[Reader-list] CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

I would like to thank Rustam, for forwarding us this text on the Gujrat 
massacre by Harsh Mander. 

While press and television reporting on the issue of Gujrat has named the 
victims, has said that the majority of people killed were muslims, and has 
not glossed over the identities of their killers, the same reports have 
continued to sing the song of a "failure of an administrative machinery" in 
Gujrat. 

Harsh Mander's text shows that what we witnessed was not the failure, but the 
success of the administrative machinery. It is not a question of whether the 
political leadership were failing to do their job, rather it was the fact 
that they were doing it only too well, that no  journalist could find himself 
saying. A similar reticence once used to surround the figure of a man called 
Slobodan Milosevic and the apparatus of the rump of the Federal Republic of 
Yugoslavia. We must remember, that there was a long period when the leaders 
of the western democracies, and the world media which today pillories him as 
a war criminal, spoke instead of his 'inability' to control the serb 
militias. And spoke of the killings in Ex-Yugoslavia as if they were an 
epidemic of unexplainable and irrational violence. 

What makes such circumstances occur that the names of towns become synonymous 
with pogroms? Time and again, with a disgusting, monotonous, clockwork 
regularity?

I think that one factor is the amnesia, or the scotoma (the inability to see 
something in front of your eyes) that is required of us, that we see every 
instance of violence that we witness as a 'breakdown' of normality, and not 
as the 'intensification' of normality. To do this would be to ask too 
fundamental a question about the nature of our polities, and about what we 
have come to accept as a 'normal state of affairs' . This is a question that 
the media are not in a position to ask. The media are a part of that reality. 
they contribute above all, to the framing of what is constructed as 
'normality'. 

Hence the diffidence, hence the gentle hedging of the hard questions that 
came along with the sincere and heartfelt expressions of grief and outrage on 
our television screens. 

Barkha Dutt, in  a recently telecast episode of "Reality Bites" for instance, 
was all sympathy for the bereaved, and referred predictabley, to the 
tardiness of the state in protecting the lives of the victims of the rioting. 
Sympathy for victims of violence in times of violence is what one would 
expect from any human being. And in performatively frontaging that sympathy 
Barkha (and she is not alone, this is true for the entire media reportage of 
Gujrat) was doing only what can be reasonabley expected of human beings. 

I would argue that we should raise questions as to whether or not this is  
adequate in terms of an ethical practice of journalism. Whether exhibiting a 
sympathy for the figure of the victim and maintaining a silence about the 
apparatus that enables a systematic degree of organisation and military 
precision that underwrote the violence, is ethically tenable?

Why can no journalists ever bring themselves to ask this un-equivocally when 
the facts speak so clearly for themselves? 

Gujrat only demonstrates what should be common knowledge by now -  there is 
at all times, a readiness to riot, just as there is at all times, a readiness 
to go to war in our society. The instruments, the routines, the technologies 
of mass violence have been learnt to perfection and they are part of the way 
we live. They encompass everything from how electoral registers can reach 
those who lead mobs to how there can be so effective a deployment of weapons 
by organisations that are not military. Where are the arsenals, (where are 
they located in times of peace and who looks after them?) and how do the 
records of identity, electoral records, registers of property ownership, 
details of the memberships of housing societies,  names of the partners, in a 
marriage or a buisiness, reach the hands of the arsonist? What are the 
channels of information and how does the knowledge necessary to start a 
pogrom move, and move so quickly?

The state requires this readiness in order to be able to unleash onto society 
a violence that can be perceived as catastrophic, which can then lead us on 
to demand the imposition of military measures to control the situation.

This is precisely what has happenned.

As used to be the familiar adage of doordarshan news reports the "situation 
is (always) tense, but under control" - "sthiti tanavpoorn magar niyantran 
mein hai" (hamesha)

Harsh Mander's text clearly demonstrates that violence on the scale that we 
have witnessed in the recent days cannot be without the active connivance of 
the state machinery. He knows what the state machinery can and cannot do, he 
is speaking as he himself says, as someone who has spent twenty years in the 
Indian Administrative Service. He knows what a district magistrate, or a 
commissioner of police can and cannot do. He knows what they have not done.

In a television interview, the chief minister of Gujrat, proudly stated that 
this time, Gujrat has the highest record of deaths due to police firing in 
the entire history of communal violence in India, and that hundreds of people 
have been arrested already, or taken into preventive custody. That this was 
an instance of the state machinery acting, and acting decisively. Indeed it 
was. But did any journalist ask how many of those killed in Police Firing 
happened to be muslims, or what was the ratio of hindu to muslim detainees. 

We need only to hear what Harsh Mander has to say - 
"There have been many reports of police firing directly mostly at the 
minority community, which was the target of most of the mob violence. The 
large majority of arrests are also from the same community which was the main 
victim of the pogrom. " 

The state was acting, and it was acting decisively.

The events in Gujrat immediately brings back memories of the 1984 killings of 
sikhs in Delhi. And the connivance of the machinery of a 'secular' state in 
holding our city to ransom, and the killings of thousands of people. 

Today, while walking in a march through New Delhi demonstrating against the 
killings, I was saddened most of all by the way in which senior leaders of 
the political forces that orchestrated the killings of 1984 could be seen 
excercising their spin on what was obviously ordinary rage and anger at the 
events of Gujrat
 
Arrayed on the stage, expressing their anguish, where leaders of political 
forces who have successfully erased the truth of the 1984 sikh killings out 
of public memory. It was akin to seeing the butchers of some gulag weep at 
the threshold of some aushcwitz.

What is worst in our time is our inability as people to express the 
singularity of our outrage, to say that one doesnt necessary sit and do the 
bidding of the spin doctors in times of grief.

On the other hand  to hear Harsh Mander say that he cannot any longer sing 
"Sare Jahan Se Accha Hindustan Hamara", can give our refusal to acquiesce to 
violence a critical edge that is difficult to find at present.

I hope that more of us can join the ranks of his silence and his disgust that 
has the courage to express itself without flying flags, or singing anthems.