When remembering the George Floyds of USA don’t forget the Faizans and Khatoons of India
For some reason COVID-19 in itself is starting to take a backseat. The pandemic is a constant overarching theme running in the background while our hearts and minds are burdened with certain heart-wrenching incidents taking place in India and around the world.
We are living in an age of collective trauma where via social media platforms the repercussions and reactions to an episode or event in any part of the world are not restricted at the local level. George Floyd, a black man in Minneapolis, US, died after he was pinned down by a police officer, Derek Chauvin who kneeled on Floyd’s neck despite the latter screaming saying that he couldn’t breathe.
The video of the incident on 25th May went viral and as of this moment, Detroit, Los Angeles, and other states in the US are seeing massive protests with the #BlackLivesMatter agenda playing a central role. The George Floyd incident is perhaps the best example of collective trauma as it has not only invoked responses from within the US, but India and other countries as well.
My Facebook timeline, along with Instagram stories are filled with #BlackLivesMatter hashtags along with fundraising links towards the cause. At a time when global solidarity is of the utmost importance, this is an encouraging sight.
On the same day as the Floyd incident, in India, Arbina Khatoon, a migrant worker died on board a “special” Shramik train from Ahmedabad (as claimed by Indian Railways). The video from Muzaffarpur, Bihar was shocking (an understatement) which showed Khatoon’s lifeless body on a railway platform with her two-year old son trying to wake her up by moving the cloth over her body, not understanding that his mother is deceased.
The video went viral. What followed was sheer cacophony where on one hand the Indian Railways claimed that the reports of Amrina Khatoon (same person as Arbina Khatoon stated above) dying of starvation are false and that she was unwell before. The family of the deceased retorted by saying that she had no prior illness.
What’s more infuriating is that two different reports (both cited here), have reported two different names of the victim. Along with the pandemic plight faced by the migrant workers, we have failed to uphold their identity as well.
Khatoon received national coverage whereas in Delhi, a 23-year old Muslim man named Faizan died a silent death as a result of police brutality late February during the Delhi riots. A video also emerged which showed the police beating five young people while asking them to sing the national anthem, a common happening in India’s hyper-nationalist narrative. Faizan was one of the five in the video.
Reports (rare in numbers as they were) stated that Faizan was held by the police and beaten ruthlessly. After he was brought home, his body was swollen and had cuts on his head. He died in a hospital shortly after.
It’s so ironic that Faizan’s story was so less reported that I got to know his name and the incident from a friend’s Facebook status which was written with a context about Floyd’s death, as both happenings can be categorised under the issue of police brutality.
The three people mentioned in this article are all victims of a misbalanced, biased, and broken socio-political systems their respective countries. In USA, racial discrimination has been part of their history despite the abolition of the Jim Crow laws and the Civil Rights Movement. In India the segregation on the lines of religion, and caste have their own historical roots.
So let’s get some facts straight. On one hand we are extending our solidarity to George Floyd. On the other, Amrina/Arbina Khatoon’s death is followed up by reports comprising of a battle between the family and Indian Railways and her name being reported differently by various media agencies. Additionally, Faizan’s story remains unheard in the same country where he died.
This selective outrage is something which we should avoid. If we are empathising with the death of a black man due to police brutality in another country while being ignorant towards the death of a Muslim man due to the same reason in our own nation, then we should take a look in the mirror, do some daunting introspection and ask ourselves whether we are justified in our protests and beliefs.
When we express solidarity with George Floyd, we say “When Black lives matter, all lives matter.”
But what we should do is add some prefixes and say “When Muslim, Migrant labor, Black lives matter, then all lives matter.”
They are not mutually exclusive, but inclusive.
