are likely to be strengthened.

How does caste come into this?
Other than Ganguly I do not know who the other six brahmins are.
And like myself, there will be million Indians who doesn’t care.
Caste becomes an issue if it is proved
the BCCI is run by brahmins, who have all the selectors of that caste,
the team selection has been deliberately picked only brahmin players
and deliberately discriminated against worthy players from other castes.

I challenge the author to prove this.

This is the author’s attempt to pass off is personal and untrue assumption as an evidence. It is not only irrelevant in the present context I also resent his unsubstantiated insinuations.

The value attached to whiteness is a sickness in south Asian society, which badly needs the antidote of a “black is beautiful” movement. There are precedents in the lower caste insurgencies associated with Periyar (founder of Dravidian movement in south India) and Ambedkar (the Dalit, ie “untouchable” liberator). The skin colour hierarchy can in the end only be uprooted by a transformation in attitudes towards caste, marriage, the female and male bodies, and social stratification in general. But the first step has to be breaching the widespread reluctance to acknowledge or discuss the realities of racism in Indian society. The Indian response to the accusation against Harbhajan indicates that this will be an uphill battle.

Does this author understands what “racism” really is?
Or he seriously believe we, as Indians,
are incapable of defining racisms.

What he describes
is more a “sickness” of many white societies?
I am yet to see a neo-nazi group of fairskinned Indians
goose-stepping through the neighbourhood of coloured Indians?

He equates an individual’s colour preference as racism.
He also wrongly generalises that every Indian prefers whites over others.
Indians in general do not accept homosexuality, would he also condemn
an Indian’s reluctance to accept certain sexual preference
as another “reality of racism in Indian society”?

This is irresponsible journalism.