Episodic Reaction and Prospects of a Dazzled Innocence

Bimol Akoijam *

Protest rally against murder of Loitam Richard at Besant Nagar Beach , Chennai on 06 May 2012 :: Pix - Premjit Ningthouja

Setting up CCTV or providing computers without adequate supply of electricity only to get innocently surprised to discover that those instruments do not work without electricity or banning vehicles in the streets of a market place only to notice that it led to a messy traffic build-up in the spaces around the same.

Or, expecting "development" while the productive mechanisms and forces get subverted by the decade old energy "crisis" here, one must admit that it is being generous to call this as "crisis" for the expression usually denotes a temporally limited phenomenon, something that negatively affects employment generation, and efficacies of services and production units of varying scales, from automobile workshops to photocopy shops, rice mills to saw mills or disrupting efficient and effective communications in the age of internet; It seems, some of us have not realized that episodic reaction to specific episodes is no sign of a coherent response. And neither vision through the chinks is a visual treat of a cinema scope.

Of course, despite myriads of issues, cumulated over of a period of time, life still goes on. So does a centipede which coordinates its hundred legs to move and carry on with its life. But its knowledge on how it walks is presumably no proof of a self-awareness that informs human beings.

To say that "man is a political animal" is to insist that we as human beings are different from the other animals, despite sharing with them a common "natural life" of eat, drink, breath, sleep and sex for procreation. It is to reiterate that over and above this "natural life", we have a life which is qualified by ideas/values of right and wrong, good and bad etc. Strange and revealing as it is, people seem to get offended by a breach of the niceties of honorifics that smack of a feudal and mai baap sensibility and its understanding of the world than by the facts of a messy and indignity of their life.

Discourses on the Cartoon and Racial Discrimination

But how long will we allow ourselves to live with self-deception? There has to be a limit to the etiquettes of the pretentious decency of an indecent life and circulation of shallow and twisted understanding as informed or reasoned views. One wonders whether redemption from the messy life in the state is possible without challenging or offending such entrenched and atrocious niceties and "understanding" that continue to strengthen self-deception and indignity of life in the state.

I suppose, beyond the acrimonious brouhaha and character assassination of individuals and community, at the end of the day, some people have to take the risks and if necessary stand alone to realize that being minority vis-à-vis a brute majority doesn't necessarily mean that one is wrong. And being passionate or sentimental, as it were, is a form of rationality in itself that counters certain kind of ideologically constructed notions of rationality of some world-views. Didn't (colonial) modernity construct the "natives", "women" "children" and "neurotics" as "emotional" and "sentimental" (thereby lacking "rationality" and hence "inferior") in order to rationalize the privileged hierarchical position of some while simultaneously justifying the subjugation and oppression of some others?

Take for instance the controversy over the cartoon in NCERT textbook; saying that some have "lost the sense of humour" is to hide a corresponding loss of a crucial sensibility that what is funny to some may not necessarily be funny to some others. And to call those protest against the cartoon as "sentimental" is to present them as lacking in "rationality" (and hence, "inferior") while simultaneously presenting one's own "sentiments" on the issue as "rationale" (and thereby, "rationality"). It is a posture that, wittingly or unwittingly, reproduces the denials of dignity and oppressed conditions under which the Dalits continue to exist even today.

In a similar sense, inability to read the death of a young Manipuri student in Bangalore within the larger reality of racial discrimination/humiliation or denying that the present outcry against the suspected murder of the student implicates an outrage against such experiences of the people of the Notheast is to conceal the fact that there is racial based discrimination in the country.

Ironically, in the wake of the outcry, despite the initial double talk on the matter, the Ministry of Home Affairs has reportedly issued advisory to all the states against "racial profiling" against people from the Northeast. Earlier, the HRD Minister had responded by acknowledging the reality as he promised to incorporate rules against race based discrimination in the UGC norms. These acknowledgements must have taken those voices that have been denying such a reality in the country by surprise.

In fact, despite their attempt to help, wittingly or unwittingly, the Government of India in denying "racial profiling" by resisting any attempt to bring the issue of racial discrimination in the said case, such responses from the latter represent an act of betrayal to them.

Regrettably, such voices have also raised the experiences of "outsiders" in Manipur or killing of migrant workers as counterpoints to the attempts to raise the issue of racial discrimination in the suspected murder of Loitam Richard and the manner in which the case has been dealt by the concerned authorities in Bangalore. Strange as it may seem, these voices seem to suggest that since the "outsiders" have also been the targets of violence in Manipur, we should not talk of the violence committed on us by others! Nothing could be a clearer statement of a twisted ethics than such a position.

Unmistakably, such posture has come from an ill-informed understanding of (and unwarranted comparison between) different situations. It completely misses out the differences in the socioeconomic, political and institutional spaces within which the relationship between the "local" and "outsiders" are located and structured in Manipur and the so-called "mainland".

In short, a situation wherein "outsiders" exist as state officials and major players in the economic and commercial life of Manipur is not the same as the situation of Manipuris as "outsiders" in Delhi or Bangalore. Besides, these views have completely failed to distinguish between the nature and dynamics of violence in a protracted armed conflict situation and those where such things are absent.

Moreover, these voices are completely oblivious of the fact that beyond its physicalist meaning, "race" is understood as a socio-cultural and political construct that appeared during a specific historical moment as a crucial aspect of the discourses and practices of western modernity and its imperial expansion. Besides, against the popular claims on "melting pot" and "color-blind" contemporary culture in countries like United States, there have been scholarly and politically crucial articulations on the existence of discrimination which is described as "racism without race".

Self-Understanding and Beyond Episodic Reaction

The ignorance seems to run deeper so much so that it becomes a part of self-denial. One suspects that these voices do not understand that the "Northeast" has been specifically marked out in the political and cultural discourses in this country. For instance, the innocuous sounding expression, "South East Asia starts from India's Northeast" is a racial/cultural rather than mere geographical marker which distinctively locates the "Northeast" as different from the rest of "South Asia".

Or, take the observation on the people of the Northeast by a well-known psephologist who also incidentally happened to be present when Northeast delegates, including representatives from the "Justice for Richard", recently met the HRD Minister in the wake of the present outcry, "There...definitely is a cultural and ethnic difference with people from the mainland" (No Hard and fast Rule, Hindu, 21/4/2011); it positions "Northeast" as distinctively different, culturally and ethnically, from the "mainland".

In short, these observations point to something specific about "Northeast" as a distinctive category in the multicultural and multiracial India. Thus, statement of "we are one" or harping on the stratified nature of the people of this "multicultural country" must not obfuscate the reality of such a specific and distinct marking of the "Northeast". And correspondingly, the specificity of the socio-cultural and political experiences which have been played out on that basis must also be acknowledged.

Incidentally, for a long time, a part of that specific experience has been the havoc of a "suspicion" that the people in the region who harbor, as Sadar Patel once put it to Pandit Nehru, "pro-mongoloid prejudices" and who do not have "firm loyalty" and "devotion to India"; the power to arrest or kill on the basis of "suspicion" exemplified by "special powers" under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, a policy measure that comes in the form of a "lawless law", has been a specific marker of the Northeast for decades under the democratic polity of this country.

Coincidentally, if my memory serves me well, some Human Rights groups from the region had sought to raise the case of AFSPA in the Durban Conference in 2001 wherein various Dalit groups also raised the issue of "castism as racism" or "racism without race". Northeast experience in the country in the form of the present outcry following the death of Loitam Richard has only sharpen the race question which has been hitherto raised by some Dalit groups. However, such linkages between specific manifestations, including the present case, and the larger issue of racial based discrimination are likely to be missed by those who are used to reacting episodically to specific episodes.

Whether one likes it or not, race and racial discrimination are facts in this country. Incidentally, the constitution anticipated such a reality by inserting the expression "race" in its Articles 15 and 16 in order to make discrimination or denial of equal opportunity based on "race" illegal. As communication improves, the presence of people from the Northeast amidst the so-called "mainland" is expected to grow in the days to come, and correspondingly, increased presence and contact are bound to bring about conflicts and acts of discrimination. Thus, rather than succumbing to a political paranoia that produces violence and denials, taking proactive steps to fight against racial discrimination will go a long way in strengthening liberal democracy's capacity to deliver justice and address differences of a stratified population.

Similarly, an adequate self-understanding rather than self-denials will enable one to address challenges in a coherent manner. It is this imperative that forces one to address the present case of Loitam Richard within the larger issue of racial discrimination faced by the people of the Northeast. Or, we wait for the reality to strike the myopia of those who indulge in episodic reaction to elicit dazzled innocence like the ones we have seen amongst those who have discovered that CCTV and computers do not work without electricity!!!!