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Enveloped In The Peace Of The Dead

By Anand Teltumbde

07 September, 2010
Countercurrents.org

Dazed by its satirical brilliance, the first thought that crossed my mind as I got up from my seat after watching Peepli Live, this debut film of a young ex-TV journalist, is why even such a powerful projection of the rot in the system fails to enrage people. It is by no means the first film to mirror it; right from the Bollywood potboilers, which perhaps communicate to larger audience than Peepli-like ‘unentertaining’ films, such mirroring of horrific reality of India, has been happening. And films are not the only medium to do that: conscientious writers, poets, singers, playwrights and numerous civil society movements have been doing the job of awakening people. But all these attempts are failing to shake the people from their middle class reveries.

A Pathetic Piece of India

Peepli is anchored in the plight of two brothers – Natha and Budhia, who are on the verge of losing their land, their only source of livelihood, due to an unpaid loan from a bank. They contemplate an option of suicide as insinuated by a local politician in hope that it would fetch the family Rs 1 lakh as compensation from the government. It certainly does not represent the mode in which nearly 2 lakh farmers committed suicide since 1997 but still captures the very essence of the contemporary rural crisis that for a paltry sum of a few thousand rupees, which could be casually spent by urban rich over a dinner or a night stay, farmers have to resort to this horrific end. The genre of the film being satire, it does not at all undermine the importance of this issue of farmers’ suicide, much less ridicule it. It just uses it as a backdrop to expose the bigger rot in the system. It is unfortunate therefore that a controversy was created about the film by the Vidarbha Jan Andolan, which has been otherwise doing a good work in exposing this issue from its epicentre.

While Natha, prodded by his elder brother Budhia to commit suicide for the sake of the family, is still in the state of bewilderment, the news spreads around. Being election time in the region a reluctant reporter of a local news paper stumbles upon it and reports it. The news creates a sensation in the political arena and before it could be brushed under the carpet, comes an avalanche of TV channels to the village and there begins a media circus as each one vies with other to sensationalize the issue to increase its TRP (Target Rating Point, a measure of its reach to the target audience that fetch advertising revenue, the mainstay of media). The issue gets completely sidetracked by the mutually reinforcing dynamics of politics and media. The film effectively exposes how contemptuous the state is towards the plight of people: the collector sending Natha a bare ‘lal bahadur’ (a hand pump under some scheme named after Lal Bahadur Shastri) without any concern that it would be a liability than an asset to him; the centre and state playing usual ping pong to score one-upmanship and at the same time shirking their responsibility; not finding a single scheme in the plethora of schemes to really help a Natha-like farmer in distress the centre instituting a new scheme in the form of a Natha Card, which paradoxically Natha himself would not be qualified to get. The media, unashamedly TRP (read business) driven, is devoid of any sensitivity to the human tragedy. A lone sensitive journalist, who laments media indifference to the death of a labourer in the same village, is shown dying. Eventually, when the entire tamasha ends abruptly with the assumed accidental death of Natha, he is shown at a construction site in Mumbai with the same helplessness tucked to his bosom.

A Grand System Failure

Peepli depicts a grand failure of our system as far as common masses are concerned. Sixty years ago, our founding fathers had laid the foundation of the system in the form of the Constitution which, whatever its other features, had a chapter on directive principles of state policy, which provided a blue print for realizing the vision reflected by its preamble. That vision was to “constitute India into a sovereign socialist secular democratic republic, and to secure to all its citizens: justice, social, economic and political; liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship; equality of status and of opportunity; and to promote among them all fraternity assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the nation. Where do we find ourselves vis-à-vis it today? If Peepli truly represented India, we have surely done well to negate it. On every parameter of the preamble, anyone can easily assess, our progress represents an antithesis of what India was meant to be.

The greatest excuse for all failures as given by our rulers is our democracy as though it was something extraneous to our vision. Actually, this delusion is at the root of our failure on most counts. The basic premise of Indian democracy is sovereignty of people, which is actualized through their representatives elected through a great ritual of elections. Our sole claim to democracy is that we have observed this ritual largely uninterruptedly over the last six decades. But in terms of contents, are we really a democracy? To what extent our elected representatives represent Nathas and Budhias of Peepli? When they approach them they are shooed away; indicate them an option of suicide, and later threaten that Natha had to die. The disconnect between people and their representatives has grown over the years. A cursory glance at their class profile reveals it all: There are as many as 315 crorepatis out of 543 MPs in the current Lok Sabha up from 154, from the previous one, with approximate distribution in proportion to their strength across political parties. The average asset of the 304 re-contesting MPs in 2009 election grew from Rs. 1.9 crores in 2004 to 4.8 crores and that for the elected 154 MPs from 2.2 crores to 6.0 crores, a growth of nearly three hundred percent. The entire political power is monopolized by a few thousand families in the country of 1.3 billion people, who masquerade as different parties but represent the ruling class interests. People have been left with no real choice, either in the ritual of elections or thereafter. It is therefore that when these MPs got themselves a raise of threefold salary recently, people just watched with muted disbelief. It is not the matter of a few lakh of rupees, but the utter absence of accountability in the system, reflected in this process is what is noteworthy. The rot in the political system inevitably shows up in other spheres and necessarily on every possible developmental parameter, whether absolute or relative.

‘Consumerocracy’ over Democracy

The rot is accentuated by the media, which is rightly focused in Peepli. Gone are the days, it was called the fourth estate by the likes of Thomas Carlyle or Edmund Burke, a la conscious keeper of the nation; media is a pure business today but functions in far more insidious a manner than even a business. Its new offshoot, the electronic media, becomes far more perilous insofar as it can mould the world as it pleases. Unlike the press, which can present kaleidoscopic world, the electronic media has intrinsically very narrow focus which can be potentially content rich but at the cost of exclusion of many other happenings. Natha in Peepli becomes an obsession of the media circus, but Hori Mahato (intelligently named after the immortal character from Munshi Premchand’s ‘Godaan,’ the classic tale of exploitation of farmers), that sinewy man who dug up earth from his barren piece of land entire day to sell it at the nearby brick kiln so as to earn his daily bread, does not attract its attention even after he dies of hunger. Just because it does not fit in the theory of attracting eyeballs.

The business model of media is based on target audience that has purchasing power. It thus intrinsically valorizes not democracy of ‘one vote, one value’ kind but consumerocracy of ‘one currency note, one value’. Barring the fanciful concern for the ‘bottom of the pyramid’, mostly the 77 per cent population earning less than Rs 20 a day is naturally excluded from it. The entire game gets played up with balance 23 percent, the so called middle and high class of this country. As a matter of fact, Nancy Birdsall’s more scientific study dismisses the existence of any such middle class in India. She could not find anyone earning 10 Dollars a day to qualify for being middleclass as per her international definition, after knocking out the top 5 percent as rich. Nonetheless, no Indian considers himself below middleclass unless he sleeps on road and begs for food. This change in aspiration has particularly, come in during the last two decades of neo­liberalism, which has lit the fire of consumption in all. Neoliberalism, as an ideology pulverizes society into individuals and preaches them to compete for their selfish ends. These discrete individuals with ever increasing appetite for more and more consumption do not have time to ponder over Nathas of this world or the odds of the system until they affect their own selves. They have interests in preserving the status quo as it provides them a sense of security in the fast paced change around. That is why we do not see mass upsurge in support of incipient resistance struggles waged by some people in such odd times.

Peace of the Dead

The neoliberal obsession of the rulers for GDP growth is enriching a few and pauperizing the vast masses for whom the crisis of living has intensified through galloping unemployment, insecurity, inflation, fascization of polity, pervasive corruption, and naked loot of neocolonial predators. The stink of the rotting system comes out with such disturbing frequency through various scams and corruption scandals that our nostrils got used to it. Nothing ever happens in the country to those who have pelf and power, while millions get pushed to the margins like Natha of Peepli, enveloped in peace of the Dead!

Dr Anand Teltumbde is a writer, political analyst, and civil rights activist with the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights, Mumbai