Nobody Kills Anybody in India Today

An alumnus of IIT and Harvard, and a minister of the Government of India, Jayant Sinha has recently courted infamy by garlanding members of a lynch mob that beat to death 52-year-old Alimuddin Ansari in Hazaribagh, Jharkhand. What is not so widely known is the fact that the minister had organised legal defence for the accused and personally paid for the legal costs. So, the brouhaha over a few garlands is pointless.

Although a lower court had sentenced the eight men to life imprisonment based on pictures apparently circulated by the murderers themselves, just THREE MONTHS after the conviction, on 29 June, 2018, the Jharkhand High Court suspended the life sentence of BJP leader, Nityananda Mahto and 7 Others, and let them free on bail.

Sabrang India reports that after the convictions, Alimuddin’s widow Mariam Ansari made headlines when she had said ‘she was against the death penalty’ for the killers of her husband. But such headlines and noble sentiments are not even a footnote in an India where hatred is the currency of political exchange.

A lawyer representing the convicts was quoted by New York Times saying, “… yes, the mob had roughed up Mr. Ansari but that it was actually police officers who beat him to death, in custody.” The lawyer pointed to photos that have been circulating on social media that show Mr. Ansari looking alert and apparently not badly injured as officers led him away from the mob.

Fast forward to the night of 20-21 July ignoring everything else, another innocent Muslim, Rakbar Khan, was brutally murdered by a mob of cow vigilantes in a village in Alwar, Rajasthan while he was taking home two cows he had purchased.

Strange, strange things happen after the vigilantes accost Rakbar.

1. One of the men in the mob, Naval Kishore, calls up the police at 12.41 AM. From the events that follow, Naval Kishore seems to be small-time big gun among the cow goons, a minor politician from the ruling party, who is a major power in rural pockets.

2. The policemen pick up a grievously injured Rakbar at 1.15-1.20.

3. They provide no medical aid to Rakbar.

4. They make absolutely no attempt to arrest his attackers.

5. They wash Rakbar in custody and dress him up in rather jazzy borrowed clothes.

6. They allow people to photograph Rakbar, who happily upload his pics on the social media.

7. They take the victim to Naval Kishore’s home to arrange – hold your breath – transport for the two cows to a shelter. Later, one of Kishore’s relatives, Maya, tells NDTV that she saw “a policeman beating the man inside the vehicle and abusing him.” Asked if the man was still alive, she says yes.

8. The policemen and Naval Kishore drink tea at a tea stall while the victim is dying on the floor of the police vehicle.

9. After accomplishing the task of sending the cows to the shelter and having refreshments, the policemen start for the nearest hospital.

10. Finally, after more than three hours, they cover the distance of one kilometre between the police station and the hospital at 4 AM. By then, Rakbar Khan is dead.

If you think the revolting chain of atrocious events stopped after Rakbar’s death, you do not know what India has become after four years of glorious saffron rule.

On 25 July, Hindustan Times reported, Rajasthan’s home minister Gulab Chand Kataria, (who defended the new breed of cowboys earlier too), said that Rakbar died in police custody. To quote the shameless minister: “According to the evidence we have collected, it looks like a custodial death.” The not-so-hidden message is that the vigilantes didn’t kill.

Alimuddin Ansari’s killers enjoy their freedom today because identical arguments were used to protect his murderers. Naval Kishore’s relative Maya started the process, the home minister continues with the fibbing. It would be safe to anticipate that Rakbar’s killers too will go out scot free, to be garlanded by some other luminary. This wretched government will find a judge or two who would buy their nonsensical stories. (Why not? Ordinary people wait for justice for years, sometimes decades; tens of thousands of undertrial prisoners rot in Indian prisons for years, but how long did it take to free the saffron murderers?)

If this is a template to save people who murder innocents in for no reason except out of sheer hatred, can you imagine what kind of cold-blooded cunning criminals are ruling us from Rajasthan to Jharkhand?

Secondly, there is a bigger moral of this sordid story, if you sell your soul to a dangerous ideology that sanctifies hatred, you won’t be able to think straight. It doesn’t matter whether you are a semi-educated village politico, or a Harvard Educated former consultant at McKinsey & Company. I would appeal to my friends who still are Modi Bhakts, "Please thiink, if you still can."

These days, my blood boils when I read newspapers. Does yours?

Thursday, 26 July 2018

[Picture of Rakbar Khan's family is from the website of NDTV 24X7]

Those who read books

Bhabatosh Dutta, eminent economist and teacher, wrote about an unlikely scholar, Nirmal Chandra Maitra. Maitra was a sub-deputy collector in Chattagram when Dutta began his teaching career there two years after the raid on the armoury. Forty to fifty years later, Dutta wrote, “I have not come across another person with such immeasurable knowledge: he went to the very depth of literature, history, philosophy and political science.” After retirement, Maitra wanted to teach at a college. Bhabatosh Dutta dissuaded him because he felt such an erudite person wouldn’t be able to endure the ignorance of college teachers of the time.

Another economist, Ashoke Mitra writes in his autobiography that shortly after completing school, he made friends with an older man, Suranjan Sarkar, who lived elsewhere. He worked with the Customs and shared Ashoke Mitra’s passion for literature. Suranjan wrote brilliant letters about the fiction and biographies he had just read and quoted extensively from poems.

Sunanda Sikdar’s Dayamayeer Katha is a beautiful memoir about her early childhood in a remote East Bengal village in the 1950s. Sunanda writes that an illiterate farmhand, Majom Sheikh, used to walk long distances on empty stomach to listen to books being read aloud. Once, little Sunanda asked Majom, what he had told Allah during a prayer. Majom replied, “I said, ‘Lord! Please give rain and rice to those you have sent to the world. Keep their children in good health. Make all men, animals, insects, plants and trees happy.’”

The thread that connects the two government officials and the wise unlettered farmer is their love for written words. They read without expecting material benefit and didn’t gain anything by reading except, to paraphrase Russell’s words, becoming better human beings. Such people have become almost extinct, but in olden days, we met them at times. Here are a few more true stories from my unwritten diary.

A colleague of my mother was trapped in an unhappy marriage. Her husband was cruel, but she suffered him as divorce was unthinkable for middleclass Indian women then. But one day, her patience ran out and she went to a nearby police station in Kolkata to lodge a complaint. The sub-inspector on duty asked her if she had a child. She had a son. What subjects did she teach at school? English. The policeman then said, “Madam, I can start a case against your husband. But will that solve your problems?”

As she pondered in silence, the sub-inspector said, “Please recall Tennyson’s Home they brought their warrior dead: ‘Rose a nurse of ninety years, / Set his child upon her knee-- / Like summer tempest came her tears-- / “Sweet my child, I live for thee.’ I would advise you to live for your child.”

After my daughter was born, it was a big task to locate the office that would issue a birth certificate. After visits to several municipality offices, I discovered the right place: a dimly lit room in a medical college building. A lone clerk in a shabby shirt sat behind a desk, reading a Bangla newspaper and smoking a bidi. There was stubble on his face, and arrogance. After waiting for some time, I pulled a chair and sat down across the table, but the man continued to ignore me. As I had nothing else to do, I too started reading. After a long time, he looked up and noticed the book in my hand. Then suddenly, his face lit up. Putting down the paper, he said, “For whom the bell tolls? I love Hemingway. Do you know who Robert Jordan was? People say Hemmingway modelled him on Christopher Caudwell, the British essayist who died in the early days of the Spanish Civil War.” 

I said I had once tried to read Caudwell but gave up because he went over my head. The man continued, “Caudwell was badly hurt. He lay down with a machine gun as his Republican comrades retreated, just like Robert Jordan. He was not even thirty. All his books came out after his death. His first book, Illusion and reality is a masterpiece. Please read it.”

My work was done immediately while I wondered about the difference between illusion and reality.

Postscript: Robert Jordan may not have been Christopher Caudwell in real life. Wikipedia says he was possibly an American academic, Robert Merriman.

7 April 2010