When you look at a tragedy, it is not the magnitude of statistics that counts in the end but the human cost, the value of each life lost. Yes, we are a democracy and that is why even after losing so many innocent citizens, the unprotected,the unprivileged, the unacknowledged ordinary people in countless terrorist attacks, we have quietly or loudly mourned the loss of life and gone on. In a surreal, almost cruel coincidence, I was watching A Wednesday the other day where the “stupid common man” decides to hold the law enforcers of a mega city to ransom and says something to the effect of, “Logon mein gussa bahut hai..unhe aazmana chodiye.”
The film had a flawed premise but an absolutely valid question to ask, “How long will the hard working Indian be expected to put up with the fact that her/his life is of no value?” It also made another point. That every terrorist attack is infact a question,”We will strike whenever, where ever we want. What will you do?”
We are a democracy and that is why we will never endorse or follow the path of violent retribution like the protagonist of A Wednesday. When we are angry, we instead light candles, fill up Ramleela Maidan, go on fasts or idolise those who do, wave flags and are laughed at by the intelligentsia and accused of threatening the parliamentary institutions of this country. It hasn’t really become clear to people who remember the middle class only when it makes its voice inconveniently heard that for years, it is the man or the woman going about his or her work, quietly and diligently who has been in the line of fire, as a victim of corruption or terrorism.
And parliamentary institutions are not respected when democracy is not respectful of the rights of its citizens and negligent towards their security.
It is the terrorist who does not respect our sense of nationhood and democracy. A bomb cares nothing about parliamentary institutions. It is the people who keep the semblance of democracy going when they queue up willingly or unwillingly every five years to vote in the hope that something will change.
Even though, like every other time when a bomb has blown up and taken away people’s lives randomly, today also after the blast in Delhi, a grown man cried like a child into the camera and said that he was not being allowed to meet his injured father in the hospital while the VIPs were being ushered in and out. That is democracy in all its pristine glory for you.
This is what we are supposed to accept as part of our lot and not say much and we don’t, thank God because imagine the chaos, if we did? And it is not apathy or selfishness that prompts us to keep quiet through scams, terrorist attacks, through politics that allows mineral rich regions to be mined and through a culture of corruption that encourages ministers to acquire wealth, donate diamond crowns to favourite Gods and sleep on gold plated beds but the compulsion to survive everything, live from day to day, raise families and stay safe.
We know we are in this alone and whether it is a bribe that must be paid to the policeman at the kerb, or the sight of dismembered bodies in a bombed train or around Delhi’s High-Court, no one is coming to rescue us. We have to pick up our pieces and get by on our own.
The way our law enforcers and governance modules operate, it is to each, their own. No one is accountable to us. No one will ever come forward to talk about the human rights of the people who died in Delhi today. They don’t matter. There are so many of us, so what if some of us die?
The point is simply that what happened with Anna Hazare as a catalyst was not just about corruption or just one man who somehow rang true in a sea of cliches. It was about asking for accountability. For answers to questions like,“So why is it that in a country where helicopters are chartered to ferry ministers, crores disappear without a trail and leaders celebrate their birthday with garlands of currency, we do not have CC TVs in public places prone to terrorist attacks?”
Questions like why we don’t have a strategy, a law to deal with terrorism? Why citizens are sacrificed in random attacks and forgotten till the next bomb?
As for those who rule us or laugh at us, please spare us the stock statements. Please don’t tell us what democracy is. We know. We are the fodder that keeps it warm. Just show some respect for citizens who are blown to pieces without warning and are not even accorded the basic human right to a natural death. Whether its a Kashmiri boy who disappears never to be found again or the mothers of Manipur who have to strip before the armed forces to shame them or the people of all religions and social stratas who died during 26/11 or those who died today in Delhi, every life counts, every citizen in a democratic country deserves to be considered as an intrinsic part of governance and not as a dispensable, extraneous statistic.
We are the reason why India still functions, still gets up and goes to work every day after a flood, a terrorist attack. Please stop taking us for granted.
Reema Moudgil is the author of Perfect Eight (http://www.flipkart.com/b/books/perfect-eight-reema-moudgil-book-9380032870?affid=unboxedwri )
true Reema, we are good people and we light candles, go on fasts n wave flags. We are so good that we need 5 yrs to covict the attackers of our parliament n another 6 yrs to decide on mercy pretetion. I wonder if we need the same yrs to decide on kasab. OMG felt such strong tremors of earth quake just now. i’ll continue tomorrow
i must finish, after all these bomb explosions we are still doing politics on afsal, on rajiv killers, on kasab. After all these video footage, kasab is still alive. What image we are pasing on to these terrorists. Kill people, spread terrorism and we’ll provide u food in our prisons.. Yes we are a soft state. No not ‘soft’ rather ‘weak’. Yes we are a weak state. Our politics make it further weaker. All those cops who died confronting terrorists in the parliament attack were fools,idiots. Little did they know that same mp they were securing will do politics on conspirators. Yesterday another mig crashed.Thank god this time the pilot was safe. So many crashes n so many young lives still no one is accountable.
For yesterday bomb explosion, terrorists were not fully responsile. We were also resposilble for having given invitation to them by passing our image as a soft n weak state, by our attitude in handling these terrorists.