For many other classes of victims, including the poor and the not-well-connected, things move a lot slower. Those on the lowest end of the socio-economic pecking order have the most difficult time: the maids, municipal sweepers, construction workers. If one of them is raped, the chances of the police filing an FIR drop, and the media reports tend to be smaller, inside-page news items. Another class from where victims tend to trigger lower levels of outrage is the student community from the north-east of India. Because they have “Chinese” features, and favour Western dress and lifestyle, they’re considered exotic, “looser” and “easier game”. They are frequently the targets of sexual harassment, a crime often trivialized in India as “eve-teasing.”
The African student, thanks to the color of her skin and to her origins – a continent seen as backward by that same Indian middle class that is widely lauded for joining global modernity – is subconsciously slotted alongside those ‘lower classes’ of society.
In this country of largely brown-skinned people once colonized by white men, the color of skin remains a point of discrimination. “Fair skin” is considered an asset, and is prominently mentioned in matrimonial advertisements. One of the hottest-selling of all cosmetics in the country is Hindustan Unilever’s “Fair and Lovely” skin-lightening cream for women in India. The product was launched with television commercials showing depressed, dark-complexioned women ignored by men, who use the product and then suddenly find boyfriends and better careers. (The ads were criticized as racist and withdrawn in 2007.) More here.