In my shoes: Contemplating Capital Punishment

Ever since the arrest of Ajmal Kasab, for his association with the horrific violence unleashed in the city of Bombay in November 2008, there has been a media-orchestrated, orgiastic baying of his blood from large sections of the Indian populace. So deep and profound has this orgy been, that subsequent to the confirmation by the Supreme Court of India, of the death penalty awarded to him, there have been demands that this execution be carried out in public. Buoyed by this energy, public spirited citizens have even come forth offering their services as the hangman.

Also present in this melee however, have been the voices of a stubborn minority that have argued their principled opposition to the death penalty and persistently argued against the penalty, be it for Ajmal Kasab or anyone else. The arguments against the death penalty are numerous; one of them being that it is not for the State (or anyone) to take human life. The theistic would add that life that has not been given by us, cannot be taken away by us. Further, is the more pragmatic argument, that given the possibilities of a variety of factors impacting on the trial and judgment, there is always the possibility of the wrong person being killed for a crime they did not commit.

To these arguments, the fierce response has been that there can be no doubt that Ajmal Kasab was involved in the violence in Bombay; and further, who are we to talk, given that we were not the ones to loose family and loved ones in those terrible days in November 2008. It is in face of the latter argument that I have invariably fallen silent, for truly, without being in that position, how do I know what my response would be in a similar situation? If it were my people that had been butchered, would I not, perhaps, also have joined in the demand for blood?

The judgment in the case of Babu Bajrangi and Maya Kodnani in the Naroda Patiya massacre, associated with the Gujarat pogrom of 2002, seems to allow the space to finally provide an ethically honest response to this question that until now invariably silenced me. The Naroda Patiya massacre involved a mob of Hindu nationalists who mutilated and killed around 97 people. Leading this mob and encouraging them in acts of extreme violence, acts that included the disemboweling of a pregnant woman and the spearing of her foetus, were Maya Kodnani and Babu Bajrangi.  A week ago, Ms. Kodnani was sentenced to 28 years in prison, while Babu Bajrangi was sentenced to life imprisonment. The death penalty was not awarded to either these two, or the others convicted along with them.

I have no blood-links with the people killed, maimed or dispossessed in the course of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom. However, like many others, I have good reason to identify intimately with them. The 2002 pogrom was not merely a ‘warning’ to Muslims in India, but to all minority (not merely religious) groups, that this sort of violence could be visited upon them next. We have seen such violence in Orissa, in Assam, and more recently in South Kanara. Given that that some of my dearest relatives live in Mangalore, the violence in Gujarat is not an external event. It marks the approaching drum-beat of a savagery that could easily mar my own life. Those people in Gujarat could easily have been my very own. Also, just as the persons baying for Kasab’s blood are emotionally invested against him and all that he stands for, I too, am emotionally invested against Kodnani and Bajrangi. And yet, after careful thinking, I am convinced that I am not in anyway desirous of their blood. I do wish to see them jailed, and put away for a good period, but I do not wish to have their blood on my hands.

As many of us who have opposed the death penalty have often emphasized, the issue at stake in the opposition to the death penalty is not about what happens to persons who have committed a crime heinous enough for us to want their death. The point is what does instituting, and perpetuating the death penalty do to us as people, and as a polity. The impact it has should be obvious to even a casual observer of recent Indian politics, where the death penalty has become the penalty of choice for practically every offence, ranging from corrupt practices, to rape. To set ourselves on this path, is for us as a polity to lose the meaning of the value of human life and to persuade ourselves that killing is a valid answer for harms done to us. Supporting the death penalty does not close the cycle of deaths perhaps commenced by the criminals, it only perpetuates the cycle, trapping the living in a ceaseless cycle of death.

Before concluding, I would like to turn the issue around, and ask those in favour of the death penalty, why the same death penalty apparently justified in the case of Kasab, was not afforded to Kodnani and Bajrangi? On the face of the matter, there should be no doubt that Naroda Patiaya massacre constitutes a terrorist activity. Further, if one examines the case objectively, one realizes that the crimes committed by Kasab and his accomplices, and by Kodnani-Bajrangi, and theirs, in fact partake of a profound commonality. Both crimes, those in 2008, and those in 2002, were violent crimes against innocents, robbing them of their life. Furthermore, if one recognizes that sovereignty in India, as in other republics, stems from the collective of the people, any attack against the people, is an attack on the sovereignty of the State. Both crimes were by this logic, and as is popularly agreed in the case of Kasab, against the people of India, against the sovereignty of the State. In the Gujarati case, this attack on India’s sovereignty was because it willfully challenged, not just the rule of law and order of the Indian State, the host of fundamental rights it guarantees its citizens, but also the ethic of a secular system that the Indian Constitution is committed to. If Kasab is held worthy of the death penalty, why not Kodnani and Bajrangi? Do you see how the demand could go both ways?

The response against the death penalty was provided by the judge of the special court set up to try these cases, Jyotsna Yagnik. It is reported that she felt the death penalty “was against “human dignity.”” If then, the death penalty is against human dignity, and the crimes of Kodnani and Bajrangi rank on a similar conceptual scale to that of Kasab, should we not argue, using our principled opposition to the death penalty, that a similar clemency, and basic respect for a human being be shown to Kasab?

We would need to show this clemency for Kasab and others languishing on death row for crimes against the Indian State, because there is probably a very deep anti-Muslim bias (a bias that simultaneously operates against a number of similarly marginalized communities, and dissident groups in India) that is operating behind the sense of justice that accompanies the demand for capital punishment for them.

We should be grateful that Kodnani and Bajrangi were not awarded the death sentence, because it offers us the opportunity to halt the mindless cycle of eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-a-tooth that India seems determined to get into. We need to begin this halt of life-taking somewhere, and it is best that this halt begin with us, those of us who are opposed to the death penalty, even as we know, that someday, we could be the victims of murderous violence, by people who quite firmly believe in the death penalty, for crimes real or imagined, judicially supervised or otherwise.

(A version of this post was first published in the Gomantak Times on 5 Sept 2012)

English Talks, Konkani Rocks! : histories, innovations and democratic public culture

The problem around Goa’s Medium of Instruction (MoI) did not begin this year, nor did it begin in the 1990’s when the backbone of education in Goa, the Diocesan supervised schools switched their MoI from English to State Konkani. The roots of this problem lie all the way back, at the turn of the nineteenth century toward the twentieth. This was the time when Konkani was being set-up as the ‘mother tongue’ for Goans through the hand of not only Varde Valaulikar (Shenoi Goembab) but other (Catholic) intellectuals as well. Indeed in his later years, Valaulikar got a good amount of support from Catholic intellectuals, making his effort secular in the sense that it was a project that cut across religious divides.

What has not adequately been discussed however is that beyond this cross-religious collaboration there was also a caste-class divide that compromised the secular potential of this Konkani language project. Valaulikar’s Konknni was seen by non-brahmin Hindus as a Saraswat Brahmin project, that presented the Saraswat dialect alone as the perfect form of the language; while the Catholic intellectuals who supported this project, saw value in this project as a way of civilizing those Goan Catholics (both in Bombay and Goa) who came from non-dominant castes and were largely working class.

This working class had no real need for a Konkani language project however. They produced abundant literature of all forms for their consumption, and worked Concanim into the cultural forms that gave them livelihood. Thus they produced Concanim music to the form of the Waltz, Rhumba, March, Swing and Jazz (among others). Concanim lived among them, as it did not for the elites who moved this political project. For the Catholic elites Konkani was a way for them to not only civilize their ‘lower’ brethren, but to also regain a cultural authenticity that the nineteenth century theorization of society told them they had lost. For the largely Brahmin movers of the project, Konkani was not only the primary tool to forge one single Saraswat caste from multiple Konkana jatis along the west coast, but also a political tool through which they could carve an area for their dominance. If Pune and Bombay belonged to the Marathi Brahmins, who insulted and ridiculed them, then Goa would be the Konkana base. These two trends are the basis of the eventual decision to recognize Konkani (in the Nagari script) as the official language of Goa.

In making this move, Konkani was cast into more familiar forms of Indian nationalism. As in the case of Hindustani, Nagari alone- primarily for its brahmanical origins, though ‘scientific’ arguments were also thrown in - was seen as Indian. As a result of the historical model for Hindi that Konkani follows, the burden of North Indian communalism weighs heavily on the Konkani project. With this formulation, the Hindu and Brahmin came to be seen as the font of cultural authenticity. As a result of the elite (and hence minority) location of this project, and its nature as a civilizing mission, official or State Konkani could not walk normally as a language. The Konkani language project was marked by multiple anxieties. Because of its minority location, it could not be popularized; it had to be constantly under the control of a minority group. Because it was a civilizing mission too, ‘deviant’ forms could not be permitted. Because it was not based on a living social reality but an imagined past, it could not look to the future.

When cast in this way, it is little wonder that State Konkani did not find sync with a large number of Goans, and especially the Goan Catholic migrant working class, who were (and despite the allegations of the BBSM and its ilk, remain) the lifeblood of this language and its cultural forms. For this group Konkani was so much theirs, it sat lightly, but no less cherished, in their basket of social capital. No fuss about it. It would pass on to subsequent generations as it had to them, without passing through school. School was for where they learned other tricks and trades. The official Konkani project is to make them Konkani in an official and nationalist sense, the Goan Catholic working class, already knows it is Concanim enough.

Once we recognize that there are at least two Konkanis at work in the Goan cultural sphere, things begin to make a lot more sense. We can see that the official and stunted State Konkani may in fact be killing a vibrant unofficial one. Recognizing the working class history of unofficial Konkani, would also point us in the direction where Concanim can be a vehicle for an inclusive secular culture in the State.

It seems that it is this history that Armando Gonsalvez and his collaborators have connected with in their ‘Konkani Rocks’ project. It has been interesting to see the manner in which this project slowly evolved from ‘Jazz’ to combining ‘Jazz’ with ‘Konkani’. The beauty of the whole project is that because it delves, quite unselfconsciously into lived (and living) Concanim history, there is hardly a contradiction in the project. It is fun and it draws the crowds, persuading us without being heavily pedantic that Konkani can and indeed is fun. Simply put, it ‘Rocks!’

In this project, Konkani is not a nationalist millstone round our collective necks. On the contrary, it connects both with cosmopolitan past, and a cosmopolitan future. Armando’s formulation, ‘English Talks, Konkani Rocks’ twines the pragmatic approach of the Goan working class perfectly. There is no need for either to be displaced since each language has its place, and fulfills a definite need. Furthermore, 'Konkani Rocks' returns to a history that many of us, not just those pushing State Konkani, have done much to hide and forget. These actions, of shame in our working class history, have done much to ensure a shame in Concanim. By holding it, albeit indirectly, as something worth returning to, 'Konkani Rocks' reminds us that the Goan Catholics working class past is nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary, it was a period that generated the culture that we today recognize as Konkani.

That this formulation is also concerned with what the BBSM claims to be concerned with is obvious from a column Armando penned some days ago. He pointed out that ‘When I felt that my children were not so keen on learning the language [Konkani], I was all the more pained because I myself am not that good at it. Hence, instead of forcing the language down my children’s throats, I decided that the best way forward would be to attract them to the language, to pull them to their mother tongue, and what better way to do it than via music, dance and other cultural avenues. I presumed, correctly I think, that if my children would sing a Konkani song and dance to one, their interest in the language would improve drastically, and in this way their will to learn the language would be that much more fired up that without this cajoling.’

Rather than pull out some dusty folk-song and dance that the children may not identify with, Armando delved into a cultural tradition they could identify with. On the twentieth of August they drew from one of the most popular forms of recent history, the Big Band; and voila, Magics became!

Konkani Rocks is truly magic, and is a wonderful example of the role elites can play in pushing a more democratic public culture to greater prominence in society, by attending to popular histories instead of relying on civilizing missions that were inspired from the racist and colonial paradigms of the last millennium. It would be interesting to see how ‘Konkani Rocks’ manages to push forward a more democratic and sustainable model for Konkani in this State.

(A version of this post was first published in the Gomantak Times 24 Aug 2011)

Left, Right and Centre: or, Jerry Pinto ko Gussa Kyon Aya

On 14 July, a day after the latest violent attack in the city of Bombay, NDTV put together a panel to discuss the issues flowing out of this occurrence. One of the guests invited to participate in this discussion was Jerry Pinto. Jerry Pinto is an articulate voice from Bombay, a litterateur and journalist. When he was invited to join the discussion however, Jerry Pinto exploded and he let the host and the other participants have it.

Why did Jerry Pinto get annoyed? Unfortunately for us, in losing his poise, Mr. Pinto seemed to have lost the opportunity to make calmer and more collected an argument. However, because he lost control and let his emotions run loose, it seems his breaking from the script, allowed us to understand a couple of issues regarding the manner in which the latest attacks on Bombay are being responded to.

Initially fazed by his outburst, Nidhi Razdan, the host of the show eventually ventured to try and gain control of the situation. ‘Tell us how you feel!’ she cooed, ‘what is going through your mind.’ Tell us how he feels? But surely madam, he was telling us exactly how he felt! He was telling us that he felt awful, that the city he was a part of had been attacked, and that the manner in which NDTV sought to deal with the issue was to merely harvest the grief, he called it a ‘camera rape’, of those who had lost friends or family for the benefit of its TRPs.

What seemed to enrage Mr. Pinto further however, was the fact that while it was Bombay that had been attacked, it had taken all of 31 minutes for the host of the show to invite a Bombay voice into the discussion. And when this Bombay voice was summoned into the discussion, it was not to ask for an independent opinion to be articulated, but for this Bombay voice (that of Jerry Pinto) to perform the usual monkey-trick of responding to that cliché ‘the resilient spirit of Bombay’.

But in her response to Mr. Pinto’s further fusillade, Ms. Nidhi Razdan, provided a further demonstration of the manner in which NDTV is part of a larger system that harvests grief and other sentiments born from vulnerability, for its centralizing purposes.

Mr. Pinto’s first couple of responses to the invitation to join the discussion was to ask why the issue had become something that would be discussed by ‘Delhi people will talk about, in Delhi, as if it had nothing to do with Bombay.’ As with his remark discussed earlier, this was part of a demand that Bombay, and its citizens, be addressed, and asked to participate more meaningfully in responding to the blasts. There was sentient life, Mr. Pinto was suggesting, outside of Delhi. Through the blasts, this life had been temporarily deprived of agency, and what NDTV was doing by engaging with citizens of the city so superficially was to add to the sense of helplessness. To this thread of thought, Mr. Razdan, responded ‘But, Mr. Pinto, don’t get upset, Mumbai is a part of India, and so we are all upset’. And later ‘Mumbai is a part of India, and that is why people in Delhi will talk about it’.

Ms. Razdan has internalized nationalist logics so completely that it appears she did not realize how infuriating, and at the same time painfully hilarious, her trite formulations were. Thus she glibly compared the violence and disturbances in Kashmir (‘the State of Jammu and Kashmir’ as she so touchingly put it) to the violence and disturbance in Bombay. Indian nationalism has so effectively tailored her vision that she is unable to see the radically differences that both cause and attend upon the violence in these two radically different spaces. She also failed to see that one of the central points that Mr. Pinto was making is that just because it is an Indian city, it does not allow for persons in Delhi, to hijack the issue and determine the contours of the response to the incident.

If Mr. Pinto was speaking from his heart, then the panel in Delhi was ‘discussing it as if nothing had ever happened’, or discussing the matter ‘in abstractions’. What was being discussed in the NDTV studio was the imperial Indian response to the occurrence in Bombay. In that studio in Delhi, the trauma and emotions of the people in Bombay, were being harvested by NDTV, and through the public policy comments by the members of the panel, converted into a ‘national issue’ and the path that India would now have to take. Interestingly, in the course of this national policy discussion, it fell to just one person, Mr. Mani Shankar Aiyer, to point out that the possible culprits could also be Col. Purohit, thus disrupting the Hindu nationalist rhetoric that had until then quite calmly held sway.

While Mr. Aiyer remained the sole sensible, balanced voice in the discussion, had there been more sentient voices from Bombay perhaps the response would have been more appropriate to the moment. How does one reach out to a city that is both hurting and afraid? Perhaps that option would have allowed us a route out of the clichés that both Ms. Razdan, and subsequently a dramatically drenched Barkha Dutt offered the viewer.

There is much that is deeply disturbing about NDTV (and other similarly placed TV news channels in India). The least troublesome is the fact that they harvest and manipulate the emotions of viewers for the sake of their TRPs, and to create a jingoist nationalist audience that is unable to do more than bay for blood in name of the greater glory of India.

More bothersome however is the fact that NDTV seems consistently unable to respond to the more complex thoughts that are presented to it in the voices that it sometimes brings into the studios. NDTV has its own little script, one that is based on the interests and aspirations of a small group of middle-class nationalists in Delhi. Indeed, this class can well be said to be the inheritors of the multi-ethnic, pluri-religious 'nationalist class' that effectively determined 'national' agendas in the first few decades of Indian independence. It is their narrow and self-serving agenda that largely determines the manner in which an issue will be responded to, and this is the perspective that they force everyone else to internalize, limiting scope for any divergent thinking in this large, complex and diverse country. What this group and NDTV does not seem to realize however, is that Jerry Pinto's outburst, was only a sign of the times. There is a very genuine fatigue with the manner in which 'Delhiwallas', a code-word for this group of self-obsessed elites from all parts of the country, divert and demand attention and all manner of resources to their narrow, limited interests.

(A version of this post was first published in the Gomantak Times 20 July 2011)

Home cooked food!: The mantra, yantra, tantra of hygienic and clean food

A couple of days ago, a friend of mine, recently returned from the United States, complained about the stomach condition he had developed. What galled him most was that his illness had been caused via spoiled food served at a 5 star hotel. He had been warned, a dozen times over, that while road-side stalls were unsafe and unhealthy, the food served in the 5 star hotels in India was safe. And yet, this was not the first time 5 star food had him shuttling to and from the toilet. When I heard his story, I sat back and smiled. There was ofcourse, an explanation for why exactly his logic was not computing.

To get a grip on this logic however, we would have to go back in time, a couple of years when I was sharing a conversation with a friend. Speaking about the dabbawallas of Bombay, this friend remarked that this unique institution probably had something to do with the unique eating and dining habits of the South Asian. Caste rules as regards dining in older times restricted who we ate with, what we ate from whom, and where we ate as well, not to mention the times at which we ate. Thus, it was possible for a ‘lower’ caste person to offer food to a ‘higher’ caste person as long as it was uncooked. Where the degrees of separation between castes were lesser, then the possible pollution could beundone by sprinkling the cooked food ritually with ghee. The best route however, was to make sure that the food was cooked by some one reliable, someone who was ritually pure, and would thus provide ritually pure food. Someone from your home. It was partly for these reasons, this friend reasoned, that the dabbawallah was such a success in Bombay. It ensured a perfect system where ritually and socially privileged ‘home-cooked food’ could be delivered to you.

These ritual obsessions with purity, could explain the mania that the Indian displays for ‘home cooked food’; the home being a symbol for the pure. It is the absence of such preoccupations in other parts of the world, that allows places as wide-ranging as South-East Asia, Europe, the Americas and not least of all, the Islamicate urban centers of the South Asian subcontinent, to have such rich street-food cultures. The elusive hygiene of the street-side food-stall in India then, is less about hygiene and more about (often time unconscious) concerns for ritual purity. When we are not so sure about the social location of the cook, it is better to err on the side of caution.

Similarly, certain ritual systems of the subcontinent consider the consumption of food is an activity that makes one vulnerable. Thus the space in which one eats is something that one ought to give attention to. For the ritually conscious then, the liminal space of the street, that is open to polluting influences of all sorts, is best avoided as a place to eat. The ideal space to eat is the space in which one is secluded, in an environment where one is safe from intrusion of the polluted and dirty outside. Once more, scientific hygiene has nothing to do with the safety of the food.

But this is not to say that scientific hygiene has absolutely no role to play in any of these choices. On the contrary, it does and in a very interesting manner. Scientific hygiene was a colonial introduction into the subcontinent, and marked heavily by racism. The brown (or black) body was seen as the repository of filth and dirt. The tropical home of these coloured bodies was similarly loaded with pestilence and illness. Colonialism, through its mechanism of the ‘white man’s burden’ offered a way out of this mess to the coloured person, through the doctrines of scientific hygiene, urban planning and education. The elite of the subcontinent grabbed these ideas of hygiene with as much aplomb as they grabbed at the political institutions and ideas of the white man. As an illustrative case, take Gandhi’s agenda was tied as much with hygiene as it was with the setting up of the Indian nation-state. The political language of equality that Indian nationalism utilized did not however, necessarily transcend caste boundaries. In a clever move, while the dominant castes invested themselves with Western attributes, the attributes that were credited to the coloured person, were passed on to the ‘lower’ castes of the subcontinent. Thus their bodies and lifestyles, already deemed ritually unclean, were now also see as unhygienic. Just as the coloured person was seen as lacking in education, the Westernised coloured person, now projected this need for education and upliftment onto these ‘dumb’ castes.

It is no revelation that to most people in the third world, the 5 star hotel represents the developed West. It is a space where we can produce, and reproduce, ourselves as sophisticated, westernized and upper class. But as should be obvious, this westernization, and upper classness, also has casteist elements to it. Thus it is also an exclusive space, where we reject those who are not ‘people like us’. While there is no denying that a greater amount of care is possibly taken in the kitchens of these hotels, the fact is that these places are deemed cleaner, not only because they are more hygienic. They are deemed cleaner, because they are places where ‘people like us’ go, and where food is cooked ‘for people like us’. This is the safe space where the unknown and unclean cannot intrude, and this, perhaps above all, produces its ‘cleanliness’. In the past we had filthy cooks prepare food that was deemed ritually clean, because the cook was Brahmin (or of comparable caste groups). Or ritually suspect food could be eaten, because it was ritually purified by water or ghee. Similarly today, hotel food is produced as hygienic by the ritual mantra, yantra and tantra of shiny modern kitchens, presumed conformance to hygienic standards, and the modernity and exclusivity of their location.

Consequently then, we can make sense of the Facebook status message that started this whole conversation…

“Myth: Eating @ 5 Star hotels in India is safe. Just had my 2nd ever experience of illness due to spoiled food served. Consequently I have warned against "road side chai" and have had it over 2 dozen times. Number of illness bouts from chai? = 0”

(A version of this essay was first published in the Gomantak Times Sept 8 2010)

Mantra, yantra, tantra: refer to the three necessary components of magic formula, machine or implement, and the procedure through which 'Hindu' ritual can be successfully completed.

Standing on the shoulders of giants: A chapter from ‘The Training Manual for Younger Activists’

I attended a couple of days ago, a meeting by a group of young activists, who like many of their compatriots were concerned about the state of Goa. The idea was, as with others, to save Goa from the fate that it seems determinedly headed toward. One of the highlights of this meeting were the sage words from one of these young activists; Goa was headed towards becoming another Bombay. It was going to become the base for big capital, and as with the old Bombay, the social groups who earlier constituted the space, would be forced to move out. This person was speaking in the context of the Bombay Goans and the East Indians, but he might as well have added the Parsis and other sundry groups that constituted the old Bombay. The new Bombay is a space for the national and international money bags, even as the city is awash with labouring groups from all over the subcontinent.

Despite the obvious enthusiasm to address the problem, and the willingness to form a group to address the problem, I came away from the meeting with a deep depression. The depression had something to do perhaps with the fact that these enthusiasts were ‘young activists’. The young is not a reference to their age. There were some older persons in the group. The young is a reference to their experience as activists. This was clearly, the first time that these folks were attempting to come out into the public sphere and assert their stake in the governance of the land. And yet, merely because we are young as activists, there is no need for us to reinvent the wheel, as I perceived was the case, and the problem, at that meeting.

The Goan public sphere is no stranger to activism. Right from the seventies Goa has seen persons emerge from out of the blue to take a stand in the way the state ought to be governed in the larger interests of its people and its environment. Some of these activists have gone down the political party route and are thus lost, in some measure, to the larger public cause. However, a good number of them have continued to remain in the popular space, outside of party politics and continue to raise their voices against the injustices in our land. One of these activists points out how in the seventies, when the first environmental protests were being raised in Goa, the Chief Minister of the time scoffed at them. ‘What environmentalists are you speaking about’, he is reported to have asked; ‘you can count them on the fingers of your hand’. What may have been true in the seventies, does not hold true today. Those seven voices today have grown into a voluble chorus, graced by a number of committed souls and fine minds with keen analysis.

In such a context then, younger activists have no reason to reinvent the wheel and contemplate how or where they ought to begin their fight to save Goa. Our first attempt ought to be to engage with these older activists. These activists represent a range of political positions and preferred and tested strategies allowing us to gain in this process of engagement, a political education and a choice as to our preferred route of engagement. This engagement would also allow us to plug into existing networks and causes, building on the foundations that have already been laid. Why start from scratch when there is already such a wealth of effort and energy at our disposal?

Goa is young as a democratic political society, and the qalb (the upheaval) that we witness today are signs of a population coming of age politically. We must remember that the Portuguese era was not so much a time of suppression by the Portuguese regime, as much as a time of suppression of the common man by local elites who collaborated with the Portuguese state. This domination has continued since ‘Liberation’, making some mockery of that term. What was missing was the presence of larger popular democratic institutions and the current tension in our society allows us the opportunity to create these. If this politically poised population is to mature therefore, what it requires is an investment in some kind of institutionalization. It is this institutionalization that still seems somewhat lacking in our state. This allows for younger activists to continue thrashing wildly while they seek to address the rot in the state.

Institutionalization does not however mean forming registered bodies or groups. It does not even mean taking the positions of all the existing and older activists as gospel truth. Institutionalization should mean merely the creation of a framework for a consultative process. A process through which we can gather, discuss, agree and disagree, and in the process sharpen our analysis and then be able to strengthen each other’s causes. If we can stand on the shoulders of giants, it should be possible for us to see beyond the dark that threatens our present and look into a promising distant future.

(First published in the Gomantak Times, 2 June 2010)

Critical Choices… When the soul of a nation hangs by a thread

There is a moment from the Steven Spielberg film Munich that I cherish. In this particular moment, the bomb maker Robert is beginning to have doubts about the morality of killing the persons whom the Mossad held as responsible for the brutal killings of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. And so it is that Robert says ‘We're Jews…Jews don't do wrong because our enemies do wrong….Suffering thousands of years of hatred doesn't make you decent. But we're supposed to be righteous. That's a beautiful thing. That's Jewish. That's what I knew, that's what I was taught and I'm losing it. I lose that and that's everything. That's my soul.’

This cinematic moment has been replaying itself in my head over and over again ever since the drama around Kasab’s punishment erupted in the Indian media space. It would be worthwhile for us to examine this issue of capital punishment for Kasab from the doubts that Robert has in Munich. Robert captures the dilemma perfectly in his phrasing. Suffering, even if for a thousand years, does not make us and our actions righteous. Thus the real sufferings of those who lost family and friends through the violence in Bombay, and the alleged sufferings of the Indian nation are not reason enough to justify the Indian state’s killing of Kasab. What we should be the real focus of our debate is what the killing of Kasab will do to all of us as Indians. This is what should be the focus of our discussion. And this is what Robert realizes after he has sufficient blood on his hands; that all that killing is making him loose his soul. And at the end of the day, the loss of his soul is too much to bear.

The loss of our collective souls and the loss of the humanity of the Indian nation-state is what we stand to loose through the State killing Kasab. The Indian judicial system assures us that capital punishment is to be awarded only in the ‘rarest of rare cases’. This may in fact be true, where a higher court may hold that a decision granted by a lower court was irresponsible and overturn the sentence of capital punishment. But this is not the point. The point is what does the presence of the death punishment do to us as a people of the legal system.

The Kasab case is a wonderful example of what is being done to us. No one will deny that we have been turned into an audience in this particular case.And the audience in this particular case has been turned into a blood thirsty mob, crying and screaming for the blood of this man. This audience is presented with actors, such as the prosecutor in the case, Ujjwal Nikam, who argues, contrary to the supposed ‘rarest of rare cases’ principle, that all terrorists should be given the death penalty. In the environment that has been generated in this particular drama event, what has been done is to convince so many Indians that indeed terrorists should be given the death penalty. What we do not realize though, is while in Kasab’s case it can be proven that he was stomping around Bombay spraying people with bullets, this is not necessarily the case with every alleged ‘terrorist’. The justice delivery system can sometimes go wrong, the wrong person implicated, the reasoning of courts clouded by fear and nationalist sentiment, and innocent blood can be shed.

Further, a situation where we start baying for blood and believe that all terrorists should be given the death penalty allows for State killings outside the law. Take for example the case of the Batla House ‘encounter’. We know now that the boys killed in the Batla House shootout, were innocents, and victims of a fake encounter. Fake encounters are a fact of life in India, where numerous Muslim boys are routinely dragged and shot. Tribal boys too, under the suspicion that they are Naxals. And let us not forget the trouled areas of the north-east. Allowing for the death penalty creates a certain callousness in our souls, where we shrug off these deaths. Even if we do not shrug these off however, we should remember that we are responsible for these deaths, in allowing for the existence of the death penalty.

What we should constantly keep reminding ourselves is that Kasab is not the point in the debate that is emerging. The point is the soul of the Indian population. The point is not what we can or will do to Kasab, or what he deserves. The point is what will become of us after he is gone. The attempt of the criminal mastermind is to breed bad blood between peoples. Thus either Kasab, or the forces that sent Kasab on his mission, intended that there be tension and escalating violence between the people of India and Pakistan. The idea is to create a state of permanent tension within India. If we kill Kasab, and do so after the kind of frenzied calls for his blood that have marked his trial, then Kasab will not have died in vain. He and his directors will have succeeded in the larger campaign that they have in mind. What we will have done, is to convert the peace loving people of India into a blood thirsty mob. Create a by-and-large gentle, trusting people into a suspicious collective of witch-hunters. The real victor of any battle is the one who winds up with the options. The option still rests in our hands, and we can determine the real extent to which Kasab has impacted on us. To allow Kasab and the forces he has been made to represent to transform us in this manner is to allow them to win and have the final laugh.

It is true that we have to deal with Kasab one way or the other. The way the system operates is to punish him. If one is thinking of punishment, and the inclination is towards death, then allow me a suggestion. The suggestion is that of social death. Let his name be struck from the records and his name never be spoken again. The violence he wreaked will not be mentioned, his efforts will have been in vain. At the same time, let us reach out to those who have been impacted by the violence he and his colleagues effected. In doing so we will strengthen the bonds of loving brotherhood that reputedly make India the nation that it is, and the country it wanted to be at the start of its independence.

The Jews have constructed a history of thousands of years of suffering. And yet, as the Robert of the film Munich points out, the soul of Judaism lies in persevering in righteousness despite these sufferings. India is acclaimed as a spiritual land. It is to this heritage that it owes the obligation to realize that in killing Kasab it will loose the battle of righteousness and walk into a battle where the lines are scripted by the forces of discord on the other side. Like Dronacharya told Arjuna, focus on the eye of the bird in the tree, nothing else. Kasab at the end of the day is a part of the larger forest, the Kauravas even. Our goal, our true goal, lies elsewhere. But at this moment, it hangs by a thread. My prayers are for the soul that India risks loosing.

(First published in the Gomantak Times, 12 May 2010)

Thinking About Babush II: The dream that won Babush the election

Persist to think of Babush Monserrate as the embodiment of evil, and it will be impossible to understand the reasons for his victory in the recently concluded Panchayat elections. If one is to provide a counter to him, then one has to come up with another, more plausible explanation for the victory. Demonizing him serves no purpose other than to blindly hate him and provide a bonding among the various groups opposed to him for their own varied reasons. In the previous part of this series, I had suggested that the key to Monserrate’s victory was not the fear that he allegedly instills in the people of Taleigão, but because he is congress with them for reasons of a dream that he offers them. One cannot capture votes merely by handing out gifts. One has to also capture the imaginations of the people one is gifting. Monserrate seems to have done exactly this. He offers the people of Taleigão, a dream. He offers them the dream, and the promise (even if it is a false promise) of modernity.

This modernity is has a definite physical location, and that location is the city. More particularly, it is the city of Bombay. As the Delegate of Fundacao Oriente, Paulo Varela Gomes, has convincingly demonstrated on a number of occasions, Bombay has, at least since the mid 19th century, been the goal for the Goan, and especially for the Goan dalit-bahujan. It was the city that promised them employment, the city where their culture blossomed and found mature expression, it was the location where they were able to escape the vice-like grip of their village and feudal elite, and if not wholly escape it, contest these elites on a somewhat equal footing. The city, with its broad avenues and high-rise buildings, offers not just the chic aesthetics of modernity (and we have to recognize that Monserrate has oodles of oomph [style] as evidenced from the public works carried out under his stamp) but also the promise of liberation through the destruction of the landscape and hierarchies of the village and the introduction of the anonymity of the urban environment.

What dream do we, his opposition, the forces that cry 'Save Goa' have to offer instead? By and large, we offer the people of Taleigão, and Goa, the dream of the village. We do not point to them the way forward, but look back with fondness to the aesthetics and relationships of the village. What we offer them is a return to the status-quo. But as is clear from the voices of the people in Taleigão, the people don't want a status quo, they want change, and they will grab at change any which way they get it.

The village is not necessarily the ideal place we imagine it to be. To the vast majority of people it is a place marked by the absence of facilities and most importantly glitz. In addition, it is a place that is intimidating for any one who is Queer. It is a suffocating location for the wife who refuses to be raped by her drunken husband and returns single and pregnant to her parents' home, the homosexual son or daughter, the unemployed person who refuses to have employment if it means his daily humiliation, a member of the former ‘servant castes’ who chafe at the attitude of the former dominant castes. I have written much about the need for a revolution in Goa. Silly me, I didn’t recognize the revolution when I saw it. Babush Monserrate and his ilk represent the revolution and they have with them the masses of the people. Unfortunately however, Monserrate does not represent the revolution which I imbue with the positive notions of establishing a commonwealth. His agenda represents what I have earlier termed a fitna, an upheaval without the necessary renewal of society. Which is why, the task before the opposition to Monserrate and his ilk is not merely the presentation of the dream of the village, but the dream of the village radically renewed.

Thankfully however, the opposition to the politico-business lobby is not all composed of the elites interested in a return to the status-quo. Some of us are opposed to this desertification through concrete, and hold up the model of a village because we are animated by the knowledge that the concrete industrial city that has become the model for Goa promises only a temporary relief from oppression. It breaks the bonds of village hierarchies, but simultaneously creates oppressions of other sorts. It destroys ecological independence. In a few years time, there will be no fields in Taleigão capable of producing food. The hills covered with constructions will no longer soak up rainwater; the village wells will run dry or turn saline. Others will be fed by raw sewage rather than fresh water. The rich will be able to up and leave; what of the poor? Where will they get water from? Will they be able to purchase food at exorbitant prices? Monserrate’s strategy may destroy the spatial and social relationships of the village, but it is not producing sustainable employment. Lastly, the concrete city destroys intimate bonds of the village to create the anonymous spaces and relationships of the city that encourage crime. How many of the faces in São Paulo – Taleigão’s market area- do we recognize anymore? The liberation of the city that Monserrate offers therefore, is in fact a mirage. It promises a liberation that it cannot in fact deliver. At some level, I doubt that Monserrate even realizes the damage he is doing. As I will elaborate in the last segment of this series, it is possible that he too, as a member of the society he leads, shares in the misplaced assumption that the trappings of modernity (the roads, high-rises and conspicuous consumption) alone, rather than a commitment to the social values of modernity, will ensure deliverance from the curse of our caste-bound society. It is therefore quite possible, that Monserrate actually believes that his vision will bring deliverance and liberation.

It is for this reason that I have been arguing for long that we need a revolution, an inquilab in Goa. We don’t require a return to the village of old, or the creation of the concrete industrial city, but a radical re-founding of our communities. We need to present to the citizenry of Goa, which now clings piteously to the promises of the false prophets of our age, concrete and material evidence of what this new commonwealth will look like. It calls for a change in the way in which we do and imagine politics and associations. It calls for a demonstration of the possibilities of eco and community friendly business ventures. At present the elite groups who lead the opposition both in Taleigão and in Goa seem rather reluctant to commit themselves to this radical refounding. It is not that they don’t have the imagination, but that they refuse to entertain any scheme that will radically change the status-quo. They too are committed to a fitna, a mere superficial management of society.

It is this vacuum then, which Monserrate has filled, and will continue to fill until such time as we are ready to talk equality. Until such time as we are ready to establish a radically equal society in Goa (the biblical New Jerusalem, Sant Tukaram’s Pandharpur, St. Augustine’s City of God), the city of Monserrate, will be the paradise towards which the citizenry of Taleigão and Goa will determinedly walk toward. And I can’t say that I don’t understand their decision.

(Published in the Gomantak Times, 2 April 2009)

(This column is dedicated to Dr. Paulo Varela Gomes. I would like to recollect with thanks the delightful hours spent in conversation with him, and for pointing out to me just how significant Bombay is in the Goan imagination. For all of this Professor, thank you.)