Not only racism, but other forms of bigotry, too, will continue to prevail if only because sentiments of this nature are too deeply ingrained in individuals and societies to be permanently eliminated. For this very reason, they are convenient tools in the hands of cynical politicians for consolidating their rabid supporters at election time. So, along with racism, anti-Semiticism and Islamophobia will be among the biases which will continue to be a part of the social and political scene even if they are formally disowned by some of their supporters if only because such regressive views cannot be flaunted in polite society.

Yet, willy-nilly, politics remains at the root of such xenophobic worldviews based on complexion or culture. In the US, for instance, the country of the WASPs or white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, it is an open secret that white supremacism plays a subterranean part in guiding voters to choose candidates who will be expected to safeguard and preserve the nation’s self-image as a redoubt of whites where the blacks and browns cannot be anything other than second class citizens.

However, the fear that there are now far too many of these “people of colour” has made one of the better known white supremacists, Ann Coulter, pen her pamphlet of hate, Adios, America: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole, which says that “another few years of our current immigration policies and we’ll all have to move to Canada to escape the rapes”. That the “we” refers to whites is self-evident as is the black/brown identity of the rapists. Interestingly, several similarities between Coulter’s diatribe and current events in India are worth noting.

One is the knee-jerk identification of the Left as the harbingers of America’s descent into a third world “hellhole”. Considering that the land of the free and home of the brave is a capitalist haven, it is odd that the ungodly Left are deemed to wield so much clout that they can bring about America’s ruination. A similar belief is expressed in India as well. Although the comrades are nowhere near as influential as they were in the 1960s and ‘70s, having lost their bastions in West Bengal and Tripura, they are still considered a threat grave enough for some of their fellow travellers to be locked up in the Bhima Koregaon case and for the BJP leaders to rant and rave against “urban Naxalites”. To the untutored, the BJP’s vehemence would seem to suggest that the Left are about to take over the reins of power from the present-day rulers at the centre.

The stigmatization of The Other as a rapist is another facet of this diatribe. While one of the reasons for Donald Trump to build a wall along the US-Mexico border is to keep out the Latino “rapists”, a BJP M.P., Parvesh Verma, raised the bogey of the Muslim menfolk of the women demonstrations of Shaheen Bagh, a New Delhi locality, raping and killing Hindu women if the agitation by the Muslim women against the citizenship laws continued.

In this particular case, animus against a particular community because of its religion is the main motivating factor. There is little doubt that Islamophobia has gained ground in leaps and bounds in India ever since the BJP came to power at the centre. The targeting of Muslims for being beef-eaters, which led to lynchings, and other misdemeanours such as luring away Hindu women for conversion via “love jehad” led to former vice-president Hamid Ansari saying that the members of the community were living in fear.

But Islamophobia is not a feature of Indian politics and society alone. It is also prevalent in America and Europe where the branding of Muslims as jehadis has gained traction in the aftermath of 9/11 and other acts of terror such as in London and Paris. While in India, enmity with Pakistan and historical evidence of the destruction of temples have played a part in fuelling anger against the Muslims, in America and Europe, the dislike and mistrust of The Other have combined with the inherent aversion towards the “people of colour” to become a toxic mix, overtaking the venomous anti-Semiticism of the past although the latter has reared its head again in Hungary..

As is obvious, these are primordial feelings which draw sustenance from unverifiable myths, deliberate fostering of misconceptions, a twisted presentation of history and egregious political compulsions. Only the naïve will believe that society can be purged of these noxious beliefs in the foreseeable future. (IPA Service)