Sacred Heartless

There is no such thing as society, declared Margaret Thatcher. A few decades before that,J.B. Priestley wrote An Inspector Calls,a play about a police officer walking into a well-to-do family and shattering their smugness by revealing how each one of them was directly or unwittingly implicated in the social ruin and suicide of a young girl. Ruchika Girhotras life was something like that: after being molested by an authority figure in her world,she was systematically let down by every place of succour. As her classmates have since confessed,Ruchika was left violently alone in school,the object of her peers excitable gossip. Finally,she was expelled on the flimsy charge that her fees had not been paid on time incidentally,she had been attending the school for 10 years. According to Ruchikas father,this one supposedly safe space succumbed to official pressure and asked the vulnerable teenager to leave.

Whatever comes of the renewed investigation into the schools action,it should not surprise anyone who is familiar with the way Chandigarh works. Sacred Heart Convent sarkari kowtowing is emblematic of the citys power-addled character. Few other cities are as implicated in the webs of sarkari influence. It was designed exclusively as a seat of government,and has three administrations jostling to make their presence felt in every facet of daily life. VIPs abound; everyone feels entitled to a free pass.

Unlike most other organically evolving cities,Chandigarh sprang fully formed from Le Corbusiers brow an elegantly Cartesian capital with wide open spaces and identical houses,with uses divided into different sectors. Unlike the anonymity and sense of encounter that other urban spaces hold out,ones place in the social grid is all too obvious,and matters crucially. Designed like a capitol with an elevated head and an array of administrative buildings,the city is simply an arena for the exercise of state power. The competing claims of Punjab,Haryana and Chandigarh themselves ensure that no one is immune to this favour-mongering,pompous administrative ethos. That S.P.S. Rathore got away for so long and extracted consent from all intervening institutions is of a piece with the control fetishism and bureaucratic tyranny of the town he lived in.