Dear Dr. Parmjeet Parmar,
You and I, both Indian origin migrants, migrated out of India in the 1990s.
Both of us, in the STEM disciplines, completed our graduate degrees abroad after migration.
You completed your Masters in Biochemistry in India, married, and moved to Aotearoa in 1995.
I completed my Bachelors in Agricultural Engineering in India, took the GRE and moved to the U.S. to pursue a master's on a scholarship.
You then completed your PhD from the University of Auckland in Neuroscience in 2003. I completed my PhD in Mass Communication from the University of Minnesota in 2001.
Both of us eventually found ourselves in this unique land in Aotearoa, where Te Tiriti offers a powerful global register for how to organize a settler colonial/postcolonial society.
Both of us probably had no awareness of Te Tiriti before migrating here.
New Zealand to most Indians is mediatized through visuals of cricket games broadcast on TV screens, stories of Edmund Hillary, the first mountaineer to climb Mount Everest, and Bollywood depictions of empty and pristine seascapes folding into mountains.
Caste, Indian education, and the Adivasi question
Our education pathways in the STEM disciplines in India converged, although we later went to pursue different areas of knowledge.
I am assuming, like me, you probably had little exposure to the critical humanities and social sciences education.
A postcolonial education system built into the overarching agenda of colonial management that privileged the STEM disciplines, with the aspiration of most middle-class families to raise a doctor or an engineer, had little room to teach practices of deep critical interrogation of the systemic organizing of power in society.
Most of us, middle or upper caste, middle- or upper-class Indians who migrated to the diaspora, assumed we did so on the basis of our merit, while being deeply unaware of our caste privilege that shaped our access to merit. We were taught from early on how we must pursue our aspirations in white societies by becoming model minorities. The model minority myth did well in teaching us to be entitled, replete with stories of hard work and sheer talent.
What's caste?
Like me, you probably received very little learning about the pernicious caste system that forms the everyday fabric of Indian society, the systemic oppression of India's Adivasi (Indigenous) peoples, and the ongoing violence carried out on Adivasi people in the pursuit of postcolonial development.
Projected on mainstream discursive spaces as the primitive savages that get in the way of development, Adivasis are often framed as a menace to the postcolonial Indian nation, as belonging to the outside of the nation, as antinational Naxalites who must be dealt with through police and military violence.
The Brahminical ideology that shapes education in postcolonial India systematically perpetuates the colonial construction of Adivasi peoples as backward, as burdens on the welfare system, and as incapable of participating in decision-making processes.
Worse, the violence on Adivasi peoples is justified under the ideological pursuit of development.
Finding ourselves as settlers of color
As settler of color to this land then, we come with little to no awareness of the question of Indigeneity in the context of settler colonialism.
Our casteist caste-blind education prepares us well to see ourselves as the model minority, full of merit, struggling to find our feet in a foreign culture.
We find in whiteness, the hegemonic values of white culture upheld as universal, the pathways to our social mobility.
Simultaneously, we learn quickly to co-opt the language of human rights, migrant rights, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) to craft narratives for our inclusion.
We learn to play the double game. Drawing on casteist notions of merit to copy whiteness in its articulations of merit. Pitching ourselves as marginalized and crying racism to secure for ourselves benefits. Consider the pathways of affirmative action, secured through Indigenous and Black struggles, that are powerfully manipulated by Indians to secure entry into elite schools and programs. Consider similarly, the deployment of the language of DEI by upper caste Indians to secure taxpayer funds for Indian cultural organizations, Indian clubs, scholarships for Indians etc.
It works well for us to organize around narratives of equality, perfecting the stories of victimhood, while simultaneously importing our deeply entrenched racisms about Indigenous communities.
The casteist tropes of the savage, lazy Indigenous peoples leeching onto a system funded by our taxes flow across chai sessions, dinner table conversations, and community get togethers. Our community anxieties are built around constructed narratives of Māori crime, Māori sexuality, and Māori violence. We feel resentful that Māori are getting all the benefits from the system while we struggle. The daily experiences of racism in a white settler colonial society are transferred onto Māori, offering us a psychological release. We feel better in the hierarchy of whiteness, imagining ourselves as superior to Māori.
On your X feed, on a post titled, "𝗠𝗣 𝗱𝗿𝗮𝗳𝘁𝘀 𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝘁𝗼 𝗲𝗻𝗱 𝗿𝗮𝗰𝗲-𝗯𝗮𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝘂𝗻𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗲𝘀," you are quoted as stating:
“I also reiterated to the Minister concerns I have raised publicly about the University of Auckland’s new compulsory paper on the Treaty and indigenous knowledge. In ACT’s view, the compulsory nature of the course disrespects the time and financial investment made by students. Students deserve the chance to focus on areas relevant to their careers and personal interests. This is especially true for international students who are now forced to pay upwards of $5,000 for a course that will hold little value once they leave New Zealand.”