There's No Keeping The Faith
We have become so inured to violence that we hardly notice it.
Column by Pritish Nandy, Extra Ordinary People, in the Times of India, Bombay, 29th October 2002.
I met Raju in the lift list evening. I was returning home from a 23-hour-long international flight and was pretty much washed out. But I could see that Raju was agitated. Hugely agitated.
Raju must be in his mid-teens, and I first met him eight years ago when he knocked on my front door and asked if he could deliver newspapers. He was young, fresh-faced, neatly turned out. One look at him and I said yes. A few months later, he knocked on the door again and asked me if he could wash the cars. We did not need anyone to wash the cars but I liked the fact that he was trying to do more things and earn more money. So I agreed.
After that I would bump into him once or twice a year, usually at Diwali time. I suspect that he engineered those meetings. He would promptly touch my feet, grab the baksheesh and vanish. Whatever I gave him, he accepted with a broad smile. The warmth of that smile never failed to touch my heart. But the Raju I met last evening in the lift was not the person I knew. He looked sad, angry, forlorn. His eyes were bloodshot. His entire body language had changed. I asked him what was wrong. After prevaricating for a while, by which time we had reached the 24th floor, he came out with it. A distant uncle in the gaon (one's native place, a village) had been killed. Not just killed. Lyched by a mob. For what? He and some others were skinning a dead cow and the upper castes had caught them. Before they could explain themselves, the whole village got together and mercilessly trashed them to death. When their relatives went to complain to the police, they were arrested.
So Raju was going home. He wanted his dues paid. In fact, there were six of them from the same village. They were all going back together. There was a huge function out there and all of them were converting en masse to Buddhism or Islam. But why conversion? Why not seek justice from local authorities, the courts? "We have no faith left. Every time there is a theft, we are beaten up. Every time we got to the police, they beat us even more and arrest us. Local politicians will not support us because they would lose their upper caste votes. So where can we go? Who do we appeal to? They don't even allow us into temples! What use is a religion that we are not even allowed to practise?" It almost sounded like a political discourse. But I respected his decision, paid him his dues and tried to catch up on my sleep. It is ony this morning, when I read the headlines that I figured out what Raju was talking about. Frankly, even if he had mentioned Jhajjar, I would not have recognised the district. For we have become so inured to violence that unless it reaches out and touches our lives, we cannot care less. We get along with our own little lives, our own petty problems. The pressures of daily living are so many that the story of a village somewhere back of beyond where Dalits are quitting Hinduism to protest against the way they are treated, becomes just another tiny blip on the radar of our consciousness. If it were not for young Raju, Jhajjar would have been just another horror story read and forgotten.
That is how all tragedy reaches us eventually. When it moves off the newspaper headline and touches our lives.