Bullies Within The Bullied
Only a dead pendulum can stop swinging to extremes.
Bullying comes in various forms and leaves a traumatic experience with severe mental health consequences. Unfortunately, I have closely seen four forms of bullying — childhood, race, gender, and corporate. I have been a victim but have also been guilty of being a culprit. I am writing this article to break a myth about bullying and the consequences of forming baseless perceptions.
Victims are not innocent
There is a bully in all of us. Who takes birth first? The bully or the bullied. It’s a chicken and egg problem.
Are all victims innocent? As a victim and a culprit, I can say hand on my heart that the moment there is a power shift, most victims will become abusers. I went through childhood & corporate bullying, but that does not mean I am an angel. I had my issues and got things done by playing the victim card many times.
Racism In India
In 2010, there were numerous incidents of racial abuse of Indian students in Australia. Being an Indian citizen, I watched this space closely as I planned to file for a Permanent Residency in Australia. The situation was terrible. On 9th Jan 2010, Sydney Morning Heard wrote that Indians are 2.5 times more at risk than other Melbournians.
Shouldn’t Indians know the damage caused by racial abuse? If yes, why do many Indians (including me) use the racial slur Chinki in our day-to-day life to categorize the north-eastern people of India? Because we can.
Calling people with racial slurs is terrible but not as treacherous as we did to African students in India. How can we do it? Why did we do it? Are we hiding behind the umbrella of PTSD to shield ourselves from our actions?
Gender discrimination vs. Women empowerment.
It’s appalling to see the state of Women in Afghanistan. The most recent order expects women in Afghanistan to wear a complete burka to cover their whole body. It’s like a human walking inside a jail. I feel jittery in my body just thinking about it. If I compare my country of birth, India, with the state of Afghanistan, women empowerment has come a long way to protect Indian women.
Even today, after all the efforts from the Indian government, India is widely considered unsafe for women. They need upliftment, but does government realize the damage caused by methods to uplift. Are all women saints? Are you telling me that an Indian woman never used’ Chinki as a racial slur? If you say — yes, stop kidding yourself.
Women are not safe, but men aren’t either. I wrote an article some years back after studying data from NCRB, about the mental health of Indian men. There is a reason why hashtags like #MarriageStrike, and #MakeGenocide are picking up in Twitter space.
Indian Women often misuse the laws to settle scores by reporting false domestic violence and rape complaints. It’s an extortion industry where out-of-court settlement is the norm. The Supreme court called the practice of misusing laws to empower women Legal Terrorism.
Black Lives Matter
Over the past few months, we have seen how the world has come together for #BlackLivesMatter. The #BlackLivesMatter has become an excellent platform to promote equality. Different organizations and countries intensified their efforts to educate the population about racism. But that does not mean discrimination does not exist within the black community. Colorism has existed within the black community for a long time.
Although less advertised, the problem of tribalism in Africa is of a greater magnitude than what we see in America. It does not mean we should not work to eliminate racism in America; it means that people from the Black or African community are not innocent. Read about conflicts between Neur and Dinka in South Sudan, Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda, and Dogon and Fulani in Mali. How can they do this to each other? Why cant they stand together in the way they did it in America?
Rule of the Jungle
Where were the celebrities when Indians tortured African students in India? Where are the women empowerment laws when an old Indian mother is dragged from one Indian court to another because her daughter-in-law has the liberty to walk into a police station without any evidence to settle scores against her husband? Why does everyone wants to talk about #MeToo and not #MenToo?
I have two reasons:
- It’s natural to work toward the most obvious problem. Racism in America is easier to handle than tribalism in Africa.
- Empowerment doesn’t bring equality. It creates new problems while trying to bandage the old.
There is no problem in uplifting the vulnerable, but not at the cost of the innocent who is unfortunate to be among the uplifted. I have asked tough questions in this article, but there are no easy answers.
It all comes down to a simple rule — ‘The rule of the jungle.’ Anyone who has the power will make use of it. I am not innocent, and neither are you. If we have the power, we will use it to our advantage. The government will use these issues to increase their political mileage over others, and the capitalist mindset will enable the creation of new extortion industries to bully the weak.
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