Published in The Wire, 13th April 2018
Who among us today, if we were born Hindu,
does not have at least one relative or acquaintance who hates Muslims? Who
among us does not have friends – men and women thought to be moral and humane –
that have closed their eyes to the brutal amorality of the ruling regime,
seeing it instead as the political road to India’s salvation? Will they be able
to carry on unchanged even now, after the people they voted in have sprung to
the defence of the rapists and murderers of an eight-year-old? Will they fail even
now to see that a girl of that age is neither Hindu nor Muslim but only a
child?
The barbarism of victorious armies was
meant to have been over and done with, and the founding of the League of
Nations after the First World War came with the liberal belief – shattered by
the Nazis – that civilised life was more or less inevitable. In the India where
I grew up, the exploitative British regime was over, it was post-Nehru, a
country peopled with liberal myths and socialist dreams. There were riots, the
country did simmer and boil off and on, but in the end, it was agreed, the
state and the judiciary would follow the Western institutions on which they
were modelled. Until the early 1990s, when the Congress Party grew unbelievably
corrupt and turned a blind eye to the Babri destruction, medieval brutality
was, I thought, over: political enemies would no longer be poisoned, women and
children would no longer be savaged as a matter of course to signal the conquest
of a victorious army.
After their giant electoral victories, the
new, democratically elected armies of the Hindu Right have proven the opposite.
I was about to catch a flight when the
details on Asifa were published and as I tried functioning with the normalcy
and efficiency airports demand, it became a steady drum beat inside me: when
you were taking a train down from the hills, a voice inside me said, they
shoved two pills down her throat to drug her; while you were making yourself
toast, they shoved themselves into her: grown men took turns forcing themselves
into a child; while you were walking into the airport, they bashed her head in
with a stone; they raped her in a temple; they hid her under a bed; they
strangled her with her own clothes.
After that, one of them joined the search
for the missing girl. Because he was a policemen. Kashmir’s lawmakers then marched
to save the policemen from being charged with rape. Women too marched to defend
the rapists: because they are Hindu
and the child who was gangraped and killed was the daughter of a Muslim goatherd. It is impossible, when
this level of mental sickness and brutality have coalesced, to do anything more
than fall into the silence of absolute despair. Until, that is, an overwhelming
rage sweeps away the despair.
Around me, at the airport, a woman argued
over why they had given her chicken noodles when she’d asked for veg noodles. A
group of little girls were planning a movie outing on their first day of travel.
I drank my lassi wondering why I had that strangely disjointed, disembodied
feeling you have when someone close dies, as if there is a fuzzy glass between
you and normal life. But nobody close to me had died. This was a child I had
never known, a little girl who went out to bring back her family’s animals and
then was drugged, imprisoned, raped, and tortured for a week before her head
was battered with a stone.
A long-ago poem by Auden came back to me,
sounding curiously anaemic now. “Everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from
the disaster . . . and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen/
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky/ Had somewhere to get to and
sailed calmly on.” That poem is about obliviousness, not indifference. The dogs
who “go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse [who] scratches its
innocent behind on a tree” have no idea there is someone being tortured, a boy
falling to his death.
But what of those
who do know?
I remember the preternatural hush that hung
over Delhi after the Nirbhaya rape and am old enough to remember the countrywide
horror over the Sikh pogrom following the assassination of Indira Gandhi. There
is no horror any longer. These things happen, they happen somewhere else, they
happen to someone else. At the airport there was no inkling of a national
crisis. If you are affluent enough to fly, if you are not Dalit or Muslim, you
are forever in a bulletproof, air-conditioned cocoon. But what is it like not
to have the cocoon?
I went to a Muslim school in Hyderabad where
most of my childhood friends were Muslim. At that age, I had nearly no
awareness of my minority Hinduness, nor had my playmates much inkling of their
Muslimness. I have a sense of where these friends are now: they are silent somewhere.
They are feeling cornered somewhere, besieged by the sense of hunting dogs coming
after them. This is not the country we grew up in together, the necessity of
secularism drummed into us. The venality and cynicism of politicians was
ordinary, normal, an unworrying aspect of how politics was done in our part of
the world. It was still a country in which parents were more likely to teach
you about morality and manners, not sheer human survival.
What can you do as an ordinary citizen
trying to survive in a country run by criminal gangs? Mafias on a scale so
large that they seem to exist beyond anyone’s reach. Mafias so clever at
manipulating belief that millions believe their every lie? What can you do when
you see your protectors turn into killers? And what can you possibly do as a solitary
writer?
Everyone in wartime is not a soldier, nor
can everyone in times such as these be a lawyer or activist. Masons, plumbers,
teachers, doctors are still needed; there are still houses to be built,
children to be taught, leaking taps to be fixed. For a long time I told myself
my usefulness lay in doing my own work. Is this true or is it merely a way of
legitimising my desire to somehow carry on living only as I know how to? I
don’t have the answer.
Other writers say much the same: that the work
of the writer is to write books that make people think, which alter their world
even if for the few days they are reading that book. Writers are not
investigative journalists, and for a writer of novels it is especially
difficult to respond to events that are current, volatile. “It’s dangerous for
novelists to point a plot at a moving target,” says Lionel Shriver. It is also
true now that novelists are more usually valued when they write novels that are
overtly political. They have always to bear the burden of being literary
activists – how else, in this kind of country, can a writer remain relevant? Is
it possible to construct perfect paragraphs while your house is burning?
In my small hill-town I teach spoken
English to a girl of nine. She is a goatherd. She goes to a government school
which teaches her quite little. She dreams of being an actress. After school,
in the evening she sets off to bring back her family’s grazing cattle, waving a
switch, walking into the deep forest with nothing but two dogs for protection.
I walk with her for a part of the way and we talk, she in halting English, I
correcting her pronunciation and tenses. Then I turn back and she carries on
alone. Our town is safe, we say, she has only wildlife to fear.