S. ANAND
New Delhi

Most people do not realise that society can practice tyranny and oppression against an individual in a far greater degree than a government can. The means and scope that are open to society for oppression are more extensive than those open to the government; also, they are far more effective. What punishment in the penal code is comparable in its magnitude and its severity to excommunication? — BR Ambedkar

Willing cops In Bihar’s hagalpur, policemen tied a man to their motorcycle and dragged him in front of live television cameras. The crowd egged them on.

A CONSERVATIVE SOCIETY, enforcing its dictates with an iron hand — that is who we are, us Indians. Men and women who do not fall in line are routinely persecuted — and killed — under antiquated norms of honour and right conduct. Each day, violence is unleashed by society in its various manifestations — the family, biradari, caste, village, religion. Governed by unwritten rules, the “world’s largest democracy” seems to be doing little better than a theocratic dictatorship.

A spate of incidents testifies to this. The mysterious death of Rizwanur Rehman in Kolkata for the crime of loving and marrying Priyanka Todi, a Hindu; the September 10 lynching of ten people of the Kureri community in Vaishali, Bihar; the ostracisation of HIV-positive Jayalakshmi Bhovi, a midday-meal worker in Thombattu in Karnataka’s Udupi district; the televised mob attack on August 27 on Salim Ilyas, an unemployed youth in Bhagalpur, Bihar, which inspired a similar attack on a “gypsy” woman and her children in Kerala on October 3; the forced expulsion in September of 62 families of Pardhis — an itinerant tribe — from Chothiya village, 165km from Bhopal, and the razing of their homes built on authorised land; the killing of 30- year-old Natarajan, tied to a coconut tree by mill workers in Salem, Tamil Nadu, on September 23; the regular persecution of men and women who prefer to choose their own partners anywhere in the country. Life in India’s village republics can indeed be nasty, brutish and short. An urban location may offer relative relief, but not necessarily. As popular television actor Aamir Ali, who plays a Hindu protagonist in the serial Woh Rehne Wali Mehelon Ki, would testify. He was recently denied the right to buy a house in Springfield Co-operative Housing Society in the upmarket Andheri suburb of Mumbai — a city that passes for India’s most cosmopolitan even when it nurtures caste and community-specific housing societies.

Ali filed a public interest litigation petition before the Bombay High Court this August, but lawyers are already citing the 2005 Supreme Court judgement by Justices BN Agrawal and PK Balasubramanyan in the Zoroastrian Co-operative Housing Society case. The court upheld “the right of the Society to insist that the property has to be dealt only in terms of the bye-laws of the society, and assigned either wholly or in parts only to persons qualified to be members of the society in terms of its bye-laws.” Meaning, there is nothing illegal if a registered society seeks to restrict membership and exclude the general public. In Chennai, a magazine called Dalit Murasu was denied space and hounded out. Having moved several offices, its editor Punitha Pandian says, “People would receive us well and be nice to us till we mentioned the name of our magazine.”

In India — rural and urban — what passes for tradition and collective wisdom acts as a regulatory mechanism more powerful than the laws of the land. Those who transgress boundaries are either excommunicated or ghettoised, or sometimes simply executed. Everyday societal violence is rendered invisible, for much of it is “constitutive of Indian society, particularly in the maintenance of a hierarchical Hindu society,” ashistorian Dilip Menon sees it. “The State in India is like Dhritarashtra: blind, ineffective, idealistic.”

Hated love Priyanka Todi with Rizwanur Rehman, who was killed because he married the girl he loved

IN THE HINTERLANDs, women who assert their individuality are paraded naked, branded witches and often killed. In Assam, in the past five years, 59 people have been killed — 22 in 2005 alone — in 47 reported cases of witch-hunting. Six months ago, in the Chennai suburb of Pallavaram, a woman suspected of infidelity was tied to a tree and lynched. In most cases, the police blame it on mob fury and no action is taken. Under the ruse of maintaining law and order, the police, and sometimes the judiciary, invariably take the view that society’s diktats must be respected. In several instances, such as in Kherlanji where a year ago four members of a Dalit family were tortured to death for defying caste rules, the police, even when alerted, took its own time to arrive. When it did, it just pleaded helplessness. Says Menon, who teaches at Delhi University, “Bollywood satirises the police force and exalts the vigilante. As in the Hindi film, justice is not the preserve of the State; it is the right of the people. The police always arriving late in films is a metaphor for the irrelevance of the State apparatus. The perception is that you need to take the law into your own hands, as the Thakur did in Sholay. Of course,such heroism is prohibited for the Dalit and the Muslim.”

In Edappal, Malappuram district, Kerala, a mob at a busy market area descended on 41- year-old Jyoti and her two children when a customer raised an alarm saying her child’s gold anklets had been stolen. Jyoti was a suspect only because she belonged to a denotified nomadic community from Karnataka and was found “loitering” in the area. Public spaces in India are demarcated on such basis: there are legitimate occupants and then there are loiterers.

According to J. Devika, historian with the Centre for Development Studies in Thiruvananthapuram, when Jyoti was strip-searched and manhandled by a mob, progressive intellectuals and the political class were quick to re-emphasise the difference between (uncivilised) Bihar and (civilised) Kerala. “But the state government and the intelligentsia remain blind to other forms of mob rule that are part of everyday life in Kerala. When sex workers are pushed out of their homes by moral vigilante “mobs”, when HIV infected children are thrown out of school by well-educated parents, when the “Gulf wife” is publicly punished for alleged “straying”, why is Kerala’s enlightened civil society so slow to respond?” asks Devika.

Ravikumar, writer and Dalit Panthers MLA in Tamil Nadu, says universal adult franchise and other ornamental aspects of parliamentary democracy do not ensure social democracy. “Most Indians, especially in rural India, are outside the purview of citizenship. Basic rights that many urban Indians take for granted do not exist for millions. Authoritarianism in Indian society is not vested solely in the centralised authority of the State, it is vested more within society. Hence the urban middle-class’ passive acceptance of the Emergency.”

The increase in the physical manifestation of violence also owes to hitherto-subordinated communities asserting their rights. It is only when subaltern communities seek to transgress boundaries drawn by society that we see erruptions. K. Satyanarayana, who heads the Kula Nirmoolana Porata Samiti (Forum for Annihilation of Caste) in Hyderabad, says the spurt in brutality should not be read merely as collusion between civil society and the State. “The widespread violence inflicted on Dalits across the country, particularly in the North, owes also to their assertion in the public domain — especially in the wake of Mandal and the Ambedkar centenary in 1990. A Dalit who goes to college and falls in love with an upper caste girl would be beaten up or even killed for asserting his humanity,” he says.

Targeted The “gypsy” woman facing the mob’s fury in Kerala

BESIDES DALITS, several communities — sub-castes, religious minorities, tribes — are organising themselves as identity movements. “The secular and liberal intellectuals are uncomfortable with such assertions of caste and religious minorities, but these struggles are significantly reshaping democracy in India. The violence we see today is a result of these contestations,” says Satyanarayana.

Even chilling statistics — 13 Dalits murdered every week, 3 Dalit women raped every day — do not evoke a response. “We are inured into thinking India is not racist and fascist even if society murders 2,000 Dalits over a year, witch-hunts 500 women, and kills a few hundreds in mob violence. Our civil society does not seem to react as long as a pogrom like in Gujarat does not happen,” says Ravikumar.

It’s a society that also comes down heavily on marriages which defy the system. A look at matrimonial columns and websites shows how most Indians prefer to find comfort in “arranged” subcaste and denomination-specific marriages. Despite the State providing Rs 50,000 as cash incentive to marriages involving a Dalit partner, there’s widespread persecution of couples who marry out of choice. Says Sharmila Rege, professor of sociology at Pune University, “Denial of the freedom to love a person — who does not belong to the same religious and caste group into which one is born, or a person of the same sex — is so naturalised in our caste-based patriarchal society that it does not even appear as denial until someone is brutally murdered for challenging this denial.” Rege says, “Women are the gateways of the caste system. Endogamy or marriage within sub-caste becomes essential to maintaining hierarchy and caste status in Indian society. Family, community and the State collude to punish young people who transgress these boundaries, for at stake is the reproduction of gender, caste and class inequalities.”

The haemorrhaging in society is historically linked to two perspectives that have dominated views on development in post-Independence India: the Nehruvian liberal State that stood for technocratic governance and which was criticised for oppressive homogenisation of society, and the communitarian perspective represented by Gandhi that has, since the 1980s, resulted in the NGO-led critique of the Nehruvian paradigm. Gandhi put forth the concept of a society based on sanatana (eternal) dharma, emphasising a non-secular, communitarian logic. The performance of duties was prio - ritised over the exercise of individual rights. However, Ambedkar spoke the secular language of rights of individuals, especially of minorities, and championed liberty, equality and fraternity. Reacting to Gandhi’s romance with villages, Ambedkar had told the Constituent Assembly: “I hold that these village republics have been the ruination of India. What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism?”

Of no fixed address Punitha Pandian’s magazine was forced to move several times

Such ruination unleashed by a militant society sits surreally juxtaposed to an Incredible India that the Dhritarashtra State prefers to showcase through malls, a soaring Sensex and nuclear muscle.

with inputs from Teresa Rahman in Guwahati, PC Vinoj Kumar in Chennai, Shalini Singh in Mumbai, M. Radhika in Bangalore, KA Shaji in Thiruvananthapuram and Anand ST Das in Patna [For case studies from across India, visit www.tehelka.com]

WRITER’S E-MAIL
sanand@tehelka.com