Comment by Riaz Haq on April 14, 2017 at 9:52pm

#India is world's 4th worst for religious violence after #Syria (1) , #Nigeria (2), #Iraq (3). #Pakistan at no 10. https://qz.com/959802

India historically touts itself as a secular state, one where all religions are recognized and can peacefully co-exist. Well, at least in theory, it is. Unfortunately, the reality is much different.
An April 11 Pew Research Center analysis of 198 countries ranked India as fourth worst in the world for religious intolerance. In the country of 1.3 billion, the incidence of hostility related to religion trailed only Syria, Nigeria and Iraq, all places where sectarian violence is widespread.
India is not alone in seeing more religious unrest. Globally, Pew says, government restrictions on religion and social hostilities involving religion increased in 2015 for the first time in three years.
Pew analyzed cases that involved hate crimes, mob violence, communal violence, religion-related terror, the use of force to prevent religious practice, the harassment of women for not conforming to religious dress codes, and violence over conversion or proselytizing.

Tensions between religious groups—especially Hindus and Muslims—has long divided India, but the rifts have intensified. “[In 2015,] Muslims in India at times experienced attacks by Hindus because of alleged cow slaughter, while Hindus were also sometimes the targets of hostilities by Muslims as well,” Katayoun Kishi, the study’s lead author, told Quartz. “In addition, there were multiple incidents of rioting and mob violence involving the two groups.”
Lynchings of beef-eating Muslims have compromised India’s status as a secular country. But a re-burgeoning Hindutva nationalist agenda has not made even the majority Hindus immune to discrimination, in India or elsewhere. Around the world, Hindus were harassed in 18 countries, fewer places than some other groups. “But the vast majority of the world’s Hindus—95%—live in India, where harassment of Hindus by both government and social groups was reported in 2015,” the study’s authors note. Dalits, the lowest-caste Hindus, were especially ill-treated in society. (Dalits are often secluded from basic government institutions and services, such as education and health care, too.)
National crime statistics in India also indicated that, compared with other caste affiliations, assailants most often perpetrated rape against Dalit women, according to the US State Department’s human-rights country report. Many of the assailants are not prosecuted. On June 24, 2015, attackers beheaded Dalit engineer V. Gokulraj in Pallipallayam, Tamil Nadu, reportedly because of a romantic relationship with an upper-caste Hindu classmate. The primary suspect, local caste leader S. Yuvaraj, absconded for months after the incident. (He later surrendered.)

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 8, 2017 at 10:42am

'Straight out of the Nazi playbook': Hindu nationalists try to engineer 'genius' babies in India http://wapo.st/2pnhDKH?tid=ss_tw … by @anniegowen

Members of a Hindu far-right organization called Arogya Bharati say they are working with expectant couples in the country to produce “customized” babies, who, they hope, will be taller, fairer and smarter than other babies, according to a report in the Indian Express newspaper.

The group's health officials claimed that their program — a combination of diet, ayurvedic medicine and other practices — has led to 450 of these babies, and they hope to have “thousands” more by 2020, the report said.

“The parents may have lower IQ, with a poor educational background, but their baby can be extremely bright. If the proper procedure is followed, babies of dark-skinned parents with lesser height can have fair complexion and grow taller,” Hitesh Jani, the group's national convener, told the newspaper.

Jani explained that the program consists of a “purification of energy channels” and body before a pregnancy, and mantra-chanting and “proper food,” such as meals rich in calcium and vitamin A, after the baby is born.

The newspaper identified the group as the “health wing” of the conservative Hindu group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, but Ramesh Gautam, Arogya Bharati's national general secretary, said the group was merely “inspired” by the conservative ideology of the RSS rather than being officially supported by it. Arogya Bharati's website says it is a "voluntary organization of service minded people who have an interest in the health of society.”

On Saturday, the chairwoman for a state child rights commission tried to attend one of the workshops where couples are counseled on how to produce these “genius” babies — as the Economic Times termed it — but was barred by organizers, that newspaper said.

“This is an unscientific thing that’s happening here. It cannot continue,” Ananya Chatterjee, the chair of the West Bengal Commission for Protection of Child Rights, said. The group countered that her charges were “politically motivated.”

Responding to a petition from the commission, the West Bengal state high court later mandated that organizers present an affidavit and video of the proceedings, which went off as scheduled.

The program launched over a decade ago and has spread to several Indian states. Organizers said it was inspired by a RSS leader who met a woman in Germany more than 40 years ago. An official said the woman led a post World War II re-population effort in Germany for “signature children” based on the same principles, according to the Indian Express report.

This comment — and its evocation of the legacy of Third Reich era eugenics — prompted immediate backlash on social media, with one critic writing on the Daily O opinion website that this “dystopia in the womb” was “straight out of the Nazi playbook.”

The RSS was founded in 1925 as a volunteer organization to advance the rights of Hindus. Over the years, it has given rise to many of the country’s more successful conservative politicians, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi. A few of its founders praised in essays and books the totalitarian movements of Nazism and fascism sweeping Europe at the time, scholars have noted.

“The original RSS stalwarts found a political validity in racial resurrection championed by Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich,” Angshukanta Chakraborty, an opinion writer on the Daily O website, wrote, adding, “And even now, a racially pure search for homeland or creation of one along racially/communally pure lines appeals to the RSS and is the heart of its ideology.”

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 12, 2017 at 7:59pm

Excerpts of Audrey Truschke's Aurangzeb

https://books.google.com/books?id=oUUkDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontco...

Across the border in Pakistan, too, many endorse the vision of an evil Aurangzeb. As Shahid Nadeem, a Pakistani playwright, recently put it: " Seeds of partition were sown when Aurangzeb triumphed over [his brother] Dara Shikoh". Such far-fetched suggestions would be farcical, if so many did not endorse them. 

British colonial thinkers had long impugned thew Mughals on a range of charges, including that they were effeminate, oppressive, and Muslims. As early as 1772, Alexander Dow remarked in a discussion of Mughal governance that "the faith of Mahommed is peculiarly calculated for despotism; and it is one of the greatest causes which must fix for ever the duration of that species of government in the East". For the British the solution to such an entrenched problem was clear: British rule over India. While the Indian independence leaders rejected this final step of the colonial logic, many swallowed the earlier parts wholesale. Such ideas filtered to society at large via textbooks and mass media, and several generations have continued to eat up and regurgitate the colonial take that Aurangzeb was a tyrant driven by religious fanaticism. 

Over the centuries, many commentators have spread the myth of of the bigoted, evil Aurangzeb on the basis of shockingly thin evidence. Many false ideas still mar popular memory of Aurangzeb , including that he massacred millions of Hindus and destroyed thousands of temples. Neither of these commonly believed "facts" is supported by historical evidence although some scholars have attempted, usually in bad faith, to provide an alleged basis for such tales.  

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Such views have roots in colonial-era scholarship, where positing timeless Hindu-Muslim animosity embodied the British strategy of divide and conquer. Today, multiple websites claim to list Aurangzeb's "atrocities" against Hindus (typically playing fast and loose with the facts) and fuel communal fires. There are numerous gaping holes in the proposition that Aurangzeb razed temples because he hated Hindus, however. Most glaringly, Aurangzeb counted thousands of Hindu temples within his domain and yet destroyed, at most,  few dozen.....A historically legitimate view of Aurangzeb must explain why he protected Hindu temples more often than he demolished them. 

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The bulk of Mughal histories are written in Persian, the official administrative language of the Mughal empire but a foreign tongue in India today. Out of necessity and ease, many historians disregard the original Persian text and rely instead on English translations. This approach narrows the the library of materials drastically, and many translations of the Mughal texts are of questionable quality, brimming with mistranslations and abridgments. Some of these changes conveniently served the agendas of the translators, especially colonial-era translations that tend to show Indo--Muslim kings at their worst so that the British would seem virtuous by comparison (foremost here is Elliot and Dowson's History of India as Told by Its Own Historians). Such materials are great for learning about British colonialism, but they present an inaccurate picture of Mughal India. 

Comment by Riaz Haq on August 5, 2017 at 8:05am

BBC suspends #British #Indian host Tommy Sandhu & starts major inquiry into his racist, sexist, anti-#Pakistan slurs

https://www.geo.tv/latest/152540-bbc-starts-major-inquiry-into-staf...

LONDON: The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has suspended a star of its Asian Network, in a row over online messages littered with lewd comments and racist slurs – including racist attacks on Pakistanis and the BBC’s British Pakistani staff members.

Indian origin DJ and BBC host Tommy Sandhu, 40, is amongst at least four colleagues allegedly part of WhatsApp groups sharing sexist comments as well as homophobic remarks and a derogatory terms for Pakistanis.

One of the men in the group suggested that they refuse to play any music by Pakistanis on the breakfast show, even though the network was set up to cater to all Asian groups. 

This is not the first time that BBC's asian network has been accused of anti-Pakistani bias, on several occasions it has emerged that BBC Asian Network’s hosts and DJs have refused to give due coverage to Pakistan's arts and culture. 

Allegations have been made by insiders that the broadcaster's asian network has an intolerant policy towards Pakistani music and musicians.

Another message shared on the group referred to BBC’s British Pakistani entertainment reporter Haroon Rashid as a ‘Paki’ – a derogatory term used to attack Pakistani origin individuals.

It was also discussed in the group that one of the DJs who worked with British Pakistani presenter Noreen Khan had been converted by ‘Pakis’.

When one of the men did an assignment with Noreen Khan, another BBC Asian Network DJ, they were asked on the messaging group “have them Pakis converted you?”, according to sources who revealed evidence to British media.

Vile sexist comments were also made about female staff working with the network, including young assistant producer Amanpreet Kaur.

These messages, said media reports, were accidentally linked to a BBC laptop where Kaur stumbled across them, forming the basis for the BBC to open a major investigation, including disciplinary action against some of those involved.

It is not clear how many people were part of the secret messaging groups but they included Asheesh Sharma and Kejal Kamani, two radio producers who routinely join Sandhu on air, and a disc jockey known as DJ Sachy.

Sharma has been given a final written warning and Kamani has been fired. DJ Sachy, who has worked at the station as a freelance for years, has been told he will not get any more shifts, insiders claimed.

Sources close to Sandhu claimed he did not make derogatory comments himself and was simply part of WhatsApp groups where some of the remarks were made. It is understood that he did not object to comments and did not raise complaints, but was an active member of the group.

BBC Asian Network staff also used the messaging groups to make vile homophobic slurs, calling one colleague a ‘batty boy’ and used highly offensive terms for homosexuals – using an Urdu/Hindi expression used by Pakistanis and Indians. 

They also accused a fellow radio host of being gay, even though he is married.

“We never comment on matters concerning any individuals working with the BBC. Any allegations of inappropriate behaviour would always be taken extremely seriously and would be dealt with swiftly and appropriately,” said a BBC spokesman. 

The BBC Asian Network costs around £7.5 million a year to run and is listened to by nearly 650,000 people a week, according to latest figures available. 

It was nearly shut in 2010 when it was pulling in just 477,000 listeners a week.

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 30, 2017 at 9:39pm

Savitri Devi: The mystical fascist being resurrected by the alt-right

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-41757047

Savitri Devi, a mystical admirer of Hitler and a cat-loving devotee of the Aryan myth, seemed destined to fade into obscurity after her death 25 years ago. But thanks to the rise of the extreme right, her name and her image now crop up online more and more, writes Maria Margaronis.
In 2012, browsing the website of Greece's Golden Dawn party for an article I was writing, I stumbled on a picture of a woman in a blue silk sari gazing at a bust of Hitler against a blazing sunset sky.
What was this apparently Hindu woman doing on the site of an openly racist party devoted to expelling all foreigners from Greece? I filed her as a curiosity at the back of my mind, until the rising tide of extreme-right politics in Europe and America threw up the name "Savitri Devi" once again.
It isn't hard these days to find discussions of Savitri Devi's books on neo-Nazi web forums, especially The Lightning and the Sun, which expounds the theory that Hitler was an avatar - an incarnation - of the Hindu god Vishnu, and Gold in the Furnace, which urges true believers to trust that National Socialism will rise again. The American extreme-right website Counter-Currents hosts an extensive online archive of her life and work.
Her views are reaching a wider public, too, thanks to American alt-right leaders such as Richard Spencer and Steve Bannon, former Trump chief strategist and chair of Breitbart News, who have taken up her account of history as a cyclical battle between good and evil — a theory she shared with other 20th Century mystical fascists.

Dark metal bands and American right-wing radio stations also roar about the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age of Hindu mythology, which Savitri Devi believed that Hitler was once destined to bring to an end.
Who was Savitri Devi, and why are her ideas being resurrected now? Despite the sari and the name she was a European, born Maximiani Portas to an English mother and Greek-Italian father in Lyon in 1905.
She learned Indian languages, married a Brahmin, and forged an elaborate synthesis of Nazism and Hindu myth
From an early age, she despised all forms of egalitarianism. "A beautiful girl is not equal to an ugly girl," she told an interviewer sent by the Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel in 1978.

Comment by Riaz Haq on February 1, 2019 at 10:04am

#Bollywood Actress Esha Gupta exposes everyday #racism in #India by sharing conversation with her 3.4m Instagram followers mocking #Nigerian #soccer star, Alex Iwobi, as a "gorilla" and "Neanderthal" who "evolution had stopped for". 
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-47042681

Up until Monday, Esha Gupta was just a Bollywood actress with a passion for Arsenal football club.

That changed after the actress decided to share a screengrab of a WhatsApp conversation in which a friend mocked the team's Nigerian star, Alex Iwobi, as a "gorilla" and "Neanderthal" who "evolution had stopped for".

"Hahaha," wrote the actress, who helped Arsenal unveil its 2017 away kit, as she shared the screengrab with her 3.4m Instagram followers.

The racist slurs - and the fact she thought it was funny - horrified many, and the backlash was unsurprisingly swift. How dare she call herself an Arsenal supporter, her fellow fans demanded.

Gupta apologised quickly, but the post hints at a long-known - but little acknowledged - problem of racism towards people of African descent in Indian society.

"Of course I'm not surprised by the post," Ezeugo Nnamdi told the BBC from Delhi, his home of five years.

In fact, the secretary-general of the Association of African Students in India (AASI) added that, as racial slurs go, her words were no worse than what fellow African students experienced on a daily basis - to their faces.

"Racism is not something which is very hidden here. It is something very open," he said. "People just look at you.

"They call you 'habshi' [a derogatory term], and a lot of other words and racial slurs.

"Here, you are regarded as a cannibal."

You don't have to look far to see examples of prejudice towards people of African descent in India: just look at how Bollywood treats its black characters.

Take, for example, the award-winning 2008 film Fashion, which told the tale of an aspiring model - played by Quantico actress Priyanka Chopra - who is caught in a downward spiral of drink and drugs.

But the moment she realises she has truly hit rock bottom is when she wakes up beside a black man. According to Dhruva Balram, the racial undertones of her realisation were clear.

"For Bollywood, as an aspiring model, the worst thing you can do is position yourself sexually next to a black person," he argued in an article for Media Diversified.

The article immediately resonated with Kadisha Phillips, an African-American New Yorker who spent a month in Bollywood during her degree. The racism she experienced left its mark - whether being ignored in a restaurant, or blocked from entering the school's campus by one of the guards.

"I could tell it was because of the colour of our skin," she recalled. "It was just easy to notice."

So were Gupta's messages just another example of the everyday racism experienced by black people in India?

It is fair to say the furore which surrounded the Instagram post failed to make as big a splash in India as it did in other parts of the world.

But why? That could be down to the fact it takes a more shocking incident to become a talking point.

It was one such incident back in 2016 - when a young Tanzanian woman was beaten and stripped by an angry mob - which inspired photographer Mahesh Shantaram to take a fresh look at his own country.

Endurance Amalawa was attacked by an angry mob in 2017
What he found, after spending months travelling around his own city, and then the country, meeting, speaking with and photographing black Africans, left him shocked.

"I was hearing things for the first time," he said. "Imagine someone telling you stories about your country that you think you know very well, but they tell you a very different story."

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 22, 2019 at 7:11pm

The Indian Dalit man killed for sitting on a chair eating in front of upper-caste men

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-48265387

A helpless anger pervades the Dalit community in the remote Indian village of Kot.

Last month, a group of upper-caste men allegedly beat up a 21-year-old Dalit resident, named Jitendra, so badly that he died nine days later.

His alleged crime: he sat on a chair and ate in their presence at a wedding.

Not even one of the hundreds of guests who attended the wedding celebration - also of a young Dalit man - will go on record to describe what happened to Jitendra on 26 April.

Afraid of a backlash, they will only admit to being at a large ground where the wedding feast was being held.

Only the police have publicly said what happened.

The wedding food had been cooked by upper-caste residents because many people in remote regions don't touch any food prepared by Dalits, who are the bottom of the rigid Hindu caste hierarchy.

"The scuffle happened when food was being served. The controversy erupted over who was sitting on the chair," police officer Ashok Kumar said.

The incident has been registered under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities Act) - a law meant to protect historically oppressed communities.

Dalits, formerly known as untouchables, have suffered public shaming for generations at the hands of upper-caste Hindus.

Dalits continue to face widespread atrocities across the country and any attempts at upward social mobility are violently put down.

For example, four wedding processions of Dalits were attacked in the western state of Gujarat within a week in May.

It is still common to see reports of Dalits being threatened, beaten and killed for seemingly mundane reasons.

The culture that pervades their community is visible everywhere - including in Kot, which is in the hilly northern state of Uttarakhand.

Local residents from the Dalit community allege that Jitendra was beaten and humiliated at the wedding.

They say he left the event in tears, but was ambushed again a short distance away and attacked again - this time more brutally.

Jitendra's mother, Geeta Devi, found him injured outside their dilapidated house early the next morning.

"He had been perhaps lying there the entire night," she said, pointing to where she found him. "He had bruises and injury marks all over his body. He tried to speak but couldn't."

She does not know who left her son outside their home. He died nine days later in hospital.

Jitendra's death is a double tragedy for his mother - nearly five years ago her husband also died.

This meant that Jitendra, who was a carpenter, became the family's only breadwinner and had to drop out of school to start working.

Family and friends describe him as a private man who spoke very little.

Loved ones have been demanding justice for his death, but have found little support among the community.

"There is fear. The family lives in a remote area. They have no land and are financially fragile," Dalit activist Jabar Singh Verma said. "In surrounding villages too, the Dalits are outnumbered by families from higher castes."

Of the 50 families in Jitendra's village, only some 12 or 13 are Dalits.

Dalits comprise almost 19% of Uttarakhand's population and the state has a history of atrocities committed against them.

Police have arrested seven men in connection with Jitendra's death, but all of them deny any involvement.

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 4, 2019 at 7:59am

The politics of biography: Ram Guha’s concluding Gandhi bio is a familiar exercise in deifying him, reinforcing inequality—a review

https://thepolisproject.com/the-politics-of-biography-ram-guhas-con...

The celebrity Indian historian’s refusal to triangulate Gandhi’s own recollections and memoirs and the sources contemporaneous to his times with more recent scholarship leaves us with a biography intellectually thin and long on anecdote. Gandhi’s uncritical internalization of the separation between the political and the social on which the book rests impoverishes Guha’s analysis of both Gandhi and his foremost intellectual and political adversaries like Jinnah and Ambedkar. In the end, an adroit strategy of guilt-by-association clears the space for Guha the moderate biographer to consolidate Gandhi’s towering place in history.

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On 22 September 1932, the Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar met Mohandas Gandhi in Yerwada Jail in Pune, Maharashtra. Gandhi was into the third day of his fast unto death against the British colonial administration’s Communal Award that created separate electorates for Muslims, Sikhs, and the “Depressed Classes” (as Dalits were then termed). Gandhi’s objection was not to the awarding of separate electorates to Muslims and Sikhs but to Dalits. Since the Depressed Classes totaled about 50 million or approximately 20 percent of India’s population at this time, their recognition as a distinct or separate category would severely compromise Gandhi’s, and the Congress Party’s, claim to speak for all, or at least the vast majority of, Indians. While the separate electorate would greatly strengthen Dalits in their effort to redress their horrendous socio-economic status, one that had endured for centuries if not millennia, Gandhi was against such a political solution to what he regarded as a social or even a moral problem. He considered Dalits to be Hindu and his preference was for ‘Harijan uplift’ or social reform—changing the minds and hearts of Caste Hindus about untouchability. According to the media at the time, the nation was in a frenzy as Gandhi’s health was deteriorating fast. The pressure on Ambedkar to “save the life of the Mahatma” by giving up the separate electorate the Dalits had been awarded, and to settle for a diluted version of it, can only be imagined.

At one point in their negotiations in Yerwada, Gandhi said to Ambedkar, “You are born an untouchable but I am an untouchable by adoption. And as a new convert, I feel more for the welfare of the community than those who are already there.”3 Picture, if you will, President Lyndon Johnson telling Martin Luther King Jr. during the mid-1960s that though he was not black, as someone successfully chaperoning the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act through the US Congress at that very moment, he (Johnson) felt more for the welfare of African-Americans than King possibly could, for after all the latter’s blackness was merely an accident of birth.

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Gandhi’s views about indentured laborers were identical to caste Indian views of Dalits back home that, similarly, blamed the victim. The only group even further down the ladder of inferiority in Gandhi’s view was native Africans whom he referred to as “kaffirs” throughout his time in South Africa.

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 22, 2019 at 7:34am

#Indians not #racist, we accept South Indians, says #BJP's Tarun Vijay. In a debate on Al Jazeera TV over the issue of attack on some #Nigerians in Greater Noida #Delhi, Tarun Vijay said it was wrong to say that Indians are racist. #Tamil https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/tarun-vijay-south-indians-rac... via @indiatoday

Former Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Rajya Sabha MP has come out with an apology for hurting sentiments after making a bizarre statement hinting that Indians can not be considered racist as they live with 'black' South Indians.

Participating in a debate on Al Jazeera TV over the issue of attack on some Nigerians in Greater Noida, Vijay said it was wrong to say that Indians are racist.

"If we were racist, why would we have the entire south (India)? Why do we live with them (if we are racist)? We hae blacks, black people around us," Vijay said.

The BJP leader, however, apologised for his statement while admitting that his choice of words may have been wrong.

"I feel the entire statement sas this - we have fought racism and we have people with different colour and culture still never had any racism," Vijay said.

"My words perhaps were not enough to convey this. Feel bad,really feel sorry, my apologies to those who feel I said different than what I meant," he added.

I feel the entire statement sas this- we have fought racism and we have people with different colour and culture still never had any racism.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 29, 2020 at 9:51am

#India Debates Skin-Tone Bias as Beauty Companies Alter Ads Facing Charge of Promoting #Racist Attitudes. For centuries, discrimination over skin tones has been a feature of #Indian society. It was greatly intensified by #British Raj, #caste & #Bollywood https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/28/world/asia/india-skin-color-unil...

America’s intense discussion of race, in the wake of George Floyd’s death, seems to be having some impact here.

This past week, Unilever and other major international consumer brands, facing accusations that they were promoting racist attitudes, said they would remove labels such as “fair” “white” and “light” from their products, including the skin-lightening creams that are wildly popular in India.

At the same time, a big Indian matchmaking website, Shaadi.com, decided to remove a filter that allowed people to select partners based on skin tone after facing a backlash from users that began in North America.

Ms. Jennifer and several other Indians said these were moves in the right direction.

“This is a fantastic news — a stepping stone toward ending colorism,” Ms. Jennifer said. “Now young people won’t feel ashamed of how they look while growing up with dark-tone skin.”

Preferences for light-toned skin over dark — when it comes to marriages and some jobs — are still upending the lives of hundreds of thousands of Indians.

In some families, daughters-in-law with darker skin are called derogatory names, sometimes branded with the same words used for thieves. Students with dark-toned skin are more frequently bullied in schools.

Such attitudes have spawned a huge demand in India for whiteners and bleaching products. Shop shelves are crammed with creams, oils, soaps and serums promising to lighten skin, and some are manufactured by the world’s biggest cosmetic companies. The king of the market is Unilever’s Fair & Lovely cream, a fixture in many Indian households for decades.

But even before this past week, the culture had been changing.

Earlier this year, India’s government proposed a law that would make it illegal to market products that make false health claims, including those that promise to lighten skin.

Kavitha Emmanuel, the director of Women of Worth, an organization in Chennai, started a campaign in 2019 called “Dark Is Beautiful.” Many young men and women, she said, have complained to her that their skin tone is an impediment to social mobility.

She welcomed the moves by Unilever and the matchmaking website Shaadi.com, but said India was still slow in confronting such discrimination.

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