After visiting a friend's birthday party in southwest New Delhi in late September 2014, international students Yohan Koumba Daouda and Mapaga Yannis from Gabon and Guira Fallal from Burkina Faso boarded a Yellow Line train at the Chhatarpur station. They were on their way home to the southeast suburb of Noida. Thirteen subway stops later, they were being hounded by a mob of more than a hundred young Indians in a major metro station near the centre of the city. What had happened?
According to the young black men, who are engineering students at Amity Institute of Information Technology and Sharda University in New Delhi, some of the Indian passengers started taking photos of them and mocking them on board the subway train. The students felt as if they embodied a 'human zoo' for the Indians around them. One of the African students asked the group to stop taking pictures of them. A verbal scuffle unfolded which continued until the students disembarked to change trains at the Rajiv Chowk station. Amidst allegations that the international students had sexually harassed an Indian woman, the Indian crowd's anger escalated.
A lone security officer intervened and escorted the students to an empty police booth inside Rajiv Chowk station, where they sought shelter. But the size of the mostly Indian male lynch mob grew by the minute and the students found themselves surrounded. Minutes later, they were forced to climb on top of the police booth for their own safety. The mob started to smash the glass façade of the police booth before thrashing the defenceless students for several minutes with sticks and iron rods. Local police didn't intervene until backup arrived. Two of the African students sustained serious injuries, and one had to be hospitalised and operated on.
The young men's ordeal was captured by dozens of mobile-phone cameras and made the headlines the next day. The images reveal that a sizable number of people who were present chose to either film the sensational incident or idly stand by. There were only few who tried to protect the black students from the lynch mob. Chants of 'bharat mata ki jai' (victory to Mother India) accompanied the raging crowd and provided a sinister soundtrack for the video recordings that have received hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube. It is clear that the mob wasn't just attempting to lynch three African students in one of Delhi's main metro stations. They were marking their opposition to racial diversity. However, the question that dominated Indian media after the incident was whether the country has a race problem rather than how to problematise India's current racial status quo and the ideology that supports it. 'Is India racist?' was a question raised by many, but conclusive answers weren't offered.