I was asked an interesting question last week: Are Indians racist? It was prompted by a news report which reads: “A 27-year-old flight attendant from Meghalaya has alleged that she was recently subjected to verbal racial abuse twice within an hour in Delhi — once in north Delhi’s Kamala Nagar, then on the Metro.”

Her video on Instagram was reposted by the Union minister for minority affairs, Kiren Rijiju, who condemned the incident.

Let me start by answering the question. I’d say not all of us and not all the time but, sadly, this is true of many of us and it can be for much of the time.

The facts are stark and probably incontestable. We call Africans habshis. We treat them with disdain. We’re reluctant to have them as tenants and very few know them as friends.

In the 1980s, when I lived in Nigeria, the local Indian community was considered more racist than the expatriate white residents. For a very simple reason. We are less adept at hiding it. That’s probably also true of Indians in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Kenya and Uganda.

But it’s not just Africans we treat badly. North Indians call Tamils madrasis and people from the North East ch*****. We think it is funny to do so, forgetting it is rude and hurtful.

On the other hand, we’re fascinated by white skin. There was a time when our marriage advertisements and our face creams betrayed our colour consciousness. Remember Fair and Lovely? Bollywood stars had no compunction personally advertising such products.

In 2008, when he was president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, I interviewed Sharad Pawar about the accusation that Harbhajan Singh had been alleged to call Australia’s all-rounder Andrew Symonds a monkey. He dismissed the controversy on the grounds Indians can never be racist.

I suppose it’s difficult for politicians to publicly accept this truth. But it’s also a fact that very few people I know accepted Pawar’s answer. Could he have been hiding what he actually thought?

Yet it’s not the case that we are unable to recognise racism or are unconscious of it. We’re very prickly when we’re the victims. We can sense it in people’s looks, tone, manner and not just their speech and behaviour.

But that’s also precisely what we’re guilty of ourselves. Often it’s our attitude that suggests colour consciousness and racism. But it can also be our spoken words and deliberate actions.

Watch the difference in the behaviour of a Delhi shopkeeper to an African and an Englishman. He will treat the former with disdain while fawning over the latter. The only reason it doesn’t shock the rest of us is because we’re probably guilty of the same discrimination. Our own behaviour would be pretty much the same.

The sad truth is we can be a very prejudiced people and don’t know how to hide or handle our prejudice. Our fellow citizens are often at the receiving end of this majoritarian hatefulness. The flight attendant from Meghalaya is by no means alone.

We often treat Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis like aliens. We keep them at arm’s distance, rarely invite them home and, often, are not even polite to them.

The lady from Meghalaya has understood this only too well. “My only mistake is that I am born in India and I look like this, and I don’t look like the rest of the Indians,” she said.

Perhaps the saddest part is there’s little to correct, leave aside admonish us. No doubt it’s a crime to mistreat Dalits but does anyone care when we do that to Muslims or Africans, Mizos or Tamils, Jarawas or Musahars?

Even our media rarely reacts. Holding up the mirror to the ugly Indian is not its style. Yet there are occasions when the reflection would horrify us.

The truth is we need to see ourselves the way others perceive us. When that happens we could change. But till then it’s unlikely we will acknowledge our glaring faults.

Karan Thapar is the author of Devil’s Advocate: The Untold Story. The views expressed are personal