I have tried not to write, after the hopeless events in December 2012, when along with an enraged India, I last reacted to the brutal rape of an innocent girl in New Delhi, in broad urban limelight. The hopelessness that grips me is unbearable as I watch some leaders of the nation promise action and swear punishment to the culprits while their own kin stumble over their schizophrenic stances, even as tickers move at the bottom of screens reporting rapes of helpless children and women across the length and breadth of the country in real time.
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This is how our nation, which had achieved its independence from the British in 1947 and which has had 65 years thereafter to get its act together, has gone to seed and to places that our forefathers, who fought for our freedom, wouldn’t have ever dreamed that their future generations will be made to visit.
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There is a third generation of the young out here now, comprising of more than 60 per cent of India’s 1.2 billion population, one half struggling to survive and stay above board despite adversity, apathy and systemic failure at every level of governance, and the other half shouting slogans that only bring back memories of barbaric times, from period theater and movies, mythology and primitive texts, when perhaps massive stadia were rent with thousands of people shouting, ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’, ‘hang him, flog him’, ‘butcher, butcher, butcher’, ‘kill the bastard’, ‘get him’, ‘flog, flog, flog’. The feeling, the experience today, is almost Shakespearean.
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Only less than a decade ago India used to be in shock when stories like these would emerge from a wrecked Afghanistan, from countries like Iran and Iraq where fundamentalists and anarchists lead the state, more recently Pakistan too, where elected governments have no control over policy, because of extremists. We would feel we were fortunate, that such primitive times did not prevail in our land.
Today, the same happens in our backyards, and we are in a sort of denial to admit that all of us, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, sail in the same boat. Turn on the television, and you see it in front of your eyes. Switch to any media and the visuals are the same.
Shouting, accusing, fire, people using words and phrases that no government in any developing or developed world would ever tolerate from its media. Tune in, and the pictures from within are as disturbing as those which used to terrorize us when they flashed upon our eyes from far away lands.
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Today it is Sarabjit, yesterday it was Gudiya and day before yesterday, it was Nirbhaya. What is going on here?
Rage is spilling out on to the streets with each story picked up and highlighted by media almost every fortnight with regularity.
Life goes on, nothing changes, statistics rise along with temperatures. Every single man and woman over the age of 40 on every media, goes back in time to remind viewers and readers about what happened in the past, and to tell them that, therefore, the present will remain justified until such time that matters of the past are settled.
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And everyone under the age of 40 anguishes over the now. Understandable, because it is their lives we’re tampering with today, their futures, we’re destroying. To bring justice to 2002, we have to first settle 1984, and to settle 1984, we have to go back even further.
Where will the buck ever stop? We’ve been back to Babar taking over Ram Janam Bhoomi and building the Babri Masjid there at the start of the Mughal era, barely two decades ago. We can feel the cracks in ‘unity in diversity’ of 1991, even today.
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My question is, do we have the right to complain, when we, ourselves, have been complacent, the very opportunists so driven by greed, that we have brought our country to this? When have we ever stopped, taken a pause and analyzed, understood, discussed our problems collectively, to find solutions? Apathy and corruption are understandably the cause of all our problems, but where is the discussion, the debate on how to deal with it, how to end it? What did we do to raise consciousness and awareness in those times when our politics went dirty and stained the fabric of our society with divisive vote bank cultures? What did we do, as media, as conscious citizens, to stop it from going all wrong?
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Why do we always speak, only after having taken sides? Why did we not raise our voices when the doors to Parliament were thrown open to the uneducated and the criminals? Today when many of us are revealing their intolerance, we’re quietly backing them, but yet again from two sides, pro- state, and anti- state, not from the stance of what is right and ethical, and what is wrong and impractical in modern times.
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The story unfolding and fueling the angst of the day now, is Sarabjit. How much did we care about him, while he languished in a Pakistani jail for 22 years? What did we do to put pressure on the government of India to bring him and all the Indian prisoners there, back? Prisoners of War from 1971? Wives, parents, children of our war heroes await closure, even in 2013.
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We are not a state which is ruled by our fundamentalists, and by the underworld…
We are not a government held to ransom by religious clerics and armed hoodlums…
We are not a country flitting between military rule and democracy…
We are not a nation with a collapsed justicial system…
We are not a….
Or are we?
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Have the pictures of the Pakistani prisoner in Jammu, battered in retaliation to Sarabjit, been released deliberately by the state, or is it because the state is in no control over what gets released to the media and what doesn’t? Whatever may be true, it’s frightening.
Were inmates told by the state to batter the Pakistani prisoner in the Jammu jail, so those crying foul in India are fulfilled with revenge and can move on to the next big story? Is this the only way our government can assure its people that it is capable of talking tough? All possibilities are scary and every practice, archaic!
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I think India needs to look far and deep within itself to realize how much in trouble we are. We may portray ourselves to be ahead of our neighbors and democratic in our approach, but when we turn to see the uprising over Sarabjit’s death, and the politics surrounding it, it seems like we are way behind.
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We cannot afford to become a people who watch blood, gore, murder and bashing as a substitute for justice. We cannot afford to let our children grow up believing that it is the only way of life.
We are already almost that and we had better watch out.
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Read the full post here..http://vinatananda.blogspot.in/2013/05/of-sarabjit-gudiya-nirbhaya-ram-janm.html?spref=fb
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Vinta Nanda is a film maker, writer and social activist. She has written, directed and/or produced trail blazing TV shows like Tara, Raahat, Kabhie Kabhie, Aur Phir Ek Din and Miilee and also made several documentary films on women’s issues. Her first feature film, White Noise won acclaim at the Kara Film Festival, Pune International Film Festival, Florence and Seattle Indian Film Festivals. Vinta blogs on www.vinatananda.blogspot.com and has written forThe Times of India, Tehelka, Indian Express, Mumbai Mirror, Sahara Times and Mid Day. Vinta is also the President of the NGO ‘The Village Project India,’ is producing two TV shows and will be producing and directing her next feature Zindagi Paradiso shortly.