Responding to Violence
Our country is a mass of horrors. Every day, some horrible things happen. People endure horrible lives day in and day out, but I have been trying to ignore them, sitting in London. dreaming of going back to India, only occasionally jolted back to reality on trips home-and not always, just sometimes, depending on the circumstances, because I belong to a class that can protect itself from a lot of the miseries that surround it.
Now people of my class are angry, angry because they have had to experience a horror close to what a lot of their fellow country men and women experience on a regular basis, they want to do do something, focus their energies.
But there is something worrying about this, one can’t shake the feeling, because we are positioning ourselves as separate from the political process, rather than as part of it, putting ourselves in one camp and politicians and the state in another. Yes, things have to change. But if our netas are smelling rotten, it’s because of something we’ve done or not done as well.It’s the perfume we’ve been letting them wear all these years. We need to smell ourselves too.
Every time something has happened in the past, we have chosen to ignore it, most notably in the matters of justice, tacitly allowing injustice to prevail.
There is violence in the fact that not many children have access to education. There is violence in the fact that not many people have access to healthcare. There is violence in the fact that from riot after riot, blast after blast, from 1984 to today that perpetrators of the riots and blasts have not been punished, that victims have not received care or compensation. There is violence against displaced Kashmiri Pundits. There is violence by the army in Kashmir. There is violence in Assam. There is castist violence. There are such complicated violences, they overlap, they criss-cross, many parties are to blame. These are violences sustained over years. But we have ignored them all, it has become part of routine.
But we’re only getting agitated about better security, better protected borders, saying we will not pay tax, because that will, we believe, protect us from the violence to which we have just been exposed. All these other violences, that have been going on unabated for years, feeding each other, why haven’t we, and why aren’t we now making demands explicitly that they come to an end too? Is it because that no simple military solution presents itself, that we know deep down, we have to implement other solutions, that may take some years of work? I know I am feeling tired already.
very truly said. There are other problems in this Country and the unprecedented importance given to terrorism gives them the back stand.
we still look at making the rich richer in the sensex by shedding crores of rupees, but dont look at the implementation of good wages or midday meal scheme. We are in a country where the poor are fed with dreams of upliftment to be used as vote banks. Sadly, these dreams never turn into reality.
It’s like boiling the frog slowly versus throwing the frog into boiling water. All the other issues is boiling slowly – we just accept it. Pathetic? Yes.
This most recent event was like tossing the (boiling) frog into scalding water. Thus the reaction.
I agree with your larger point… My statements above are merely my way of explaining why we seem to care now. Not justifying that it is right.
Yes, I see that, I feel like the boiling frog, but I feel we need to be reacting in a more “holistic” way, don’t know if I am making myself clear at all
May I please send this to other expat friends who have so far only returned to mouth divisive ideologies while they live far away safe in the comfort of distance?
Because it is true – all that you said – we’ve accepted those mundane violences as a part of living in India, as a part of the experience. It’s only when it gets too close to comfort that we feel the heat. And yet at the same time, how is cohesive unlearning possible on such a massive scale? How do we teach generations of Indians to unlearn that bribing is not the norm? For every arugument on Hindu-Muslim riots, there’s a precedent to be quoted. How far back does the history of quid-pro-quo stretch – thousands of years back to temples we’ve never seen, and kings we’ve only read about. It starts by education – sterile and athesit and factual – the kind you recently wrote about. And lots of Foam, rinse, wash, repeat for the current generation.
I assume that was a rhetorical question? But if not, yes feel free to send it to anyone. Education needn’t be sterile as in boring, but it certainly needs cleaning and boiling, like a baby’s bottle!
So true…there is so much to be done, that it makes one weary to even think about it !
Though our country has been making a lot of economic progress, there is a huge lacuna in the social aspect, which is very depressing.
Since security happens to be of foremost concern for any nation, such extreme reactions came forth to the terror attacks. The other things like lack of education and basic healthcare, like you rightly mentioned, we get used to over time…
What is the solution..some would say, vote for the right candidate ! But what if nobody seems fit for the role ? I don’t have much faith in either of the two major political parties..
Having said all this, I still have a lot of hope that things will change for the better in india !
Yeah, I live in hope too.
All that you say is so true. But there are some wonderful people who are doing their bit to make a difference, and they are a beacon of hope in a dismal scenario.
Yes, we seem to have lost focus and a holistic vision. And we probably have the leaders we deserve.
Yadiyadiyada why repeat everything we already know ?
I don’t know what yadiyada means, and as for the post I was just thinking aloud. There are lots of things many people already know but still feel the need to talk about them and maybe do something about them. You will not find the originality you were looking for here
i dont know why i didnt see this before. i agree almost completely. the problem is that there has been a separation, like that when milk curdles, of those that are most affected by the actions of politicians and those that are able to affect the actions of those politicians. this is mostly caused by increasing inequality and separation of the traditional class structure, caused by the shock of rapid GDP growth which is mostly restricted to the urban and exurban areas (and, i might add, a simultaneous explosion of people who read Ayn Rand and consider it a sound philosophy worth adoptic, a notion more offensive and dangerous than calling her work literature).