Gandhi Hasn't Died Yet!

The boy is the father to the man, as goes an old adage. The phenomenon of racism and xenophobia is way more dangerous than the mass murder. When it comes to white privilege, the  western civilization is not new to racism, a doctrine asserting racial differences in human character, physical and mental abilities, disposition, intelligence and so forth. Most people in the West tend to inherit a deep-seated racist mindset from their predecessors and thus exhibit the same hatred and xenophobic feelings to non-white races. Without a doubt, despite calling themselves liberal, secular and an open-minded breed, Britons, time and again, have shown us their hatred and extreme dislike for the other people. Held at Wembley Stadium in London, the final of the Euro Cup 2020, played between the U.K. and Italy, is just another example.

Bukayo Saka, a black British footballer, missed his penalty shot in the Euros final, resulting in Italy's victory. The weeks of celebration and social spirit that had apparently brought the country together as the tournament progressed, were washed away by a deluge of racist comments towards the three Black penalty shooters, namely Jadon Sancho, Bukayo Saka and Marcus Rushford. From this day forward, the whites have been using racial slurs against the black community in England. After the Euro Cup final, the Instagram handle of Bukayo Saka was replete with abusive comments and were littered with emojis of a monkey eating a banana. Even some online users, mainly from the white community, asked Saka to leave the United Kingdom. Many people also said that the black players should not play in the English side, and even the black community, on the whole, should not be allowed to open their pubs and shops in the U.K.

Particularly after the English defeat, the white breed with a superiority complex  has shocked the entire world as no one was expecting such an inhuman reaction from them. On his Twitter account, Boris Johnson, the U.K. Prime Minister, condemned the sheer display of racism and xenophobia aimed against the blacks. However, he has failed to perceive that the U.K. government is equally accountable for promoting racism and racial discrimination among the British people. There is no denying to the fact that Boris Johnson by himself compared veiled Muslim women to letterboxes, while calling black people 'piccaninnies' with 'watermelon smiles'.

The political track record of Boris Johnson suggests that he has always been very unconventional both in politics and foreign diplomacy. He even failed to condemn the U.S. President Donald Trump's racist leadership approach against the American Blacks during the Black Lives Matter movement in particular. It is a stigma for the English people that a public representative of a supposedly progressive country fails to condemn such heinous crimes. This criminal silence over the white supremacy could have an unexpected consequence in the long run.

Plagued with racism and implicit bias, the same mindset led to the great Bengal Famine of 1943, which took about 15 to 29 million lives in India during the Second World War. When the then U.K. Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was informed about such an intentional human-induced catastrophe, he asked, “Why hasn't Gandhi died yet?". The white supremacists, including the likes of Boris Jonson and Donald Trump, must learn from Willy Brandt, the then German Chancellor, when he kneeled down at the Warsaw ghetto in 1970 to apologize to Polish Jews for the Holocaust.

Suffering from delusions of grandeur, the lot of white supremacists and neo-Nazis must rethink their racist approach towards the other races living in the world, because when the hand of fate intervenes, it shows no mercy.