(In late 2002 top cop KPS Gill – who was foisted on
Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi as adviser by the then prime
minister, AB Vajpayee, to enforce peace – was to reiterate what Rai
had claimed seven years earlier. For his part, Rai was merely stating
what he had demonstrated in practice during his stints as
superintendent of police in several districts of Uttar Pradesh during
the 1980s).
Over more than a few drinks late one evening in
Mumbai in 1995, Rai and I were discussing how communalism and casteism
were close cousins. I recalled an occasion from the early 1970s in my
native village in Allahabad, when I was declared a "traitor" and a
"communist" by my childhood buddies, Raja Ram (a Bania) and Anis Ahmed
(a Muslim). My crime lay in defending the right of Dalits to absolute
social equality with upper-caste Hindus and Muslims.
I had long believed myself to be alive to the
indignities of caste but that evening Rai said something that hit me
like a bullet. "You and I, Javed, can never fully grasp what it means
to be a Dalit. You have to be born a Dalit to know what it means to be
one." Here was an "upper-caste" Hindu talking to an "upper-caste"
Muslim. By way of elaboration, he recounted the story of a young Dalit
from eastern Uttar Pradesh who today is hopefully a respected senior
police officer somewhere in India.
A few years after he joined the IPS, the young
Dalit officer shared his poignant story with Rai, his Thakur senior:
"Sir, the moment news reached my village that I had been selected for
the IPS, the enraged upper-caste people in my village decided that
this was simply unacceptable. They decided that I must be killed,
prevented at all costs from leaving the village. Luckily, our family
got wind of the plot. So at 3 a.m. that very night I fled my village
without any luggage, headed for the nearest railway station to catch a
train to Delhi. Believe me, sir, until I reached Delhi, I was
convinced they would get me and that would be the end of me and my
career."
We might also recall news reports in recent years
that are no less chilling. A Dalit woman stripped naked and paraded
around her village; a Dalit man hacked to death for the crime of
having been elected sarpanch; Dalit manual scavengers continuing to
carry buckets of human excreta on their heads; a young Dalit forced to
eat human excreta just to ‘show him his place’; a judge ordering the
shuddhikaran (purification) of a courtroom with gangajal
before occupying the high seat because his predecessor ‘brother judge’
was an "untouchable".
No doubt humane people, irrespective of caste and
community background, are sickened by such recurring accounts of our
ugly reality. Speaking for myself, every time I read or hear of such
incidents, I recall Rai’s words: You have to be born a Dalit to know
what it means to be a Dalit. The recalling prompts a question: is
empathy the same as self-experience?
I do know a few rare persons who have the
remarkable quality of being able to enter the emotional universe of
the "other". But for lesser mortals like me, there remains the
question of whether our sanskar, our social milieu and
upbringing, so shapes our subconscious that the boundary between
"empathising" and "feeling/experiencing" is difficult to bridge. Are
there different ways of seeing? Perhaps we should ask ourselves a
simple question: Would any Dalit have selected Shankar’s decades-old
cartoon for the textbook? If not, why not?
What is true of caste seems as true when it comes
to gender, race or religious community. Here is a recent example of
what happened during a panel discussion on a national news channel
analysing the results of the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections. A
well-known social scientist and psephologist expressed the view that
Muslims had not behaved as a vote bank this time and this was a
healthy development. His explanation for this: "They have overcome
their paranoia." Even as the discussion was in progress, he was
bombarded with at least two protest text messages. One of them was
from me. Paranoia? Security of life and limb has been a major concern
for Indian Muslims, especially since the 2002 Gujarat carnage when
even high court judges had to flee their homes under military
protection while senior Muslim police officers had to hide their name
tags for fear of being killed.
What is it – thoughtlessness, insensitivity or
something else – that calls the understandable fear of a community,
based on bloody experience, "paranoia"? Particularly disturbing was
the fact that the remark came from a person who is not communal; he is
someone I respect. To his credit, he responded to my message,
admitting that paranoia was a "bad word" to use: "I should have said
fear grounded in reality."
What are we to say when in their choice of a sketch
or a word even humane people seem at times oblivious to the
sensitivities of the vulnerable?
I am saddened by the fact that Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar
had to resign from the NCERT in the wake of the cartoon controversy; I
strongly condemn the vandalism of the latter’s home. But the context,
I believe, calls not for lament over one more threat to freedom of
expression or tutorials on the fine art of interpreting or
appreciating political cartoons. It is time to ponder over the ‘ways
of seeing’ paradigm.
