(Siddharth Varadarajan is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Public Affairs and Critical Theory, Shiv Nadar University)
24 hours after using Congress President Sonia Gandhi as the foil for a racist remark, Giriraj Singh and the Narendra Modi government he represents seem blissfully unaware of the damage this witlessness has done to India's relations with Nigeria, and to its standing with the African continent as a whole.
To the loud guffaws of his supporters, the Minister of State for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises can be seen on video saying, "If Rajiv Gandhi had married a Nigerian lady, someone not white-skinned, would the Congress have accepted her as its leader?"
Under attack from the Congress and other parties, Giriraj Singh has made some lame attempts at damage control. First, he insisted the offensive statement was made "off the record" and should not have been publicized, a strange defence because in politics, racism and misogyny are not acceptable even when they are expressed "privately". Second, he said that if Sonia Gandhi was indeed upset by his remark, then he was prepared to apologise for it. Nowhere has the minister acknowledged that he was wrong to say what he did. Full stop. Most shocking of all, to my mind, is his failure to apologise to Nigeria, despite that country's envoy to India already expressing his anger at the racist suggestion that Nigerian women are in some way inferior to whites or Indians.
We are used to the common-place prejudices in our society against dark skin colour, to the preference of fair over dark and the lucrative business that thrives on selling the chimera of whiteness to millions and millions of Indians by robbing them of their self-confidence and self-esteem. This is a battle that Indian civil society will have to fight. But when Indian racism begins to hurt other peoples and countries - be they African students and migrants in India, or the feelings of an entire continent - action by the government has to be swift and immediate.
Nigeria, like many other African countries, is also host to a thriving Indian community, many of whom have lived there for decades. The Indians in Africa have done well for themselves, and for India; they have preserved their national identity and language but are far more comfortable speaking the languages of their adopted homeland - Hausa, Yoruba, Swahili, Wolof, Lingala - than migrants from, say, China. The crude racism of Giriraj Singh and the failure of the Prime Minister to sack him - or even publicly reprimand him - are an affront to Africa, an embarrassment to the Indian diaspora, and a slap in the face of Indian diplomacy.
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