Until the cows come home

(Published on July 30, 2016, in Business Standard)

Hindu chauvinism may prove to be its own downfall

Indian society has an absurdly high tolerance for suffering—one’s own suffering, as much as that of others—and our tolerance for casteism is Exhibit A. It must require a mind-bending fatalism to accept imposed deprivation, hardship, and humiliation as your lot, for thousands of years. It also requires dehumanising emotional callouses to violently maintain the pecking order so that the lowly never get too big for their boots. This stuff we do very well.

Some people say that caste is a sophisticated social mechanism, too subtle for the rootless heathen to understand. It’s certainly too subtle for me. All I see is a grotesque rationalisation of cruelties that would curdle your eyeballs; socially approved torture and murder; and a billion pollution certificates. All that tends to kill my interest in the subtleties.

Dalits are still murdered over a matter of Rs 15, as a couple was in Mainpuri. They are still raped and destroyed for sport. They are still locked into the most unpleasant and most necessary jobs, freeing up higher caste Hindus to pour scorn on them for doing those jobs. Just recently, an institute in Ahmadabad conducted a social experiment. It advertised jobs for sanitation workers, and said it would give preference to high-caste Hindus. The invitation alone, the very idea being floated, was met with so much rage, threat, and physical violence, that the director had to go into hiding.

That there hasn’t yet been a caste revolution in this country is inexplicable. But it’s something to hope for. It would restore my faith in natural justice if the tireless promoters of exclusivist Hindu nationalism were to cause the complete cave-in of exclusivist Hindu culture.

I like to think that that process has begun, and that the Sangh Parivar’s naked, unelected, anti-constitutional push to saffronise India has started it.

The July 11 atrocity, in which four Dalit men were beaten and paraded half-naked in Una for skinning a cow, wasn’t particularly special. Another day, another violent humiliation. The fact that the assailants themselves posted video of the assault on social media tells you everything you need to know about how such an event makes normal, social sense to both oppressor and oppressed. It’s the ancient message that the top of the caste pyramid constantly sends down the line: This is how it’s always been, and this is how it will always be: we can mess you up anytime we feel like it, so behave. It’s the message that the Sangh Parivar is thrilled to finally be openly drilling into India, with government backing: Don’t allow the promise of ‘economic development’ to confuse you about the who you are. You are the repulsive dregs of society, and we will never forget your filth or let you forget it.

From the time the BJP government took office a the centre, its representatives have either silently allowed, or openly encouraged, cultural and religious vigilantism—the Gujarat Animal Husbandry department has actually called for volunteers to ‘be the eyes of the government’ in monitoring the beef ban, and it has gotten a healthy response. There is great support for ‘ancient Hindu values’ from people who have a voice, and money, and power, and a very personal interest in maintaining the status quo.

But this time, the viral video from Una aroused something that Hindu chauvinists and cow-botherers never take into account: Numbers. Upper caste Hindus are a tiny minority in this country and are vastly outnumbered by Dalits. This time, Dalits staged huge protests: they refused to work, dumping cattle carcasses in front of government buildings instead. ‘The cow is your mother,’ they said. ‘You conduct her funeral rites.’ Peaceful and witty, neither of which can be said about the oppressions they face. The fact that media reported these protests somewhat anaemically only tells you what castes tend to dominate the media, and what they fear.

Could it be that in its zeal to reinforce the tenets of its most beloved fantasy—a Hindu nation bristling with temples and a ridiculous obsession with pollution and cows, and textbooks designed to dumb kids down—the Sangh Parivar and its affiliates, including the central government, could provoke a cultural revolution from the inside? Can you imagine what would happen if Dalits all over the country refused to work at their traditional jobs, or refused to accept scorn and revulsion on account of their jobs? What if the hundreds of millions at the bottom of the caste pyramid rejected caste en masse?

We should all be rooting for it—rooting for the day, someday, when the large majority of suffering Indians will decide that they are, literally, done taking shit. That would make a hell of a viral video.

Aliens at home

If you want an insight into the nature of a state, look at how it treats its own most vulnerable people — its women, children, and seniors; its poor; its disabled; its sexual and religious minorities; and its marginalised.

The Indian state is often too busy chasing money, power, and status, to muster much empathy for its dreary domestic problems. As much as it can be the mature voice of reason, it can also behave like the puffed-up wannabe who swans around all day talking big and sucking up, and at night gets drunk and beats his wife and yells at the kids. It can vent its own frustrations and inadequacies on those more vulnerable than itself. It can ignore, oppress, and sweep under the carpet any embarrassments to its self-image. It can alienates its own.

That might explain why hot-blooded nationalists don’t talk about 300 million malnourished children; why Parliament refuses to admit that marital rape is a thing; why an airport immigration officer can tell an Indian passport holder that she doesn’t look “Indian enough”.

How does such a state treat its angriest, most alienated people?

From the evidence, India seems to regard Kashmir as a necessary nuisance, a territory to be defended. Ignoring human grievances, it limits its attention to sporadic crises of nationalism, insurgency, and cross-border puppetry that must be managed with the jackboot. It seems not to recognise that it is dealing with its own people. All the newsprint and talk time represents governments, separatists, army personnel, politicians, diplomats, militants, and security experts — “us” versus the hostile “other”. The ordinary Kashmiri, assumed to be a pawn in the hands of these forces, goes unheard.

You dismiss people’s deep-seated feelings at your own peril.

When lakhs of Kashmiris turn up to mourn a Hizbul Mujahideen commander, they are saying: “There is a reason that hundreds of thousands of us are saying, that there is a reason that people like Burhan Wani are heroes.” They hold up this unpleasant truth: India will not engage with us until we seem like the people you will engage with.

And astonishingly, our response is always more of the same. One television debate badgered Mirwaiz Umar Farooq to explain why India should not assume that “anti-social elements” were behind the protests. The Mirwaiz repeatedly made one point: you turn to us when there is a crisis, but you ignore the sentiments of the Kashmiri people.

But forget TV. The meeting held by the Prime Minister — after his trademark long silence while a state burned and his countrymen died —did not include a Kashmiri. Does that not speak volumes? As for the J&K Chief Minister, she did not speak for three days.

Kashmir nurses betrayal, and a perfectly understandable resentment of India’s military presence. India has, for a few good reasons, no intention of holding the long-promised referendum. Having decided this, however, it has failed to make it up to Kashmiris, failed to work out how best to accommodate them short of a referendum. A policy of permanent suspicion is not the same thing as providing people security. Holding elections is not the same thing as making people feel free. India has utterly failed to give Kashmiris a stake in the idea of India.

We help maintain a hideous cycle of death, destruction, rape, disappearance, militarisation, terrorism, separatism, grief, anger, cynicism, and irreconcilable differences. The Indian government treats each breakout as a standalone crisis. In between, what we call “peacetime” is what Kashmiris experience as “routine oppression”. The much-needed “healing touch” is not band-aids after a beating; it is ongoing preventive care, the promotion of well-being, in the form of expanding trust and freedom. Why should a Kashmiri buy into Indian citizenship unless India treats them like equal citizens, with equal rights?

It is difficult, when you live with unquestioned daily freedom, to imagine the costs of living with chronic violence, humiliation, and constraint. To get online, or make a phone call, to come and go as you please, to not face a gun at every corner, is a freedom invisible to those of us who have it. In Kashmir, a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl minding her own business at home, can permanently lose her eyes to pellets from Indian forces' guns. Those same “non-lethal” pellets have blinded close to 100 people, and killed 40 others. And that’s just this one protest. Kashmir has endured decades of lives lost and shattered, with no sign of change. Getting into a vengeful passion about the Indian Army’s sacrifices not only fails to address Kashmiri grief and rage, but fuels it further.

We desperately need new ideas for how to deal with Kashmir. We could start by treating Kashmiris, and their tragedies, as our own.