Beyond Containment – Confronting Racial Hierarchies in International Law: Who Is Seen as Subject to Racial Subordination? India, Race, and International Law

[Suraj Girijashanker is a Residential Fellow at the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School. His research focuses on the nexus between race, empire and international law, particularly in the context of migration]

Over the past year, racist violence and abuse targeting Indians across the First World have surged. From attacks on Indian migrants in Ireland to a New Zealand Member of Parliament warning that a free trade agreement between New Zealand and India will lead to a “butter chicken tsunami,” racist rhetoric and violence are escalating in tandem. Online, portrayals of Indians as “invaders” and “job thieves,” along with the circulation of the now-infamous slur “Pajeet,” have become more visible. For many Indians, this is what comes to mind when thinking about racism. As Dipesh Chakrabarty puts simply, racism is often seen as something “white people do to us.” At home, however, hierarchy is read through other frames, including communalism, regionalism, and caste. 

If race is understood as a transnational structure of power whose advent is rooted in the European colonial project, its application to India risks flattening the subcontinent’s pre-existing social formations. Yet, in a context where British colonial officials cast India as a “laboratory of mankind,” with racial science and knowledge production central to how populations were classified and governed, can race really be set aside? Applying the lens of race in the Indian context is not straightforward. It requires attention to how hierarchies shaped through the racial logics of British colonial rule intersect with indigenous forms of ordering, including caste-based subordination as well as religious and regional differences. This may help explain why, aside from scholarship on Dalit activists’ efforts to internationalize caste, including through the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, engagement with race by international legal scholars has remained relatively limited.

But the account remains incomplete. It fails to explain the reluctance by international legal scholars to use race to examine how India and Indians engage with non-Indians. As early as 1936, W. E. B. Du Bois cautioned that “India has also had temptation to stand apart from the darker peoples and seek her affinities among whites.” That warning still rings, visible in violent attacks against African students in India and in the attitudes of some members of the Indian diaspora, including those in positions of power in the First World in advancing hostile policies toward non-white populations. 

If political discourse is any indication, one might argue that Indians find it difficult to engage with race and racism where they themselves are implicated. My chapter in Emancipating International Law, Indian Approaches to Racism and Related Forms of Subordination under International Law: A Question of Interest Convergence, grew in part out of such patterns of deflection, as well as my own encounters with individuals who struggled to confront anti-Black racism in particular. At the political level, this difficulty is particularly visible in statements by figures affiliated with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), though, as I illustrate in the chapter, it is by no means limited to them.

Following a series of violent attacks against African students in Indian cities between 2016 and 2017, then foreign minister Sushma Swaraj responded:

“India is the land of Gandhi and Buddha. We have fought consistently against racial discrimination. Mahatma Gandhi himself championed the cause of fighting against this evil. We can never have a racist mindset.”

In a similar vein, Tarun Vijay, a former member of the Rajya Sabha, collapsed anti-Black racism into domestic difference, asking:

“If we (Indians) were racist, why would we have the entire south? Which is, you know… completely Tamil, you know Kerala, you know Karnataka and Andhra. Why do we live with them? We have Blacks, Black people all around us.”

Throughout my chapter, I argue that India’s engagement with international law on questions of race and racism has been double-edged. While it has mobilized legal and institutional frameworks to confront racism beyond its borders, it has also drawn on those same frameworks to resist or deflect scrutiny of racism and related forms of subordination within a domestic context. I revisit the period leading up to and following India’s independence in 1947, when it played a critical role in challenging racism and white-minority rule in South Africa and beyond at the United Nations. Extending Derrick Bell’s theory of interest convergence to the Indian context, I argue that, beyond expressions of genuine solidarity, India’s antiracist stance aligned with its geopolitical interests and was premised on the maintenance of hierarchies in relation to African movements and subordinated groups within India.

Given this conditionality, I contend that when attention shifted to its domestic treatment of racialised and subordinated populations, India’s default position has been a double move: invoking its antiracist history while challenging the applicability of relevant international legal frameworks in an Indian context. This has been evident when attention turned to domestic issues such as caste-based subordination and anti-Black racism. I suggest similar dynamics are likely to be replicated as international attention turns to the racialization of Muslims as part of the construction of a Hindu Rashtra.

It is in this final move, I would argue, that scholars must most urgently engage with race and racism in international law. Despite ongoing attempts to reinterpret the history of Hindutva, especially that of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)—an organization long associated with members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), including Narendra Modi—its racial foundations remain well established. Social science scholars have traced ideological and technological exchanges between Hindutva and other racial projects, including Italian fascism, Nazism, and forms of white supremacy. Hindutva ideologues have consistently framed Hindu identity in racial terms, grounded in notions of blood and culture. Central to this project is the racialization of Muslims, who, as Zaheer Baber argues, are subjected to a “racism of domination,” and increasingly, a “racism of extermination.”

For many Indians, the concept of “racism of extermination” may seem overstated. Yet it is difficult to sustain that view in light of India’s enduring history of anti-Muslim violence. As is well known, prior to becoming Prime Minister, Modi served as Chief Minister of Gujarat, during which over 1,000 people were killed in anti-Muslim pogroms in 2002. Since assuming national office in 2014, there has been a marked rise in violence targeting Muslims, often with the acquiescence or direct involvement of the BJP and its affiliates.

At this moment, there is clear scope for Indian legal scholars to frame the treatment of Indian Muslims through the lens of race and international law. India is, in certain contexts, sensitive to challenges to its international reputation, particularly when framed through race, making international law a potentially useful avenue. At the same time, it is important to recognize that Hindutva’s racialized logics are not confined to India’s borders, raising questions of international law.

India’s response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza immediately comes to mind, where ideological commitments intersect with its engagement with international law and institutions, as well as its material practices. Writing in 1947, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, an ideologue associated with the RSS, argued that “the international policy of Hindudom… must always aim to break up the power of the Moslem blocs from Africa to the Malayan Peninsula,” adding that “the creation of a strong and independent Jewish state must serve to checkmate the aggressive tendencies of Moslem fanaticism in general.”

This provides a longer ideological backdrop to the record of the BJP, including its willingness to turn a blind eye to international law and, at times, to act in ways that raise questions of complicity in its violation, most clearly reflected in the co-production and export of weapons technologies to Israel used in genocide. Understanding race as a transnational structure, and racial hierarchies as contested yet operative across borders, may help to interrogate India’s engagement with international law in this regard, tracing connections between logics and technologies deployed domestically against Muslims and those circulating internationally. Extending this analysis may help to revitalize traditions of solidarity and coalition-building, of which Indian actors have historically been a part, that have challenged racism and related forms of subordination. In this regard, it is also important to recognize that Hindutva’s intellectual tradition contains clear anti-Black elements. As Savarkar himself suggested when asked by an American journalist how Muslims would be treated: they would exist “as a minority, in the position of your Negroes.”

Undoubtedly, this is a challenging moment for Indian academics and students, both at public and private institutions in India and beyond, who seek to critique Hindutva. Within these constraints, international law and race remain one lens to confront configurations of power and violence.