There is, first, the child, flapping its arms and legs and yelping in excitement at having been presented with a brand new shiny object, wondering what to do with it: toss it in the air? Kick it? Try and stuff it, whole and entire, into the mouth? (Think of days one and two of the aftermath of the Delhi rape, when 'coverage' was a series of increasingly shrill freeform yelps without coherence or substance but with lots of lung powering it.)
Then the teen, as volubly excited but with a greater awareness of his peers. (That channel had the Home Minister on the griddle and called for the resignation of the police commissioner? We need to ask for someone's resignation too. Oh and that other media house? It gave the victim a symbolic name - that's so cool; we need to give her a name too!)
Then the adult, who has outgrown the follies of youth and, cleansed his palate of the metallic aftertaste of adrenalin, discovers maturity, and fairness, and balance. (We reported the police version and the protestors' version, didn't we? Huh? Didn't we? What do you mean, which is the truth?! Duh!)
And finally renunciation wherein, having sat under the tree of knowledge and been shat on by pigeons, he slips into a zen stage and waxes philosophical. Here is the perfect example: an opinion piece by Harish Khare that at least one prominent TV host endorsed as an argument meriting serious consideration. This is the bit that gave me pause (parts italicized for emphasis; parenthetical interjections are mine):
"In any fast changing society and economy, resentment and anger against an insensitive "system" is bound to find an expression; and, in our current discourse, empowered citizens are made to feel that they have a licence to defy, disobey and disrupt. A crowd is seen to be an ipso facto morally superior gathering in its collective democratic representativeness and hence is deemed to have sanction to resort to unorthodox methods of protest against presumably corrupt and crumbling power arrangements." (Wait - these "unorthodox methods" - that would be gathering peacefully in a public space to give expression to the collective sense of helplessness, of anguish?)
"And, now, when the crowd gathers there are television cameras. Our liberal sensitivities are naturally offended as powerful moving images of police lathi-charge, teargas, and water cannons get beamed into our drawing rooms. No less stirring is the sight of ordinary citizens bravely standing up for this or that "cause," demanding "justice" and insisting on instant solutions. Every story becomes a battle between good and evil. Any attempt, say, to contextualise police action is instantly put down and derided as justification of khaki high-handedness." (I could at this point link to dozens of videos of young girls and young men standing still, hands at their sides, while police beat them up with rubber truncheons and lathis; the video of a girl walking the other way when a policeman grabs her by arm and hair and throws her to the ground, and so on - but those images were already 'beamed into our living rooms' to tickle our 'liberal sensitivities', so I desist. However - is there a way to "contextualize" this incident?)
"We seem to have arrived at a new, deeply democratic moment in our republic. There is a heady feeling in the air that we can make our "rulers" squirm, smoke them out of their comfort zones, disrupt and dispute their monopoly of defining content and substance of national aspirations and dreams, and, indeed, force them to listen to "our demands" and make concessions on our terms." (And all of this is bad, why? A "deeply democratic" moment is a bad thing how? And in what way is it preferable to let our "rulers" remain in their comfort zones? And why exactly should these rulers monopolize the "defining" of the "content and substance" of our national aspirations and dreams? And oh my goodness, what a verbal water-cannon this is to train on a group of sad, anguished, outraged young people who were only asking for the right to live and study and work and go watch a movie in their own land without the ever-present risk of being mauled, groped, stripped and raped many times over, without the risk of having iron rods stuck up their vaginas and their intestines drawn out!!)
Fair warning: what follows is apt to rub those liberal sensibilities a touch raw. That said, here is a snapshot of what else happened during the past 24 hours:
1. In the same newspaper and on the same day as the Harish Khare piece, a story was published about policemen who refused to register a case of rape for five whole days, and kept their superiors in the dark about it, despite the father of the victim repeatedly approaching them requesting that a case be filed. Related, we learn that of the thousands of rape cases registered but not followed up on, there are over 250 instances(and these are the instances we know about) where the police (in Patna) have not bothered to file charges.
2. In Ghaziabad, a jailed rapist on his release attempted to kill his victim. "Leave it, friends," the Senior Superintendent of Police is quoted as telling inquiring mediapersons. (This presumably is how officials "define the content of our national aspirations and dreams".)
3. In Kolkata, a 40-year-old differently-abled woman was sexually assaulted inside a stationary bus at a spot close to a police station. He was caught by locals and handed over to two policemen. He managed to 'give them the slip' (presumably the 'slip' refers to currency?) and fled.
4. Oh, and a two-year-old girl child died in a hospital in Panchmahal district of injuries sustained during rape. The rapist, presumably worried that the baby would fight him off, had tied her hands and legs down before raping her.
5. A district judge - a member of the 'establishment' that "defines the content" of our aspirations - has ruled that a wife has no right to refuse sex with her husband and if said husband forces himself on the wife sans consent, that is not rape.
That was a very short, but by no means exhaustive, tour of 24 hours in this 'heaven of freedom' that Tagore sang of - a heaven wherein the honorable Home Minister, mute in the immediate aftermath of horrific rape, appeared on television a week later to mourn how the unruly protestors had blackened the image of the country. Now to pull back for a wide-angle view:
Then the teen, as volubly excited but with a greater awareness of his peers. (That channel had the Home Minister on the griddle and called for the resignation of the police commissioner? We need to ask for someone's resignation too. Oh and that other media house? It gave the victim a symbolic name - that's so cool; we need to give her a name too!)
Then the adult, who has outgrown the follies of youth and, cleansed his palate of the metallic aftertaste of adrenalin, discovers maturity, and fairness, and balance. (We reported the police version and the protestors' version, didn't we? Huh? Didn't we? What do you mean, which is the truth?! Duh!)
And finally renunciation wherein, having sat under the tree of knowledge and been shat on by pigeons, he slips into a zen stage and waxes philosophical. Here is the perfect example: an opinion piece by Harish Khare that at least one prominent TV host endorsed as an argument meriting serious consideration. This is the bit that gave me pause (parts italicized for emphasis; parenthetical interjections are mine):
"In any fast changing society and economy, resentment and anger against an insensitive "system" is bound to find an expression; and, in our current discourse, empowered citizens are made to feel that they have a licence to defy, disobey and disrupt. A crowd is seen to be an ipso facto morally superior gathering in its collective democratic representativeness and hence is deemed to have sanction to resort to unorthodox methods of protest against presumably corrupt and crumbling power arrangements." (Wait - these "unorthodox methods" - that would be gathering peacefully in a public space to give expression to the collective sense of helplessness, of anguish?)
"And, now, when the crowd gathers there are television cameras. Our liberal sensitivities are naturally offended as powerful moving images of police lathi-charge, teargas, and water cannons get beamed into our drawing rooms. No less stirring is the sight of ordinary citizens bravely standing up for this or that "cause," demanding "justice" and insisting on instant solutions. Every story becomes a battle between good and evil. Any attempt, say, to contextualise police action is instantly put down and derided as justification of khaki high-handedness." (I could at this point link to dozens of videos of young girls and young men standing still, hands at their sides, while police beat them up with rubber truncheons and lathis; the video of a girl walking the other way when a policeman grabs her by arm and hair and throws her to the ground, and so on - but those images were already 'beamed into our living rooms' to tickle our 'liberal sensitivities', so I desist. However - is there a way to "contextualize" this incident?)
"We seem to have arrived at a new, deeply democratic moment in our republic. There is a heady feeling in the air that we can make our "rulers" squirm, smoke them out of their comfort zones, disrupt and dispute their monopoly of defining content and substance of national aspirations and dreams, and, indeed, force them to listen to "our demands" and make concessions on our terms." (And all of this is bad, why? A "deeply democratic" moment is a bad thing how? And in what way is it preferable to let our "rulers" remain in their comfort zones? And why exactly should these rulers monopolize the "defining" of the "content and substance" of our national aspirations and dreams? And oh my goodness, what a verbal water-cannon this is to train on a group of sad, anguished, outraged young people who were only asking for the right to live and study and work and go watch a movie in their own land without the ever-present risk of being mauled, groped, stripped and raped many times over, without the risk of having iron rods stuck up their vaginas and their intestines drawn out!!)
Fair warning: what follows is apt to rub those liberal sensibilities a touch raw. That said, here is a snapshot of what else happened during the past 24 hours:
1. In the same newspaper and on the same day as the Harish Khare piece, a story was published about policemen who refused to register a case of rape for five whole days, and kept their superiors in the dark about it, despite the father of the victim repeatedly approaching them requesting that a case be filed. Related, we learn that of the thousands of rape cases registered but not followed up on, there are over 250 instances(and these are the instances we know about) where the police (in Patna) have not bothered to file charges.
2. In Ghaziabad, a jailed rapist on his release attempted to kill his victim. "Leave it, friends," the Senior Superintendent of Police is quoted as telling inquiring mediapersons. (This presumably is how officials "define the content of our national aspirations and dreams".)
3. In Kolkata, a 40-year-old differently-abled woman was sexually assaulted inside a stationary bus at a spot close to a police station. He was caught by locals and handed over to two policemen. He managed to 'give them the slip' (presumably the 'slip' refers to currency?) and fled.
4. Oh, and a two-year-old girl child died in a hospital in Panchmahal district of injuries sustained during rape. The rapist, presumably worried that the baby would fight him off, had tied her hands and legs down before raping her.
5. A district judge - a member of the 'establishment' that "defines the content" of our aspirations - has ruled that a wife has no right to refuse sex with her husband and if said husband forces himself on the wife sans consent, that is not rape.
That was a very short, but by no means exhaustive, tour of 24 hours in this 'heaven of freedom' that Tagore sang of - a heaven wherein the honorable Home Minister, mute in the immediate aftermath of horrific rape, appeared on television a week later to mourn how the unruly protestors had blackened the image of the country. Now to pull back for a wide-angle view:
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