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CATCHING the once-a-week flight from Delhi to Karachi last Monday, I overheard a riveting exchange between the immigration officer who was handling my Indian passport and a worried man who rushed to speak to him in a hurry, I suspect, after seeing my bearded profile from a distance.

In my banterish way I engaged both of them in a conversation about their source of worry. Upon close inquiry the man who had rushed to the passport desk with doubts about my bona fides turned out to be a religious Muslim from Uttar Pradesh who hadn’t watched TV for decades. His job was to alert the officers about any Kashmiris going to Pakistan, or perhaps anywhere at all.

What or who they were looking for was their business and I didn’t ask beyond a point, but I did glean from the chat that the government of India hires semi-literate and obscurantist Muslims who don’t watch TV for religious reasons, to keep an eye on their fellow brethren who may have given up watching TV because Indian channels usually misrepresent the reality as distinct from what they know it to be.

The incident also gave me useful insights into at least some of the reasons for the poor intelligence and security that haunts the country as it claims its seat in the colosseum where the duel with terror is perennially on.

link

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In college in Delhi, my hostel loos were freqently in an unmentionable state. I have come across people who think it is the poor who do not know how to use loos or keep them clean-this happened to be a hostel largely of middle class girls, many of whom were considered to be from “good families,” whatever that means. Bad toilet etiquette is something all classes are good at. There was one girl who regularly vomited into the wash basins instead of the WCs, with the result we had to deal with a sea of undrained vomit. Maybe she was ill with bulimia, in hindsight I think she was, but did that excuse from not vomiting in the WCs?

My mother has a huge toilet obsession. My sister and I remember how she would carry wads of tissue in her bag in case her children ever needed to use a public loo, so that we wouldn’t touch anything directly-we had to hold the tissue and then hold on to the bars in train toilets to keep our balance. Or she would be holding us. We would be instructed never to touch our bums on western style seats but to raise ourselves off the seats and pee without dripping on to the rim! We traveled everywhere by train, on long journeys, but she once made my sister R2 and me pee in plastic bags on a train, when she felt the toilets were unusable. Thankfully I have no memory of this incident, but R2 does.

I blame my toilet fetish entirely on my mother and her horror of outside loos. Now, even if I am in a really clean five star loo, it, erm..still takes me a while to get comfortable. My mother, of course, blames her obsession on her mother. Even now, if we are with my mother, she will stand outside the toilet door saying “Don’t touch anything…”

Once A and I were part of a school expedition to a wildlife sanctuary, where we stayed overnight. The toilets were so bad, they overflowed. Experiences like these have etched themselves indelibly on his memory, and even now, he has nightmares about it. He has actually woken up suddenly at night, in a cold sweat, thinking of them. The last nightmare inducing loo he encountered was in Strasbourg a few years ago, a strange thing, with a shelf like contraption. He shivers at the thought of it.

The privilege of living in our own house, and the comfort that it brings, with our own bathrooms, is indescribable. The right to a clean loo and the responsibility of learning how to use it, should be universal. It is especially hard for women in India, men, after all, feel they can pee anywhere (even when they do have a toilet they are not averse to spraying everywhere but into the pot). Women have to, as Paromita Vohra’s film pointed out, Q2P.

Also read:

The Politics of Toilets
Energy International constructs Sulabh Shauchalayas (pay as you go public toilets).
Sulabh International Website
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Hope we can have campaigns against all the Senas of the Shiv, Navnirman variety.

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Bloggers and journalists on the right of the political spectrum are protesting that Muthalik’s and the Ram Sene’s actions should not be conflated with either Hinduism or Hindutva and are objecting to the term “Hindu Taliban.” These writers are also distancing themselves from Yeduryappa’s statements. I make a distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva, as I do between the terms Islamic and Islamist, and I think it is a moot point about whether such incidents can be attributed to the rise of Hindutva, but that is not the point of this post.

As someone with “liberal left” leanings, I object to my opinions being lumped with those of NDTV and other big media houses. I object to the term Talibanisation, because in it’s very sensationalism it distracts from the all too frequent horrors of being a woman in India, which should be the main issue here. We get nowhere, comparing ourselves to the lowest common denominator. There are other reasons we should object:

Whenever there is an incident in India that involves women (and that receives attention), it becomes an argument about which religion is the more “fundamentalist,” who said what and when, in protest at which incident, often argued by men from different communities, of the geriatric politician/cleric/self-appointed moral custodian variety, from Shah Bano to Mangalore, rather than about the rights of the woman herself. A lot of us women get co-opted into this process, allowing it to become a question of protecting our religious identities.

It is now being argued that the government kept quiet when Taslima Nasreen was attacked, that the “secular” media was complicit in this. But there were a range of voices from across the “liberal left” who might otherwise disagree with each other, who protested at the way she was being treated, more than once, with damning criticisms of the CPM government in Bengal. I have only linked to a couple here. None of these “liberal lefties” have much love for the actions of the media or the government. To lump everyone with views that are “liberal left” into one category and apply the one size fits all sticker of “pseudo-secular” is as disingenuous as characterising all those with right wing political opinions as Ram Sainiks.

The “left” is a vast category, with lefts, rights, centres, liberals and illiberals of its own. There are huge disagreements amongst people on the “left.” One has to look no further than the issue of Nandigram.

Furthermore, the various “lefts” have a running battle with the media. There are leftist blogs dedicated to dissecting what the media comes up with, and they do not reserve their criticism for papers that support the right like the Pioneer, but take issue with most big media houses from the Hindustan Times, to the Indian Express to NDTV. To therefore think, that all on the “left” or all “liberals” or all those who believe in secularism are in accordance with the ill-thought out reports of our major newspapers and channels, or even consider them secular, is incorrect.

And here I am, wasting time writing about the right, the liberal left and the media, instead of what can be done to make India a safer place for women. For ever shall we be stuck, in our polarised views of the world, instead of changing it.

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