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