DNTs, Delhi, Eviction, Mahasweta, 2007
Henry Schwarz
Nightmare By Jawed Naqvi. You can see this page at:
http://www.countercurrents.org/hr-naqvi170107.htm
Do we know this Naqvi? Henry
India's Tryst With Destiny:
A Dream, A Nightmare
By Jawed Naqvi
17 January, 2007
The Dawn
At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will
awake to life and freedom�We shall never allow that torch of freedom to
be blown out, however high the wind or stormy the tempest. Thus spoke
Nehru moments before India became officially free from colonial rule.
Now test these inspirational words against a couple of scenes from Delhi
last week, almost exactly 60 years after Nehru spoke.
Delhi has been freezing these past several weeks as it always does in
December and January. Delhi is also getting a facelift for the
Commonwealth Games due in 2010. But all along the new and magnificent
roads and skein of impressive flyovers, on the footpaths in the dead of
night sleep hundreds or thousands of wretched men and their women and
children. Rows of tattered sheets and filthy quilts blackened by the
soot from speeding cars and buses, can be easily mistaken for piles of
rubbish that were left to rot by striking municipal workers.
However, underneath these loosely stitched sheets lie people from
various corners of India, exhausted from the day's hard grind. They
shiver for a while and then miraculously fall asleep, contorted like a
foetus but very still, unlike foetuses.
The busy road opposite Nizamuddin Aulia's 14th century shrine has a
higher saturation of these homeless citizens of Delhi. This also is the
preferred road used by many of the city's VIPs, including one or two
former prime ministers. Suddenly a posse of policemen descended on the
footpath. It was well past midnight, a week into the new year. There was
no warning or pleading or cajoling. Just one whack of the cane. Followed
by two or three even harder ones. Expletives rained galore. And yet
surprisingly there was not a word of protest from the dazed men, women
and children who had been so rudely jolted from sleep on that insanely
cold night. In fact the victims appeared to be accustomed to be
pointlessly and mercilessly thrashed. It would be ridiculous to expect
them to know what Jawaharlal Nehru had promised them in his celebrated
"tryst with destiny" speech. So the question of a dream turning into a
nightmare should not arise.
The following day the neighbours called. Please send the servants to the
park outside. They are to be registered with the local police. The idea
was too revolting to be complied with, but the problem remained.
Why should the servants be registered and not the owners of the house,
their visitors, relatives. Why shouldn't everyone living in Delhi or
visiting the city be registered? Was the proposed dragnet going to bring
down the incidence of rape, murder, theft or even terrorism in the
capital? Indira Gandhi was killed by her bodyguards, the parliament was
supposed to have been attacked by the ISI, or so the story goes, not by
anyone's domestic help. Manu Sharma who killed Jessica Lal was the
nephew of a former Indian president's son-in-law. His father is a senior
politician. Incidence of rape in moving cars, a feature of Delhi, have
never been linked to servants.
On the contrary, if anything, just consider the man who is accused of
killing dozens of boys and girls over the last two years for whatever
bestial reasons. He is a product of Delhi's elite St. Stephens College
where Zia ul Haq and Natwar Singh had studied. What was the way to check
this unprecedented crime? The man was the owner of the house where he is
alleged to have demonically assaulted the children, invariably from poor
families of migrant workers. Yes, this Man Friday is also said to have
been involved in the macabre killings. The police in Noida, a virtual
extension of Delhi, didn't file a complaint report nor an FIR from
anyone of the missing children's families.
Instead the poor parents were themselves taunted for running a sex
racket or organs trade and so forth. Typical police highhandedness. And
it's not taking place in some remote corner of the country. This is the
state of play in Delhi.
With a sharp increase in the incidence of terrorist attacks in India's
capital city, the police go understandably hyper days before 15th August
and 26th January, the two main national holidays. You can't imagine the
plight of the defenceless, homeless people of the pavements when a
dragnet is drawn across the streets in search of the terrorists. It's
scandalous to put it mildly.
The entire approach of the police smacks of the arrogance of the
country's former colonial rulers and their Indian minions. The British
had codified Indians according to their criminal tendencies.
Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi has been working with some of these
"denotified" groups of people. Who are these so-called denotified
Indians? Denotified tribes are the tribes that were originally listed
under the Criminal Tribes Act in 1871, as "addicted to the systematic
commission of non-bailable offences." Once a tribe became "notified" as
criminal, all its members were required to register with the local
magistrate, failing which they would be charged with a crime under the
Indian Penal Code. Free India's Criminal Tribes Act of 1952 repealed the
notification, i.e. 'de-notified' -- the tribal communities. This act
was, however, replaced by a series of Habitual Offenders Acts, that
asked police to investigate a suspect's criminal tendencies and whether
his occupation is "conducive to settled way of life". The denotified
tribes were reclassified as habitual offenders in 1959.
It's like banning untouchability but nurturing the caste systems that
fuels it. What Mahasweta Devi says of India's denotified tribes is also
relevant for the impoverished pavement dwellers of Delhi, many of whom
belong to the tribes that are still targeted for their innate criminality.
"What I think or you think does not matter," she once said. "But it is
true that the minimum human rights -- having roads, liveable huts,
drinking water; if they have land then irrigation; health, literacy --
they should get it. They are not only not getting it, increasingly
tribals all over India are getting evicted from their land like anything."
Nehru said free India would never allow the torch of freedom to be blown
out, however high the wind or stormy the tempest. Little did he know
that his very own Congress party which he had high hopes from, would one
day be spending more time and money in shoring up the police and other
colonial paraphernalia. Not so much in keeping the promise he made to
the ordinary Indian, the aam aadmi, a phrase that has become some kind
of a fad with the current government.
--
Henry Schwarz
Professor
English Department
Georgetown University
Washington, DC 20057
414-795-0017
http://explore.georgetown.edu/people/schwarzh/?PageTemplateID=155
Recent book: http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405120576.html
Current project: The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies (3 vols.)