The possessive instinct

This right of possession is not limited to historical monuments. Our national leaders and other assorted VIPs seem to possess a feeling of ownership over highways, traffic arteries, airports and parks which are used as if they are privately owned. These rights of private possession may not have a clearly proven status in written law.Nevertheless their status as private property is endorsed and affirmed by law enforcement personnel with whom no one can argue.

Who sanctioned the right to convert public monuments to private property? How did Pramod Mahajan, for example, get the right to convert a public park and a historical monument into limited access zone with all the hallmarks of private property and deny admission to perfectly harmless walkers? Or, for that matter, how did an unknown, faceless VIP manage, without prior announcement, to close down the entire Red Fort, on the morning of Saturday, the fifth of March? Not just some colony park or gulli, mind you, a whole qila was closed off! Whatever happened to concepts of collective and public rights?

The question is: are VIPs the only ones who are engaged in this appropriation? However much I may rant and rave against takeovers by the likes of Mahajan or his Congress counterparts, I also need to look closer home and detail the possessive instincts of the ordinarypeople in their bid to shanghai public property. Appropriation of public spaces by our national leaders is a symptom of a much deeper possessive instinct that runs right through our society and our polity.

Ordinary people do not have the police back-up available to our national land-grabbers. What they do have are residents’ associations. You and I might believe that all individual citizens of a state have the right to access any public park or walk down a public street anywhere in our city. You’d be wrong. You might assume that living in one colony does not limit your children’s right to play in an another colony’s municipal park. You’d be wrong. You might also think that a residents’ association reflects the needs of all the residents of a colony. You’d be wrong.

Residents’ associations are institutions that seem to be obsessed with deleting the rights of general access to areas which are in fact `open’ and not individually owned. There’s no problem about house plots. The real focus ofanxiety is municipal or public property like parks and streets. With respect to these, residents’ associations act like possessive individuals and have developed their take-over skills into a fine art. The number of prohibitions that a residents’ association inflicts upon public parks echoes Mahajan-style take-overs. The associations decree that children cannot play cricket or football in parks and must engage in only the most decorous Victorian diversions like nature study. They provide caste-mark stickers for identifying `residents’ cars consequently thwarting the movement of non-legitimate `others’; and they virtually decree the exclusion of any but house-owners from the use of public property. Certainly, no urchins can dare to play in a colony park without someone trying to stop them in the name of the residents’ safety. The hidden agenda of this exclusion is the sanitisasation of one set of individuals from infection by a lesser breed of persons who don’t have a house plot to their name.

But the realstar-wars invasion of public, collective spaces comes from another source entirely: the cell phone. "The Cell" is the absolute epitome of a New Urban Order based on the principal of seizure. The Cell is not just a symbol of private communication. It is a catalytic convertor that has reconfigured individual conduct in public places.

The invasion draws its power from technology which has no room for moral rights of the collective. The Cell, a hybrid of a telephone and FM radio, imitates the one-on-one communication mode of the telephone. But the actual conversation at either end is forcibly shared with complete strangers who are necessarily party to the most intimate messages between the callers. This is penpalship in the modern world — you don’t know what the hell the other person looks like but you do know if they like Chinese cuisine and Zulia Rabarts. It’s the love dance of the liberal era — everything wide open and up for grabs. Including public rights.

I am quite sure that old philosopher ThomasKuhn had the cell phone in mind when he wrote about paradigm shifts in modern science where old knowledge is literally thrown out for new in one dramatic throw of a lever.

That is exactly what the Cell has done. With a press of the beeper, it has changed the way people think of boundaries of intimacy, privacy and individual rights and simultaneously remade the rules of sharing public spaces. The rigid separations of home and world, private and public which modern life has challenged has also put the very idea of public arenas at risk. The ease with which this invasion of `the public’ happens, whether it is of monuments, highways, parks or airwaves, without too much contest or protest, is because we do not really have a public debate about the public.

We need to be more pro-active on behalf of our collective rights. We need to merge our voices and provide ourselves with a public discourse about the public itself. We need to connect what appear as stray instances of individual appropriation into a singlearc to understand the links between the seizures of widely disparate arenas. Mahajan and his monumental take-over may seem to have nothing to do with an individual cell user whose conversation `takes over’ a cinema theatre. But, until we realise that these individual invasions are part of a single phenomenon that has driven our public rights underground, we will remain silent spectators to the death of our own civic existence.

The writer teaches at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics