North by north Indians

When the lieutenant-governor of Delhi, Tejendra Khanna, says that there is greater compliance with traffic rules in south India as opposed to the country’s north, is he doing a Raj Thackeray? That such a question is asked, and that outraged north Indian politicians across the party spectrum — some of whom held on to their silence during the Raj Thackeray hullabaloo — are now calling for Khanna’s apology, if not his resignation, is telling. It tells us that we are losing our sense of proportion and the ability to make and keep vital distinctions. We are confusing a dangerous politics of xenophobia with what was surely nothing more than a common place observation that was clumsily worded.

Some would point out that you don’t need statistics to prove that Delhiites are notoriously law-averse. Or that the road is a more unruly place in the north Indian city as compared to the city in the south. Or that women feel more insecure in some parts of the country than others. Others will argue that these are cultural stereotypes that feed on themselves. At best, therefore, Khanna’s comment is a well-intended exhortation to a north Indian audience — and let’s remember that he is a north Indian himself — to ask questions of themselves and possibly learn from answers found in another part of the country. At its worst, he is guilty of sectarian generalisation. But he is certainly not dabbling in the kind of violent and intolerant us-and-them politics that the Shiv Sena has patented in Mumbai and which is now being mimicked by its splinter.

The real worry is that in a society of thin-skinned people, always on the look out to be provoked and get offended, the real dangers may not always be recognised and guarded against. The sporadic outrage worked up in smaller storms can sometimes become a stand-in for a more rigorous and more everyday tracking of the politics of intolerance in our midst.