Opinion Alok Rai writes on Manipur: We, as a people, have no right to shame

Just stay with the details. Let these not become merely rubbed-down shorthand for anonymous atrocity. These were women who, abandoned by the statutory authorities, were trying to run away to safety in the forest. They were taken into “protective” custody by the police who then “happened” to meet a hostile crowd. The women were stripped and groped by the men in the crowd, the teenage brother of one of the women, who tried to protest, was killed right there. The raped woman avers that they were “handed over” to the crowd by the police. Take that in. The woman saw her brother murdered right before her eyes. Stay with that. And in case you are tempted to cite earlier atrocities by way of a rhetorical counterpunch — whether in 1984, or earlier, all the way back to the Partition, there have indeed been atrocities a-plenty — remember that all these rapes and murders add up, they don’t cancel each other out, in some bizarre algebra of atrocity. (I refer, of course, to the infamous “aur Godhra?” defence that is the source of the whataboutery which the Sangh Parivar apologists have perfected since the horror of Gujarat 2002.) This bursting catalogue of atrocity is who we are, is what we are — despite the lightly-vaunted claim to being a “civilised society” that is presumed to be capable of, presumed to be entitled to, shame.

This seems as good a time as any to bring up the question that continues to haunt me, even as it seems to be completely absent from the public consciousness of my supposedly “civilised society.” The atrocity count of the Partition of 1947 is conservatively estimated to be a couple of million. That is a couple of million murders. Assume, roughly, the same number of rapes. That “victim-count” gives us at least a couple of million rapists and murderers. And, surely, all of them couldn’t have gone to Pakistan, right? The answer, obvious to all but the pathologically innocent, is that these rapists and murderers slipped into the interstices of our society, back into the gutters from which they had emerged in the first place — and, under cover of a variety of respectable disguises and identities, sheltering in sundry official and unofficial institutions, they have been leaking their toxins for generation upon generation. At some level, of course, we must know this — which is why, over seven decades on, we have not had the courage to set up a Truth Commission, and investigate the crimes of Partition. We are forced, therefore, to live with the consequences of this repressed guilt, this vaunted innocence, which pretends to be capable of feeling shame.
Consider, for instance, the fluency with which we have normalised, have already anonymised “lynchings” — publicly enacted, ritually performed murders, choreographed and published acts of grotesque violence. Remember Tabrez Ansari, newly-married and out on an errand, who was bound to an electricity pole on a public street and beaten, beaten until he died.

Remember Hamid, all of 12 or 13, who was beaten to death because he looked cocky and proud in his newly-bought Eid outfit. Remember Rakbar, pleading for mercy in the video that was recording his ritual murder. Remember Akhlaq. Remember Pehlu. Remember…. And then charge me with the weaponised sections of the law — Sections 124, 153, 295… — for calling attention to these, and disturbing, for seeking to disturb, the comforting and entirely unearned delusion that ours is a “civilised society.”

And then remember the places, the places I remember — Kathua, Hathras… Kathua, where a little Gujjar girl was confined in a temple, and raped over days by the priest and his accomplices. Remember Hathras, where the girl who was raped and murdered, was then cremated in the dead of the night, against the wishes of her grieving parents, by the police? Remember Siddique Kappan, who spent over two years in jail, for no evident reason other than his intention, as a responsible journalist, to get to Hathras and report on the crime, from the scene of the crime? The obvious, if unstated, assumption of the entire proceeding is that the perpetrators of the crime are merely carrying on the routine business of this supposedly civilised society. This “routine business”, it is evident, demands a large dose of hypocrisy. And a reporter who seeks to disturb this “civilisational” strategy, is just as evidently guilty of seeking to shake people out of this “civilisational” slumber, and so disturb the social order that rests on a soothing combination of atrocity and hypocrisy. Guilty, milord, guilty as charged.

But we will not be denied our right to feel ashamed — for who can dare deny that we are “civilised”, that we are, indeed, “a civilisation”?

The writer taught at the department of English, Delhi University