India, like its national bird, the peacock, wears many coloured plumes. Delhi, the cultural melting pot, of this multicultural, multiethnic, tolerant nation has remained largely immune to the occasional regional skirmishes marring the democratic image. But no longer...It has many new labels to wear—protest capital and racist capital among them.

DEEPAK DHAMIJA// The question of race is a curious one in Delhi, and India. We tend to define social differences in terms of community, caste, religion, language and gender. But, a discussion on race is mostly kept out of public discourse. Indians have travelled the world over, but within the country their interaction with the racial difference is rather limited, unless we start addressing the question of caste, tribals and other ethnicities from a racial lens. Many writers have argued that racial difference finds expression in prejudices that we tend to camouflage in cultural terms.

Now there are two new entrants in the public debate which have made racism a buzzword in India, though largely in Delhi. People from the Northeast—whose migration to Delhi for education and livelihood over the years has now attained a critical mass to be counted as a political category— and the migrants from African countries— who started becoming visible ever since India started opening up its economy—have brought the focus on racism in a much more direct way. This directness comes from the fact that these two social categories cannot be defined in any other traditional Indian lexicons of both marking and fighting injustices. Moreover, the African migrant brings with her an international and historical vocabulary of fighting injustice in racial terms.

In the present time where the world is fast becoming a global village, cities everywhere have started resembling each other. We see similar kinds of buildings, interests and cuisines and similar ways of human exploitation, though these exploitations find manifestations in unique manners in different cities. On the one end of the scale, there is Mumbai, where violence in the name of regionalism keeps raising its head every once in a while and towards the other end is Chennai, where the Dravidian movement subtly ensured the non-involvement of north- Indian population for decades. Similarly, on the one end of the spectrum, Calcutta has witnessed rare instances of violence against women, and on the other end, Delhi is slowly becoming the rape capital of India.

Though the instances of violence are becoming more and more rampant among the so-called civilized and educated city population, the capital of the nation is also leading the polls for being least tolerant, most insensitive and most racist city in the country. It is quite a difficult feat to achieve, considering the presence of VIPs and ministers in the city.

In such circumstances, it is quite easy and convenient to pronounce the judgment about sensibilities of city residents and write it off as a city of boorish people who cannot respect ethnic and racial differences. But, if the idea is to go a little deeper than merely being judgmental, it will require a lot of effort and patience to know why the Delhi psyche has developed the way it has.

Talking of Delhi in the 18th century, the famous poet Mir said,“Dil ki basti bhi shahar Dilli ho jaise/jo bhi guzra usne hi loota(As if my heart is like the city of Delhi/whoever passed through it destroyed it)”.

At times, the poetry, stories, folklores, myths and songs of an era reveal much more about it than its historical landscape can which is contained in voluminous books. Such is the case with this couplet of Mir from the 18th century Mughal India. Imagine what all Delhi must have seen that it became a metaphor of sorrow for poets to convey extreme pain of plundering. And, since then, the city has not only witnessed the cases of extreme violence but has also been home for thousands of victims of extreme acts of violence. Whether it was the Partition riots of 1947 or the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, the city accommodated all the victims within its open arms. And, all of them stayed back, carrying deep scars and indelible marks in their heart.

The impact of such acts of mass violence had bred a generation of extremely insecure, aggressive and temperamental individuals, who were not willing to trust anyone beyond their families and communities. Over the years, the same insecurity has been passed on from one generation to another as a cultural legacy. Though the hurt has come down considerably with time, but the hangover of fear still looms in the heart of most of the witnesses of those massacres.

This hangover has ensured that citizens often find it difficult to accept anyone or anything which is not identical with their regional identities. A child develops a certain sense of aggression as part of their personality within the first few years of their childhood as a defence mechanism to survive in this part of the country.

With this baggage of Partition and violent history from a different era, it may be quite difficult for Delhi to lose its shades of aggression over the next few years. Though more tolerance and sensitivity is not only the demand of the era but it will also prove to be a positive step in the healing of its own wounds.

MADHURESH KUMAR// Delhi being the power centre and base of most ‘national’ visual media houses is in the news on a daily basis more than the other metros in the country. This is good as well as bad. It is good in the sense that this focus helps bring many issues to fore for debate, and every time it happens, things improve. The deep-seated issues of discrimination against the other is endemic to every city in the country, irrespective of their location, be it Mumbai, Bangalore, Guwahati or any other city. Compared to other cities, Delhi is no one’s city, because it is the national capital. There are claimants for every city but none claims Delhi. Bangalore is considered to be the pride of Kannadigas, Mumbai of the Marathi manoos; Hyderabad is witnessing a tough tussle between the people of Seemandhra and Telangana and Chandigarh between the people of Punjab and Haryana and so on. Delhi is not parochial and regional in that sense.

Delhi being a financial, intellectual and activist hub, it is not surprising then that the racial debates are most vocal in this city. However, these are still early days, but some trends and confusions are already visible. On the one hand, we see people using the term racism rather loosely to mean any kind of cultural injustice and, on the other, there is a tendency to see common patterns among cultural, gender-based and racial discriminations. Yet, Delhi seems more tolerant than other places when it comes to amalgamation. Though it is a city believed to be dominated by Punjabis, Gurjars and Jats, but the census figures will belie that, and so will the composition of elected representatives to the Delhi Legislative Assembly or any of its municipal corporations, where those from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and other states find place in them. The MDMK, a Tamil party, fields its candidate outside of Tamil Nadu only in Delhi. Delhi that way is more cosmopolitan than other cities, like Kolkata, Bangalore and Hyderabad, which are parochial and vernacular. All this shows a very different picture of Delhi.

Everyday some form of racism or discrimination is witnessed by every community or linguistic group that comes to this city from outside, and there are pockets where people from the same cultural group live together. Delhi has varied examples of accommodating each other: Jangpura, a Sikh- and Punjabi-dominated area in central Delhi, has become a hub for those coming from Kashmir, Afghanistan and other Islamic countries. And, no wonder, Khirki Extension in the south has become a hub for Africans, the areas around the North Campus of the University of Delhi for those from the Northeast or Munirka in the south for people coming from all over. There are also pockets like CR Park where every non Bengali is the other and is unwelcome as a tenant. Yet, adjoining Punjabi Kalkaji pocket is a an amalgamation of of all castes, creeds and races—you have Africans, Sudaneses and even goras strolling down the local M-Block bazaar.

However, when it comes to people who look distinctly and are culturally different, Delhi has its underbelly, where discrimination persists. That is the reason we find those from African countries or the Northeast having difficulties in finding accommodation or being called names. But, that underbelly exists everywhere. I wonder if the experiences will be any different if a north Indian were to rent a place in a Northeastern city. One of my friends, teaching in a prestigious institution, tells me about the attitude of her own colleagues from the Northeast towards her, which borders on discrimination. She is not physically attacked, but she is on the guard.

There is no unwritten law in Delhi which establishes its ownership: in fact, everyone is the other in this city. The prejudices here are more reflective of economic differences. Those who can pay and afford to live in posh south Delhi neighbourhoods do not have the experiences of discrimination. It is in the cut-throat world of Delhi villages, localities like Khirki, Jangpura, Munirka, etc., which will occasionally see these tensions erupting, but they will never explode the whole city. The logic of market comes into play, and at the end of the day, rent economy takes over social differences. Somewhere in the growing cacophony around these issues, things like this one are not factored in.

There is a hue and cry on the issue of racism, but migrant workers coming from Bihar, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and others have an equally harrowing time in this city, who are exploited. But, no one talks about them, other than on occasions when news items mention maids from Jharkhand being trapped in some south Delhi localities by their employers.

However, these differences and similarities cannot be a justification for the Khirki Extension incident or for everyday intolerance or discrimination towards people from the Northeast or Africans or any other cultural group in Delhi. If Delhi wants to become a world-class city, then it must learn to co-exist with differences. But, more importantly, it needs to worry how it can become a city in which the dignity of labour is recognised and those from margins find izzat and peace.