Why are the police bestialising us? Why are humans trying to get home, with no other means to do it except on their feet, being brought to their KNEES? Crawl, duck-walk, frog-march? The symbolism is unmistakable. My column.
outlookindia.com/website/story/…
outlookindia.com/website/story/…
"The physical evacuation of our streets has produced a strange kind of vacuum. A voiding of citizenship and its rights. And into that void flows only one thing: the State and its absolute writ. And that of the police, the advance guard of the State."
""The sight of migrant labour walking back to distant villages already produced a historic sense of pathos.... But even among such millenarian visions, there were a few that truly stood out as the harbinger of a new age of sadism." 
A most brilliant illustration by Moustafa Jacoub...it catches the precarity lakhs of Indians have been thrown into. This situation of gigantic abnormality in which we examine our 'bare life'.
Who could have missed the irony when the phrase "social distance" enjoyed its rebirth, attended by ideas of contamination. Brahmin mavens were gloating about having invented it. In old Kerala, they mapped that metaphorical distance literally, in feet.
How do we now remap the idea? The web of social relations in a city are again, so very visibly and literally, marked by "distance". A royal firman to "stay at home" empties out our cities, for "home" is hundreds of miles away.
Prime Minister Modi's two speeches have produced an effect absolutely opposite to what was intended on two other occasions: the congratulatory plate-banging parties, and the two hours of concentrated panic buying in the cities.
But this! This is an epic parable of folly.
But this! This is an epic parable of folly.
It also behoves us to think caste via the police. The British brought a formal rupture, with a 'modern', legal apparatus that endures unbroken. In no way are they to be credited with introducing cruelty into India. Those 'animal forms', they are ancient.
The piece did not mention caste, I've been told, and by tracing police brutality to the colonial regime, it is at risk of implicitly absolving us of the need to look deeper. An explicit and emphatic no to any such exoneration. Caste intersects in complicated ways with policing...
...because the recruitment is largely from the wider Bahujan pool (with a savarna top brass wearing the epaulettes) -- and it is they who are then set off against their own people. Perhaps a formal mirror here of Hindutva creating its infantry, with the empty power of violence...
...to be used against their own people? Your thoughts, @strghtforward @Alfalonewolf007 @AbbakkaHypatia @Shudraism @KhalidAnisAnsa1 @NeoNayak ?
"An endless banwaas," she called it.
The Indian situation is after all part of a universal one. On the stripping away of "normal" democracy to reveal "raw" democracy and what that's about: as much about the use of "coercive power" as any other. And arbitrariness.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Among other things, it speaks of an idea that I've been thinking of but don't hear anyone mentioning: an all-party 'national government' to meet #COVID2019india. Back in the day, it was frequently tossed up as an idea.
Why national government?
Because, instead of wasting energies on finding fault after things go wrong, or relying on this or that individual politician's genius or lack of it, this extraordinary crisis needs everyone on board. Not blame games.
Because, instead of wasting energies on finding fault after things go wrong, or relying on this or that individual politician's genius or lack of it, this extraordinary crisis needs everyone on board. Not blame games.
