“What’s going to come from these Indians filling the streets?” my taxi driver asked me. “How are the Indians bothering you?” I replied. “What do you mean, how do they bother you?” my driver said, surprised. “They came to live in my country. Soon, there will be no Armenians left in Yerevan- there will only be Indians and Iranians. The blood of our nation will become mixed.” And the subject changed from Indians to sectarians and homosexuals. He concluded, “Every dirty thing comes from Europe.” My driver likely believed that Indians come from Europe, too.
I use the taxi driver as being a model for the mindset of the average Armenian. It’s clear that there are academics in our country who think the same way, and then there are people who sell potatoes in the market who are more progressive. But let’s agree that the general belief is that our nation is more educated, cleaner, and more civilized than Indians, Pakistanis, Iranians, and other people in the nearby regions, and we need to be careful of them, or, if possible, get rid of them. I think that it is worth reading some works about Indian civilization. Their culture is just as old and developed as ours. But the foundation of racism, as well as any other hatred based off of religion, sexual orientation, and political views is ignorance. And just the opposite; tolerance of phenomena and other opinions is acceptable if someone has knowledge and information about it.
Why were several forces successful in turning a group of young Kazakhs in Karaganda against Armenians (hopefully temporarily)? Because they only know as much about us as we mostly do about Indians and India.
I saw a petition circulating around the Internet lately demanding the deportation of Indians and other ethnic groups from Armenia. That social media site was deleted; most likely, the website’s owners or organizers realized the racist nature of their initiative. But until the website was deleted, I saw that several hundreds of people signed it. I unfortunately believe that there is a larger number of diverted Armenians. Just as in all nations.
People have psychological and spiritual issues due to the fact that they believe there are people in the world who live at their expense. They believe that, if this person or ethnic group is far away, then they can breathe freely. In reality, there’s a lot of air for all of us to breathe. Just as the great Indian thinker Mahatma Gandhi said, “the only way to live is to give others the opportunity to do so.”
Aram Abrahamyan
