KIRAN KUMBHAR - Black Money and White Violence: Modi has brought back dark memories of colonial India
Avid supporters of Prime Minister Narendra
Modi and his government are known to respond to criticism in bizarre ways.
Recently, the prime minister himself, in an unfortunate statement that in many ways
insults the dignity of his post, compared the opposition parties to ‘enemy’
Pakistan. Perhaps the most bizarre have been responses to criticisms around
senior citizens dying in queues and in banks. While Modi has not considered his
citizens’ deaths worth his words despite finding time to congratulate cricketers and offer lotteries, his supporters’ responses have ranged from
completely denying media reports of queue deaths to dismissing them as
inevitable for the nation’s ‘larger good’.
Some of them, for instance Manoj
Tiwari, the BJP’s newly anointed Delhi leader, was even captured on video
laughing at the gullibility of people standing in queues outside banks to get
their money.
Many supporters of the
move have used their social media platforms to provide equally bizarre
responses to the suffering of people. “Such things are quite routine for
us,” a well-respected Indian Quora writer said, “and happen everyday
– on days where people rush to ATMs and on days when nothing happens [sic].”
While it was heartening to see that many young Indians found his explanation
faulty, the fact that there have been similar attempts from several quarters to
justify these deaths in some or the other way is unsettling.
Most Indian
politicians and elites hardly ever were empathetic to such ‘routine deaths’ of
common citizens (partly evident from the gargantuan neglect our rural health
centres have been subjected to for decades), but with this government, it seems
that even the so-called middle class – the ‘digital India’ – is joining their
ranks.
This state of affairs,
and the abundance of bizarre justifications for deaths, reminds one of the
British Raj, where too the deaths of common Indians were considered
insignificant matters. One of the most absurd
reasons given by British officers whenever their ‘disciplinary action’ caused
death was that Indians were by nature weak and unhealthy. University of
Washington historian Jordanna Bailkin discusses these cases in a classic paper on colonial white
violence, ‘The Boot and the Spleen: When Was Murder Possible in British India?’
Just as everyone, from
the prime minister to BJP leaders to their Twitter defenders, are saying that
“these short-term pains” should be borne by the nation for its own good, as a
“purification campaign”, British officers used to believe that the pain of
their disciplinary punishments to Indians was for their own good.
In her paper, Bailkin
mentions an 1875 incident where a lawyer, Robert Fuller, assaulted his servant
causing his death. The magistrate gave him a very light sentence, concluding
that “any harm inflicted by Fuller’s actions was committed under provocation
(the servant’s unpunctuality) and by way of correction (as was appropriate with
a servant of any race).”
In 1880, “a British
airman named Fox struck and killed a punkha coolie [because he
worked] in a ‘lazy and inefficient’ manner. The judge held that because the
coolie’s spleen was diseased, Fox could not have predicted the coolie’s death
as a probable consequence of his act.”
Such colonial notions
about diseased spleens arose from the fact that in those days, the spleens of
many Indians used to be visibly enlarged as a result of chronic infection,
especially malaria. The argument was that such ‘weak’ Indians would die even
after ‘light’ kicks and beatings, and hence such beatings could not be
considered as homicidal.
While such absurd
colonial arguments do not exist, the colonial attitude surely does, even today.
It is this attitude that makes ‘digital India’ devalue the lives of those it
refuses to empathise with – the millions of poor ‘coolie’ Indians. For example,
the prime minister made his overly dramatic Nov 8 announcement without caring
for the devastation it would cause in the lives of those underprivileged
Indians who have no bank accounts or ID cards, or those who live in remote
towns and villages where banks are several kilometres away and only
occasionally functional, or those whose near and dear ones are bed-ridden or
admitted to hospitals, or those who are disabled or chronically ill, or those senior citizens who live by
themselves and have no support system – all ostensibly, like the
British officer’s boot kick, for the ‘ultimate good’ of suffering Indians.
It
is shocking that Modi’s December 31 speech too saw no expressions of remorse or
even a mention of citizens who lost their lives or have suffered irreversibly
from his decision.
This attitude
percolates down to Modi’s supporters, who gleefully kick at dissenters –
verbally on social media and physically in queues. In fact,
the ‘anti-national’ charge used by them for critics (and the ‘like Pakistan’
tag used by the prime minister himself) are reminiscent of the British
government’s use of sedition charges against the Indian newspapers which dared
to talk about colonial white violence in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Besides, like the medical experts who employed the ‘diseased spleen’ argument
to exonerate British officers, there are influential elites today who cite an
absurd “people’s inaction” or “lack of psychological counselling” argument to
justify what was originally the government’s wrongful action.
We might ostensibly be
a proud, independent nation, but we are still colonised by colonial
notions of government and governance.
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