“The other day, someone spat at me,” said Hassan Mubarak, a Nigerian student who has lived in Greater Noida, a city outside Delhi, for three years. “They run away like I’m a monkey, just because of the color of my skin? It saddens me deeply.”
Abstracted from Global Post NEW DELHI, India — Last Jan. 31, a Tanzanian woman was reportedly beaten, stripped and paraded naked by a mob in the southern city of Bengaluru after a road accident. The woman was not involved, but the crowd assumed that she knew the driver responsible because he too was black, from Sudan. Last March, two separate mob attacks were recorded against African students in Bengaluru. In 2014, a huge crowd chased three African men through a subway station in New Delhi. The murder of a Nigerian living in Goa led to protests and a diplomatic standoff between the two countries in 2013.
Even aside from such attacks, expats in India, especially those from African countries, have horror stories to tell about the racism they face every day.
Sunil Kumar, a security guard at a Greater Noida compound where many African students live.. “Some are fine, but some are very noisy, they wear obscene clothes. One of them broke a guard’s hand here,Further questioning revealed that the guards had used sticks to beat the student after he had “deliberately” run an auto-rickshaw over a guard’s foot.
Pradeep Kumar, a pizza delivery man. He referred to Africans as “habshi,” a derogatory word used for a community of African slaves brought in by the British during the colonial period. “They just look scary sometimes, “I heard once that one of them cut up and ate someone,”
Europeans face similar challengws “It’s directed at any outsiders, but the Indians studying in the universities are better because they are younger and their minds are more open.”