A clutch of despair and hope

What do you call a person who is a professor of orthopaedics in the premier medical establishment of India, AIIMS, who is also a novelist-poet, and comments frequently in the press on socio-medical as well as domestic and international socio-political issues? Someone who quotes Brecht, Derrida, Marx, Hannah Arendt and Rosa Luxembourg casually and tellingly? Shah Alam Khan’s views are not in the service or to the liking of the Indian and Western dispensations, but that does not prevent him from expressing them.

This book is a collection of Khan’s articles, two stories and a film review. It has six sections covering politics, communalism, science, media, society and healthcare. All of them are searing indictments of the power elites of the world and India. The first essay is titled ‘Announcing the Monster’, which is also the title of the book. It was written the day after the BJP was voted to power in 2014.

The pieces included here speak ever so loudly of his concern for the downtrodden, the poor, the ill, tribals — in a word, the marginalised, whether by religion, caste, gender or region. Mostly, they are responses to the daily ‘new news’, like the dissolution in 2015 of the National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau, perhaps because it searched for and got real data on nutrition among the marginalised — and thus showed the picture flashed by the government of “achhe din” to be an empty boast. But it had given policy-makers the wherewithal to make sensible interventions to help ameliorate the condition of malnutrition among the poor of India. Its dissolution suggested that the government is more into media management than actually doing any good for the millions of poor.

Khan’s interest in history enables him to show that 20th century European fascism and Hindutva are mirror images of each other in many ways, apart from what many people already know — the penchant for vegetarianism, cleanliness (swachhata) and mob lynching. His concerns include the commercialisation of his own profession, medicine. He talks of the government’s indirect support of the private sector in medicine when it reduced the health budget in 2014 instead of raising it.

He worries about the wretchedness and haplessness stalking our land. He and his colleagues in the medical profession may be able to help a child with cancer, but they are helpless in the face of rampant malnutrition and the raging poverty which can nevertheless take away such a child’s life; or the increasing communalism which takes away the job of the father, and thereby, the life of his ailing child.

Fascism depends on citizens not wanting to get involved, allowing people belonging to the minorities to be lynched in broad daylight, accompanied by celebration. Even when any culprit is apprehended and convicted, he or she gets parole or bail on flimsy grounds. And then we get to know of some new travesty of justice. New, as in recent. Not new in the sense of different. All this is possible because we, as a people, just don’t care. Arnab Goswami actually got it wrong: the nation does not want to know.

Khan takes on the French establishment in connection with the Charlie Hebdo attacks, saying that the radicalisation of Islam is not the cause of the Jihadists’ actions. Radicalisation is itself a result of the treatment meted out to Muslims coming into France and driven into ghettos to eke out miserable lives with no hope of betterment. All this, because the imperialist past of France is still calling the shots.

Elsewhere, he asks whether the reader remembers Alan Kurdi. I didn’t, but then I never knew his name to start with. He was the boy with an angelic look whose body was found washed up on the shore. Khan writes about him a year after the event and is sure that we would have forgotten the name. But then, we also forgot the name of the young man who appeared on the cover of a well-known Indian magazine pleading for his life with sorrow and hopelessness in Gujarat in 2002.

A deep sense of humanity and sensitivity probably urges Khan to write such pieces, unmindful of the negative consequences that could transpire. It is because of people like Shah Alam Khan that there is hope.

The writer is a former bureaucrat