Three cheers for the Great Spirit etc…! | Amit Sengupta

Published on 20-09-2008 In General

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Three cheers for the Great Spirit etc…!

The great spirit of the city: the same predictable media clichés followed the Delhi blasts. How the great spirit of the city broke through the tragedy to celebrate daily life and how united we all are in the face of this blood and gore and death of innocence, and how amazing is the resilience of the survivors, and how we are so terribly unafraid of terror unleashed and how we are such a great nation and democracy, the largest in the world, the most patriotic, a nuclear power of course. This was the same cliché used when blasts happened in Mumbai earlier, in Hyderabad, Jaipur, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, yet again, earlier in Delhi, in Srinagar, and in other parts of the country.

Predictable, repetitive, inevitable killings, the carnage organised by soulless, short, nasty and brutish creatures, the invisible enemies of all humanity, civil society, faith and religions, the terror of bizarre vengeance directed against some organised objects of mythical, mindless hatred, often against the State. But the victims chosen almost always are soft targets: Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, human beings. Ordinary citizens, people with faces and eyes and hands, wearing cotton shirts, people with love and hope, hunger, longing and despair, without an agenda, people who are not killers, who have not killed anybody, who love their nation and their people, people who are coping in this difficult realm of stark economic disparity with honesty and integrity, outside all help or benefits from the pro-big business economy or the political establishment or the State. Mostly ordinary hardworking people on the streets, not the rich or the billionaires listed in Forbes magazine or the Page 3 party kinds whose parties never end, equally soulless, not the myopic millionaires obsessed with nothing but how to make more millions, cocooned and cushioned by amazing wealth and affluence; certainly not most of our politicians who have effectively subverted this democracy with sheer ineptitude, massive ignorance and arrogance, and abject display of crass insensitivity and inefficiency.

What can you say of a Union health minister who willfully ignores the dead and the dying and the survivors after the Delhi blasts, and so does his deputy, when their healing touch in terms of perfect medical treatment and care was a 24x7 must? What do you say of a Union home minister who changes his immaculate conception of expensive multi-cuisine wardrobes in the four hour of absolute crisis when the entire capital and the nation was holding onto the edge of sanity and resilience and chaos? What do you say of a former Union home minister of the BJP, the misnomer of an iron man, who wants to become the PM now at a ripe old age when he should be singing bhajans, who was himself so equally inept at his job, so much so that Parliament could be so mysteriously attacked.

So if they could attack Parliament, where is the security for ordinary people, working women, school children, mothers and daughters? And what do you say of a prime minister and his boss of the first 'democratic dynasty' who are so obsessed with the mythological benefits of the multi-billion fall-outs of the American nuke deal that they just let sinister forces go berserk all over the country – from Kashmir to Karnataka to Orissa to Delhi? And people continue to die – police firing, hate attacks, bomb blasts.

A nation often deserves its own leaders. But this cliché has a flip side. This nation has done no crime to deserve such leaders or this fate as public spectacle, limbs apart, body broken into pieces, faces full of blood, eyes full of tears. The fruit-seller, the female college student, the Kashmiri traveler, the child who lost her father; the poverty-stricken rag picker and balloon- seller from the footpaths and slums who found the clues and helped save lives; the anonymous shopkeepers who rushed the injured to the hospitals – they all deserve a nation with can fulfill the aspirations of a nation-state, the mandate of the largest democracy, the humanity of freedom, equality, justice and security.

These are Indians and world citizens. Truly humane. And their Great Spirit, sorry, is not for sale in the marketplace.

What will this nation do with a nuke deal when it can't walk in the markets, can't travel in the trains, can't walk in the rain, and can't live with a hard day's work, because there is always the fear of an impending man-made catastrophe? When the State becomes an enemy. Like the jehadis or the RSS-Bajrangis? Great Spirit? Great Tolerance? Or Great Fear and Great Apathy? And Great Helplessness?

Because you have no choice. We have no choice.

In Bollywood, sensitive filmmakers are making meaningful films on terrorism which are breaking this market and media stereotype of the Great Spirit. They say the fact is that we have grown normal with this violent violation of our daily innocence. We don't care. We are protecting our sanities. We are building an iron curtain against the stark tragedies, injustices and humanities of our social and economic life. We are being intelligently robotic.

We don't expect anything from the State or the bureaucracy or the police – especially nothing from the political class -- except perhaps retribution and harassment. Because the State cares two hoots for ordinary people. The State only cares for those it pampers – the fat cats and the rich and the politically powerful. Or vote banks – divided, mauled, brutalised. How is a fruit-seller, a rag picker, a working woman, an honest middle class professional in the scheme of things of this bloated, parasitical, political establishment which has ravaged and damaged democracy so ruthlessly and so heartlessly?

That is why people are left to die on the streets. We are left to die on the streets. The entire intelligence machinery and military apparatus of this mighty nuclear, sensex superpower becomes meaningless. The entire crime and punishment and law enforcement apparatus become useless and clueless. The entire structure of discourse and rhetoric becomes as hollow as it can be – transparent like the rivers of blood on the street. Because they seem to know everything, even the faces and names of the killers --- only after the blasts.

Then they pick up people: condemn them without a chargesheet: ask for harsher laws: hang them to death! They polarise societies and communities. Have they still been able to stop terror -- despite that? Can they ever stop terror – do they have the will and efficiency and concern and imagination? Do they know what are the sociological and historical roots of terror – from which bylane of revenge it comes and why? Do they have the vision to overcome this sectarian history of transparent contradictions?

We don't even know if we can believe them. Our democratic choices are the choices of condemnation. Between this Islamic jehadi or that VHP-Bajrangi. This criminal or that criminal. This politician or that politician. This home minister or that home minister. This prime minister or that prime minister. That Indian or this Italian.

There is no paradigm shift. A sense of drift marks this cliché. We send one SMS after another. All our friends and lovers and relatives are safe. We heave a sigh of relief. I am alive. They are alive. We have survived.

But what about those who are not safe? Who did not survive? Something terrible has happened to them. Something terrible can happen to us.

In this world of violated innocence and relentless injustice and tragedy, it's time to redefine the futuristic idea of democracy and nation-state. Or else, this condemnation will follow another, in crude action-replay, like a survivor's SMS, like a re-mixed item song, like a narrative where the end is as predictable as the beginning.

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