SOME THOUGHTS ON ELECTION DAY

As the city in which I live and work, Pune, goes to the polls tomorrow, and my native city, Bombay, goes to the polls next week, I thought of writing a blog on the process of elections in a parliamentary democracy. Of course, I must specify that I don’t vote myself, or to put it more accurately, I cannot vote even if I want to, for my name does not for some reason figure in the voter lists. As far as elections are concerned, I am thus a persona non grata. I do believe, though, that given a choice there are people who would like to see me disenfranchised for reasons I won’t go into here.

A democracy is said to be a system of government for, of and by the people. I have always been of the view that there is something wanting in this definition. If nothing else, the noun people needs to be qualified by an adjective, and that adjective would have to be illiterate. So, a democracy, according to me, is a system of government for, of and by illiterate people.

I mean no offence. Literally, a democracy does not prescribe a minimum qualification for either those who contest elections, or those who vote, and the government that thus comes to power is for everyone, ranging from PhD holders to those who have never seen the inside of a school. In other words, a democracy isn’t a meritocracy.

But the figurative or symbolic aspects of the word illiterate are far more significant. In that respect, even a PhD holder can be illiterate. And a cab driver—again, no offence meant—can be literate. And I would call anyone illiterate who votes entirely on the basis of what the government has done for them personally, rather than on the basis of what the government has done for the nation as a whole, and for the Constitution, which is the Bhagavad Gita of our parliamentary democracy.

What I mean is that is the voter voting only on the basis of whether they are gainfully employed, affected by inflation, promised freebies and cash money that will go into their bank accounts (not to speak of illicit money doled out to them before elections to bribe them to vote for a particular candidate), and so on? Or are they casting their vote after asking themselves a series of worrying questions that would include:

Does my candidate belong to a political party that understands and adheres to the Constitution?

Does the political party in question truly understand the principles of a parliamentary democracy, or is it obfuscating the distinction between a democracy on the one hand, and an autocracy and a theocracy on the other?

Are the ideologues of the political party in question the Great Dictators of the 20^th century, Adolf Hitler in particular?

Is the federal structure of Indian democracy being slowly eroded by the political party in question?

Likewise, are the secular credentials of our Constitution being tampered with by the said political party? Does the political party suffer from Islamophobia, Christianophobia and minoritophobia?

Does the political party that I’m voting for understand the importance of checks and balances in the form of a free press, an independent judiciary and bureaucratic agencies, and above all, a vibrant opposition? Does it welcome, or is supercilious about criticism?

Does the political party stand for pluralism, or is it obsessed with a series of Ones: One Nation-One Leader-One Party-One Election-One Language-One Ideology-One Religion?

Is the political party quick to accuse its opponents of scams, while resorting to bigger scams of its own?

Has the political party stooped so low as to break up other political parties and blackmail their members to join it? Often by threatening to arrest them on corruption charges?

Does the political party in question believe in the dictum Bail is the Rule and Jail is the Exception? Or does it throw people into prison right, left and centre, conveniently forgetting that there is something called habeas corpus?

Is the political party, perhaps in a spirit of competitiveness, matching the Emergency of 1975-1977 with an Undeclared Emergency of its own?

And so on.

Many voters convince themselves that they’re voting for a political party and its leader, although they are fully aware of its misdoings, on the ground that there is no viable alternative in the country to the said leader. This to my mind is a sure sign of illiteracy. I mean, no one, I repeat, no one, is indispensable, whether in families, in multinational corporations, or in the government. Don’t the patriarchs of families die? Do their deaths mark the end of the family? Don’t the head honchos of multinational companies retire? Does their superannuation mark the end of the company? Similarly, rulers of nations come and go, but that doesn’t mark the death of the nation. The nation, like life, goes on. To people who say to me, for example, “Who, other than Modi?” my laconic answer is, “Well, whoever.”

The point is, heads of families, companies and nations emerge when the need arises. Things don’t come to a standstill. Things don’t, like a freight train, grind to a halt.

Actually, the seeming lack of a viable alternative is, according to me, a good sign because it compels us to look for an alternative, and in this way herald change. And change is any day preferable to maintaining the status quo. If governments are intended to exist for life, why are elections in democratic countries held every four or five years? When the Americans voted Trump out of power and elected Joe Biden, they opted for change. When, in the 1970s, we in India voted Indira Gandhi out of power and brought in the Janata Party, we opted for change. And when we in India in 2014 voted the Congress out of power and brought in the BJP, we opted for change. So, now, ten years later, isn’t it time for change again?  The dangers of not ushering change at the appropriate time are several. Rulers begin to think they are invincible. Rulers become megalomaniacs. Rulers become sycophants and encourage sycophancy. Rulers begin speaking nonsense. All these attributes are more than apparent in the India of today.

And so, tomorrow, and the next week, when people go out to vote, I would very much wish that they keep these things in mind before getting their index fingers defaced with indelible ink, which they are supposed to hold up as proof of the fact that they’ve voted, as if to say, Up Yours.

 

 

 

 

 

SALMAN RUSHDIE’S KNIFE

I’ve just finished reading Salman Rushdie’s Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. It’s a small book, less than 200 pages, very different from the tomes most of his previous books are. This could partly be on account of the injuries he suffered in the August 2022 attack at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York, which led to the loss of his right eye and malfunctioning of his left hand.

The attack by the 24-year-old Lebanese American, Hadi Matar, was, to say the least, brutal. He rushed on to the stage as Rushdie was speaking and stabbed him multiple times. The attack could easily have been fatal.

If Rushdie survived the attack and lived to tell the tale, it certainly is attributable to his will power and to his determination not to call it quits in the face of odds. Any lesser mortal might have succumbed. But it is also on account of Rushdie’s celebrity status as a writer that ensured that he was rushed to hospital in a helicopter, and was attended to for months on end by an army of the best doctors and surgeons. The book is dedicated, in fact, to all the men and women who thus made it possible for Rushdie to stay alive.

It will be recalled that in the aftermath of the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran in 1989 to kill Rushdie for allegedly blaspheming Islam in his novel The Satanic Verses, it was the round-the-clock protection offered by British security forces that guaranteed that fanatic Islamists did not manage to get to Rushdie to murder him. Others, who were connected to the novel one way or other weren’t so lucky. Both William Nygaard, the novel’s Norwegian publisher, and Ettore Capriolo, its Italian translator, were assaulted. Hitoshi Igarashi, the novel’s Japanese translator was killed in his office.  

One of the key things that comes across in the book is Rushdie’s bewilderment at being attacked so many years after the hullabaloo caused by The Satanic Verses had died down, as a result of which he had let his guard down, so to speak, and did not imagine that there were still people out there to get him. This almost leads to an obsession with his attacker that prompts Rushdie to have an imaginary conversation with him, since meeting him in person and asking him why he did it is out of question.

The imaginary conversation, however, doesn’t purge him of the pity and terror he feels for Matar, referred to in the book as the A.  In the last chapter of the book, Rushdie actually revisits the scene of the crime at the Chautauqua Institution with his wife Eliza roughly a year later. This is how he describes it:

“Then it was time. We entered the amphitheater by the same stage door I had used a year earlier, and paused in the backstage area, where I had met Henry Reese’s mother and been given my check, the bloodstained check that was now in prosecutorial hands as evidence. I could see that Eliza had become very emotional. So was I. But here we were, to do what we had come to do. Doors were opened and we went out onto the stage and stared out at the empty rows of seats, and they stared back at us.

“The stage was empty too, a large expanse of polished wooden boards. I tried to re-create the moment for Eliza. There were two chairs, for Henry and me, I told her, approximately here and here, and the standing microphone from which Sony Ton-Amie had introduced us was over there. And the A.—when I first saw him—must have jumped up from a seat about halfway up on the right. There. And he ran fast and came up these steps. Here. And then the attack. And when I fell it was just about here. Right here.”

But this wasn’t all. Just before going to Chautauqua, Rushdie and Eliza go to see the Chautauqua County Jail where the A. is lodged. He writes:

“The jail was a small set of unimposing red-brick buildings. To the left was the police block. The cell block was on the right, behind barbed wire. I took a photograph of it and sent it to [my sister] Sameen, who texted back, ‘It looks so ordinary.’ Yes, it did. But it had an unexpected effect on me. As I stood looking at it, trying to picture the A. in his black-and-white prison uniform somewhere in there, I felt foolishly happy and wanted, absurdly, to dance. ‘Stop it,’ Eliza warned me. ‘I want to take a picture of you in front of this place, and you shouldn’t be grinning or hopping about.’ We didn’t stay long. We didn’t need to. But I was glad to have seen the place where my would-be murderer, I hoped and expected, might spend a substantial portion of his life.”  

No, forgive them for they know not what they do for Rushdie here. Rushdie isn’t a Christ-figure, although he admits in the book that he feels closer to Christianity than to Islam.

There is just one other thing I wish to comment on as far as Rushdie’s obsession with his attacker is concerned. In the imaginary conversation that he has with the A., spread over four sessions, the third session begins like this:

Allow me to ask: Do you have a girlfriend?

What kind of a question is that?

Ordinary question to ask an ordinary guy. Have you ever been in love?

I love God.

Yes, but human beings? I know you told me about your houris in Heaven. But Heaven is still some way away. No houris anytime soon. Anybody down here?

None your business.

I take that as a no. How about a boyfriend? I heard you talk about your admiration for real the men in Lebanon. How about real men in Jersey?

Don’t be disgusting.

How is one to interpret the last sentence of this conversation? Since it’s an imagined and not a real conversation, isn’t Salman Rushdie putting the word ‘disgusting’ into the A.’s mouth? But as he’s never met the A. how can he be so sure that the A.’s response to the question about his having a boyfriend, and admiring real men in Lebanon and Jersey, would be Don’t be disgusting? How can he be sure about the A.’s sexuality?

In the circumstances, the only question I would like to ask is, is Rushdie here imposing his own latent homophobia on his would-be assailant, possibly as revenge?

In Knife, one of the most honest things that Rushdie says about the 1989 fatwa and the 2022 attack, is that they have distracted attention from his books themselves. He laments, “In some way they…make it unnecessary to read the books. And that, to my mind, is the greatest damage I’ve suffered…I’ve become a strange fish, famous not so much for my books as for the mishaps of my life.”

This is a perception that many writers and critics share—that Rushdie has become a free-speech martyr, nothing more, nothing less—and this is truly unfortunate.   

 

 

WHAT PAKISTAN MIGHT BE SAYING ABOUT OUR GENERAL ELECTIONS

India has never spared any attempt to revile Pakistan as a terrorist state where the army and the ISI are more powerful than the elected government, where elections themselves are a farce, where Prime Ministers are rampantly thrown into jail, where the economy is perpetually in a shambles, where minorities in provinces like Baluchistan are at risk; in short, where the rule of law is non-existent, with the law of the jungle prevailing.

Now, as India’s general elections are underway, what might Pakistan be saying about our great country by way of revenge? Of course, there’s no way of knowing any of this for a fact, for our government will never allow us access to what it regards as post-truth, fake news, either in the so-called mainstream media, or even on social media. So, at best, we can only imagine what Pakistan might be saying about India at the present time.

The first thing that they might be saying is that, even as they speak, signatures are being sought by democracy-loving Indians to urge the Election Commission to ban the Prime Minister from contesting the elections. Why? Because although the Election Commission’s Moral Code of Conduct expressly prevents politicians from having recourse to caste, religion and ethnicity to garner votes, the Prime Minister did just that in a speech, now gone viral, in which he claims that if the country’s principal opposition party, the Congress, comes to power, they will distribute all its wealth, including the gold and mangal sutras of our mothers and sisters to infiltrators with many children (read Muslims). The Pakis would clearly take this to indicate that the Prime Minister has a chronic and pathological hatred for Muslims.

The next thing Pakistan would be saying is that no less an authority than the Finance Minister’s beloved husband, who is himself a distinguished economist (and they will emphasize the fact that he is the Finance Minister’s husband), has said that the Prime Minister is a dictator who has taken India back by 20 to 25 years in terms of its economy, and back to the Middle Ages in terms of secularism. The Prime Minister’s return to power would spell disaster for the country, the learned man believes, although his optimism makes him prophecy that the PM’s party will win no more than 220 to 230 Lok Sabha seats this time round, a far cry from the 370 to 400 seats that they fantasize about.

Coming to their favourite topic, press freedom, the Pakistanis will be letting their people know that Vanessa Dougnac, a French journalist who has lived and worked in India for a quarter of a century was threatened with expulsion and eventually deported to her country. In her own words, the Indian government has accused her of malicious and critical journalistic activities inimical to the…sovereignty and integrity of India, and to the interest of the general public. Foreign correspondents covering the elections are not allowed to do their work honestly, Dougnac has said. They are also banned from visiting Indian-occupied Kashmir (which is how Pakistan, in retaliation, likes to think of Kashmir). “This is what press freedom has become under PM Modi,” Dougnac laments, and adds, “I see this as part of a wider effort by the government of India to curb dissent from the OCI (Overseas Citizens of India) community.” The Indians, like the Americans, who never tire of saying that there is no press freedom in Pakistan must stop acting holier-than-thou, and put their own house in order first, the Pakistanis must be saying.

Television channels in Pakistan must be screaming out loud that the image of the Indian Prime Minister who portrays himself as a saint has taken a beating as the Electoral Bonds scam has come to light. The scam involves extorting money to the tune of millions from corrupt private companies to sweep their malpractices under the carpet, and use the ill begotten wealth to fund the ruling party’s election campaign. Again, it is the Finance Minister’s husband who has called the Electoral Bonds scam “the biggest scam in the world.” Nor would the scam have come to light had it not been for the intervention of the Chief Justice of India who insisted that all details of who paid how much money to whom, and when, are made public.

While the ruling party thus has unlimited funds at its disposal at election time, the Pakistanis must be alleging, it has gone and frozen the accounts of the Congress party, and put the Chief Minister of Delhi in jail without trial, so that they are unable to participate in the elections. Naturally, this will ensure that the Prime Minister’s party will return to power unopposed. And yet the Indians like to call themselves the world’s largest democracy. Laughable, the Pakis must be saying.

Laughable, because it may not be long, according to Pakistan, before India becomes the world’s largest autocracy, with the opposition virtually wiped out from the face of the country, what with scamster politicians quitting their own parties by the dozen, and flocking to the Prime Minister’s party. According to some You Tubers, the PM’s party serves as a washing machine here, into which the scamster politicians are thrust in dirty, only to emerge freshly laundered as they join the BJP. Once this process is complete, there would be no need, even, for elections. Already the Finance Minister’s husband has warned that if the Prime Minister’s party returns to power, this will be the last free and fair general election that the country may ever see. And yet they, the Indians, Pakistan would be saying, have the audacity to make a mockery of our elections!

So, this is probably what is being spoken across the border at this point of time. It may be an exaggeration; it may be not. But, from Pakistan’s point of view, India, certainly isn’t the utopia that it likes to think it is, where all is hunky dory, where the watchword is stability, where everyone is gainfully employed, where there’s no inflation, and above all, where Muslims have no reason to fear for their lives.

 

 

 

 

 

 

SUICIDE OF KERALA GAY ACTIVIST

The recent suicide by LGBTQIA+ activist and writer Kishor Kumar in Kozhikode, Kerala, has differences and similarities with the death of Marathi professor and poet Srinivas Ramachandra Siras in Aligarh fourteen years ago. A major difference is that while Siras was more or less closeted, Kishor Kumar was a co-founder of Queerala and GAMA (Gay Malayali Association), and was one of Kerala’s pioneering queer activists. He also wrote a book on Malayali cinema, and an earlier book titled Randu Purushanmar Chumbikkumbol. But what is common to both Siras and Kishor Kumar is that both were unfortunate victims of India’s shame culture.

In his Introduction to Yaraana: Gay Writing from India, Hoshang Merchant contrasts Hindu India’s shame culture with the guilt cultures of the Christian West, and suggests that while shame cultures do not necessarily treat homosexual practice with malice, what they absolutely emphasize on is secrecy. Siras took secrecy to a point where even the word ‘gay’ used in public discourse made him uncomfortable. In Kishor Kumar’s case it is societal pressure that is said to have shamed him as an out gay man. A Malayalam newspaper that first reported the suicide thus asks what punishment should be given to society for directly or indirectly driving Kumar to his death.

In both cases the timing of the deaths is ironic. Siras died in 2010 after being shamed by Aligarh Muslim University where he taught, as a consequence of a so-called sting operation conducted by the university that found him having consensual sex with a cycle rickshaw rider in his campus apartment. However, just a year earlier, in 2009, the Delhi High Court had read down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that criminalized homosexuality to exclude consenting adult homosexuals from its purview. Kishor Kumar died in 2024, nearly six years after a constitutional bench of the Supreme Court similarly read down Section 377 to exclude consenting adult homosexuals from its purview. This indicates that the reading down of the law, or amending of it, isn’t guarantee enough to tackle the stigma that a shame culture attaches to what it regards as deviant, even perverse, sexual behaviour. Even the reinstatement order that Siras’s lawyers managed to get him couldn’t save him from the ‘shame’ of being reunited with his students and colleagues in the aftermath of the sting operation. He thus chose death as the only viable option. Again, neither the law, nor his activism, nor his writing could serve as a defense against the isolation and depression that is believed to be the cause of Kishor Kumar’s suicide.

Lesbian suicides in India have been much more frequent than male gay suicides. These have been documented, for example, by the West Bengal-based lesbian support group Sappho for Equality. Kerala too has had its share of lesbian suicides. Lesbians are doubly disadvantaged on the basis of both gender and sexual orientation. The patriarchy operates against lesbians as being the ‘weaker’ sex, as well as being women who love women.

Several theorists have sought to highlight the difference between lesbians and gay men. Eve Sedgwick says, “There can’t be an a priori decision about how far it will make sense to conceptualize lesbian and gay male identities together. Or separately.” She speaks of lesbian separatism, and of lesbianism being the applied side of feminism in the America of the 1980s. She says further that “Insofar as lesbian object-choice was viewed as epitomizing a specificity of female experience and resistance, insofar as a symmetrically opposite understanding of gay male object-choice also obtained…the implication was that an understanding of male homo/heterosexual definition could offer little or no…interest for any lesbian theoretical project.”

Adrienne Rich’s idea of a “lesbian continuum” is one that “includes a range of woman-identified experience, not simply the fact that a woman has…desired genital sexual experience with another woman.” It is about female bonding that goes much beyond the merely sexual, and leads to what some have termed as “political lesbianism.” Rich comments on the difference between the experiences of working lesbians and gay men in the following words: “A lesbian, closeted on her job because of heterosexist prejudice, is not simply forced into denying the truth of her outside relationships or private life. Her job depends on her pretending to be not merely heterosexual, but a heterosexual woman in terms of dressing and playing the feminine, deferential role required of ‘real’ women.” Another difference, according to Rich, between lesbians and gay men is “the patterns of anonymous sex among male homosexuals, and the pronounced ageism in male homosexual standards of sexual attractiveness.”

What the views of Eve Sedgwick and Adrienne Rich imply is that men, regardless of whether they are straight or gay, enjoy the benefit of the patriarchy. Gay men are rarely if ever commodified in the workplace the way women are. Lesbians who, like women in general, inhabit much less of the outdoors than men, are much less likely to have a lifestyle characterized by anonymous sex on the internet and in parks and washrooms. Nor can one envisage a sort of a male gay continuum on the lines of the lesbian continuum that Rich speaks of, for surely what would hinder such a project is the anxiety of masculinity, or the anxiety of performativity in Judith Butler’s sense of the term, even among effeminate gay men.

Cinema in India has always endorsed this difference. In 1998, when the Shiv Sena called for a ban on the lesbian film Fire, it did not object to the film Bombay Boys released that year, which showed an openly gay character played by the actor Roshan Sheth. To the Sena’s way of thinking, male supremacy and privilege enabled men to get away with things that women, as repositories of cultural values, could not. Today, Malayalam cinema itself has at least a couple of openly gay films with stars of the stature of Mamooty in the lead.

This is what makes the suicides of Siras and Kishor Kumar all the more tragic.  If they were driven to take their own lives in spite of the benefits of patriarchy and the alibi of masculinity that gay men enjoy, not to speak of the support of the law, it proves that the shame culture in which we live in India overrides these considerations.

What is implicit is that the tradition of a shame culture is so all-pervasive that individual talent is swamped by it. To mainstream India, emboldened by the Supreme Court’s refusal to recognize same-sex marriage, neither Siras’s poetry nor Kishor Kumar’s fiction were able to distance them from the disgrace of being homosexual, the way, say, literary output salvaged the moral reputations of Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, E. M. Foster, Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden, and many other writers of the English literary canon.

In the end, one can only hope that, through the intervention of activists and educators, the semblance of queer liberalism that one witnesses in metropolitan India trickles down to provincial India, so that lesbian and gay suicides once and for all become a thing of the past.

 

 

 

 

 

LOVE JIHAD ?

It has happened again, within a span of just two months. After the arrest of students and professors of SPPU’s Lalit Kala Kendra for staging an ironic play that “hurt religious sentiments,” news comes of a Muslim student being assaulted on the university campus for practicing ‘Love Jihad’. All he was doing was walking towards his department with three friends, one male and two female. Apparently, the student was also told to quit studies. This would ensure that what little diversity is left on the SPPU campus from its halcyon days in the 1980s and 1990s, and the first decade of the 21st century, will automatically vanish. We’ll no longer see foreigners, religious minorities, sexual minorities, and so on, rubbing shoulders with their majoritarian brethren. Xenophobia, Islamophobia and homophobia will all have a field day.

Love Jihad is a law that currently has locus standi only in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Haryana, all BJP-ruled states. However, after he became Deputy Chief Minister, Devendra Fadnavis spoke of his government’s intention to introduce the law in Maharashtra as well.  That the thugs who beat up the unfortunate student invoked Love Jihad proves that Maharashtra is all geared up to introduce the discriminatory law after elections. The state, after all, has the second largest number of MPs, after Uttar Pradesh. The game plan seems to be to introduce the law in the larger states first, and then let it trickle down to the smaller states, till it engulfs the whole country.

Yet, the Supreme Court has ruled that “Constitutionally, no Indian citizen can be prevented from exercising her/his matrimonial choice. Since the framers of the Constitution did not foresee a situation of inter-faith marriages being objected to…there is no specific clause dealing with it.”

In keeping with its view, the Supreme Court thus reversed a judgment in favour of Love Jihad given by two high courts, the Kerala High Court in 2018, and the Gujarat High Court in 2021.

Actually, as one of the framers of the Constitution, B. R. Ambedkar in his essay “Annihilation of Caste” advocates inter-caste marriage, but points out that inter-caste marriage isn’t sufficient to annihilate the caste system. The real solution, according to him, is to destroy the religious notions upon which caste is founded. Ambedkar himself, it will be recalled, converted to Buddhism. If a low-caste Hindu woman converts to any other religion, including Islam, out of choice, it can be seen as liberation from the fixity of caste. Not to allow her to convert by invoking laws like Love Jihad, is really to keep her in the throes of caste. Ironically, it was Uttar Pradesh that had an interfaith marriage scheme to create communal harmony, introduced by the Congress in 1976, during the Emergency. According to the scheme, couples who married outside their religion were given financial incentives.

It can be argued, then, that inter-faith marriages are a means to destroy the religious notions of caste. If one accepts this view, the implications of Love Jihad run counter to what both Dr Ambedkar and the Supreme Court have said. Moreover, Jihad being an Islamic concept, the law disallowing inter-faith marriages, like the Citizenship Amendment Act, only targets Muslims. It is silent about inter-faith marriages involving other religions.

A former student of mine who is now a political activist with the Congress tells me that when he questioned the men who disrupted the Lalit Kala Kendra performance, they retorted that they had received orders to do so “from above.” In other words, from Big Brother. It goes without saying, then, that this time too, the orders to prowl about on campus to look for ‘Love Jihad’ victims would have come From Above. As the general elections near, it seems to me that the culprits are so sure of a third term for their party that they feel that nothing can stop them from taking the law into their own hands.

But if such unconstitutional orders are indeed given by Big Brother, can we really expect our universities and the cops to take action against the offenders? After all, the appointments of vice-chancellors and police commissioners are in the hands of the government. In the not-so-distant past, did the then VC of M S University, Baroda, take action against the rogues who disrupted and vandalized Fine Arts dean Shivaji Pannikar’s student exhibition, which led to his permanent suspension? Did the Gujarat University VC take action against the goons who attacked foreign students offering namaz during Ramadan last month? Did SPPU arrest the men who disrupted the Lalit Kala Kendra student performance, instead of arresting the students themselves? Likewise, did Symbiosis College of Arts and Commerce arrest the guys who stormed into the college to protest against a comment made by a professor? Or did they arrest the professor himself? The list is endless. Erudite faculty members have been suspended even by seemingly liberal private universities, like Ashoka University, for their research; and by institutions like Un-Academy, for their comments; all of which were unpalatable to the ruling dispensation.

In the present case, too, we can be sure that all talk of examining the CCTV footage and applying relevant sections, and of forming fact-finding committees, will ultimately come to nought. The offenders, we can be sure, will go scot-free. As such, the Additional Commissioner of Police, Pune, has been quoted by a leading newspaper as saying, “We won’t arrest them [the culprits], as the sections relate to non-bailable offences.”

Sadly, it is the victims who have to live in fear. The father of the assaulted SPPU student has reportedly said: “I started shaking in fear when I got the call [about my son’s assault]. I pleaded with them [the culprits] not to harm my boy. I told them he was their brother. How can they beat up a student over religion? We are scared for his life…We are taking him home for a week, so that he settles down a bit.”

R. Raj Rao is a writer and former head of the English department at Savitribai Phule Pune University.

 

 

 

EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS DON’T STAND BY THEIR FACULTY

Two cases widely reported in the media this week prove what we as academics already know. That when it comes to contentious matters involving the government, politics, ideology and religion, educational institutions rarely stand by their faculty. Instead, they side with the powers that seek to silence their faculty and take punitive action against them for expressing views unpalatable to the establishment. This is unfortunate, as it goes against the very principles of what an educational institution represents. It represents intellectual freedom. A university is not the army. People who opt for the teaching profession have minds of their own, on the basis of which they are selected. Everyone in the university cannot be expected to fall in line.

In the first case, an assistant professor at Ashoka University found himself in the firing line on account of a research paper he wrote that claimed that the BJP won the 2019 parliamentary elections not because a majority of Indians voted for them, but because of manipulation. Now, it isn’t surprising that the government has lashed out at the professor, questioning the validity of his data and analysis, calling his research half-baked, and accusing him, predictably, of anti-nationalism. This is only to be expected. But what is disturbing is that Ashoka University, which among private universities in India is known for its liberal values and is, perhaps, the JNU of private universities, has itself released a statement on Twitter to “distance” itself from the professor’s research and specify that it does not support the point of view expressed in the paper.

Why did Ashoka University release such a statement? Was it on account of fear of falling foul with the ruling dispensation and being blacklisted by them?  Was it that they feared that the corporate houses that funded them would withdraw their patronage? But then, doesn’t that imply that Ashoka University has sold out to the government and the corporate sector? Is it really likely that they would have to shut shop if only they issued a general statement to say that institutions of higher education, by their very definition, were spaces where different points of view, some pro, others anti, had to be expressed? That pluralism was the hallmark of a university?

Admirably, it is the students who came out in support of their professor’s research. They issued a counter-statement that said: “Leher [Ashoka University’s student body] stands in support of Pofessor Das’ academic freedom, condemns the outpouring of hate and attacks toward him and demands that the university withdraw its statement and guarantee protection of Professor Das’ and other faculty’s right to freedom of research.”

Actually, in issuing such a statement, the students are at greater risk than the institution itself. After all, their degrees, their placements, and their careers in general are in the hands of the university. A vengeful university can easily jeopardize students’ futures.

Not just the university, but even the faculty at Ashoka have been, to the best of my knowledge, silent about the research paper. But if it is Professor Das today, can’t it be any of them tomorrow?

The second incident happened at Symbiosis College in Pune, where I happen to be guest faculty. During the course of his lecture, a Junior College Hindi teacher extolled the virtues of monotheistic religions like Islam and Christianity while critiquing polytheistic religions like Hinduism. A student video-graphed the man’s statements with his mobile phone, posted it on all social media platforms, and that was enough to bring the aggrieved right-wing Hindutva brigade to the college to call for the man’s arrest. The cops arrived on the scene and so did television channels. The man was booked “for hurting the sentiments of Hindu students,” even as the college promptly suspended him.

At the outset, I must state that there is no comparison between the Ashoka and the Symbiosis incidents.

The Ashoka incident is based on solid, well-conducted research.

In the Symbiosis incident, conversely, the teacher comes across as rather foolhardy, if not downright foolish. I mean, to speak in such an un-nuanced manner on a subject as sensitive and touchy as religion, and that too in a mass language, Hindi, and in a Junior College class with a strength of over a hundred seventeen or eighteen-year-old students, puts the intelligence of the teacher in question in grave doubt. Who did he think he was? Salman Rushdie?  But even Salman Rushdie couldn’t save himself from being assaulted in a city as liberal as New York City exactly a year ago.

As for our Hindi teacher, it’s likely that he wanted his two-minute bit of fame, that he believed, as the poet Gieve Patel once wrote in a poem, that “To be no part of this hate/Is deprivation.” This is corroborated by the suspicion that the man wanted his lecture to be video-recorded, for if he did not, why didn’t he stop the student who pulled out his phone to record the statement from doing so? Or, are we saying that he did not know that the statement was being recorded? This is unconvincing. Moreover, the context in which the man spoke is unclear. Was he speaking in relation to a text he was teaching?  Or were his statements autonomous out-of-context statements?  The former scenario makes his offence less serious, because the onus of whatever he said can be placed on the text itself, which he obviously had no hand in prescribing.

But for all the man’s brashness, couldn’t the college itself have tried to protect him, instead of condoning his arrest? Couldn’t they have pointed out to the cops that, as news reports inform us, he has been in their employment since the year 2005, and has never before been known to have made controversial remarks in class? Couldn’t they have begged the activists who arrived on campus and shouted slogans to forgive him this one time?

That, of course, is too much to expect, regardless of whether it’s Ashoka University or Symbiosis College or any other institution of higher education. The teaching fraternity has always been, and will continue to be, vulnerable.

 

 

THE SUV AS METAPHOR

These days roads in our cities increasingly witness men driving around in oversized SUVs. I don’t know the names of all these SUVs but I know the names of some.  Toyota Fortuner seems to be the most preferred of these road monsters, but there are others like Ford Endeavour, Tata Harrier, Mahindra XUV and a host of others. The majority of SUVs tend to be white, followed by black. These are manly colours, you see. Who wants an SUV to be bright red or bright yellow? Red and yellow are sissyish colours. The drivers of these SUVs evidently want to pass off as VIPs, which by no stretch they really are, and besides, the idea of anyone being a VIP, including our clownish politicians, is itself a joke. LOL. What are their credentials, one is tempted to ask. Ninety per cent of India’s politicians have criminal cases registered against them, as a recent survey by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) has shown.

Given their size, the SUVs are most unsuited for Indian roads, what with the traffic, the potholes, the road-rage, the accidents and the overall mayhem. Yet men will buy them and drive them. Of course, they don’t buy them with their own money, as the SUVs cost a bomb. They buy them with borrowed money, borrowed from banks that are only too willing to trap them in debt traps when the men in question fail to repay even a single EMI on time. Then bouncers arrive at their door and threaten them with murderous violence if their dues aren’t cleared. And the men have no option but to capitulate. What they probably do is take a second loan to clear their first loan, and a third loan to clear their second loan. The cycle is endless.

When they buy their SUVs, however, these grown men who have failed to grow out of their childhood do not pause to consider if they’ll be able to repay their loans. Dekha jaayega, they tell themselves, as wishful thinking Indians are wont to. We’ll figure it out when the time comes. When we don’t plan our families, where’s the question of planning our finances. God is great.

Instead of pausing and asking themselves why an SUV and not a hatchback will serve their purpose, these men instead go on to fit accessories to their cars. These include dark black sun control film, as well as fancy licence plates with extremely tiny lettering, both of which make it possible for them to flee a hit-and-run accident site with ease. Accidents, by the way, invariably happen, because what’s the point in spending a fortune to buy a Fortuner if one cannot drive it at 300 kilometres per hour, way faster than our Vande Bharat Express trains? Not just that. The blokes spend up to a lakh sometimes to buy what are called VIP numbers. What they want the world to see is that they’ve made it, now that they are driving a white SUV with black tinted glass, and licence plates in clear violation of RTO rules, and VIP numbers like 1 or 9999. They have gotten entitled. No one can harm them.

But don’t women drive SUVs my readers might want to ask me. Of course they do, but then these are women who wish to assume a masculine persona, like, say Prime Minister Indira Gandhi or Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher, or Rekha in the film Khoon Bhari Maang. In truth, they are even more potentially dangerous behind the wheel of their gargantuan SUVs than their male counterparts, given the clumsy way in which they drive.  We believe in gender equality they mean to say, which itself is a laughable proposition in patriarchal India, what with the majority of our heterosexual men being misogynistic male chauvinist pigs who regard toxic masculinity as a virtue rather than a vice.

My real purpose in writing this blog, however, is to investigate if the SUV is a metaphor for something. I believe it is. I believe the SUV is a metaphor for raw phallic power. Apart from everything else that men who drive the white SUVs wish to say, they also want to tell the world that they have oversized genitals that can sustain erections for an endless amount of time. No man can give as much pleasure to a straight woman as they can. This is what they are really telling us, isn’t it, when they honk and overtake us from the left, and splash dirty water on us in the rainy season, and even beat us up if we fail to clear the way for them? My dick is bigger and harder than yours, and so I’m more equal than you, I have the right of way, and that’s the plain truth. If you drive a hatchback it sure means that you have equipment that is no match to mine.

Really?

Many sexologists I have spoken to have affirmed that more than any other race, it is Indians who suffer from serious erectile dysfunction. They fail to get it up when they have to. They are impotent. The white SUV then becomes an alibi to cover up an inadequacy. My car will help me achieve the orgasm that my male organ cannot.

Now let us see who are complicit in feeding the metaphor? To start with, automobile manufacturers are complicit for needlessly introducing newer and newer SUVs in the market? For what? For enhanced profit. Banks are complicit for doling out easy loans to infantile men to buy their SUVs. For what? For revenue in the form of interest on the loans. The RTO is complicit in selling VIP numbers to the gullible for five and six figure amounts. For what? For money. The RTO is also complicit in allowing unscrupulous drivers to drive around with illegal licence plates, and then charging them hefty fines when captured on camera. For what? For money again. And finally, the government is complicit. What better way to fool the world that India is a rich developed country than to show that our roads are full of high-end top-of-the-line SUVs manufactured by leading automobile companies? Hum kisise kum nahin. Optics, after all, are everything.