The inclement Delhi weather might have remained at bay, but the alleged racial discrimination became the proverbial rain on Liyi Noshi’s plans to savour the 66th Republic Day parade here on Monday.
A practising lawyer who hails from the Northeast and a Delhi resident for the past 12 years, her fellow spectators’ suspicions about her “Indianness” mutated into alleged humiliation by a security officer.
“I was sitting on my designated seat in an enclosure facing the Rashtrapati Bhavan, when a couple sitting next to me began pointing at me. I chose to ignore them till one of them called a security officer over and asked him to check ‘the black object in my hand’,” Ms. Noshi told The Hindu .
As the security personnel, who later turned out to be a Delhi Police officer in plain clothes, directed his attention to her, so did the rest of the audience in the enclosure.
“His first two questions to me were whether I was Indian and whether I had come through security,” Ms. Noshi claimed.
“I was shocked and answered in the affirmative. Of course, I said. I passed through five security checkpoints, I told him, and handed over my spectacle case for him to check so that he could rest assured that I wasn’t a terrorist. But by that time, and during the next 10-15 minutes, over which the episode ensued, I had already become a spectacle.”
By the time the officer was satisfied, however, Ms. Noshi, who claimed she jogged to Rajpath from her residence in South Delhi’s Pushp Vihar to have had “the honour of witnessing the parade where U.S. President Barack Obama was in attendance” had become the sole topic of the audience around her.
“I just got up and left in the middle of the parade; It was better to leave in tears than stick around and have fingers pointed at me,” she said, adding that she had decided not to file a formal complaint in the matter since she believes it would be ‘pointless’.
