chakravyuha

The great Indian guardians of morality strike again, valiantly protecting our  “sabhyata”. This incident is getting a lot of attention primarily because part of it was caught on camera. What you see is a bone-chilling indictment of the health of our society. I’ll leave aside my revulsion and hatred of such acts, my anger and frustration at the logic presented to justify such incidents and still try to analyze it objectively. It’s hard, but I have realized that hatred and anger simply begets more hatred and anger and never solves the problem and hinders meaningful analysis.

The most alarming aspect of this incident (and there are many, many, alarming aspects to this incident) is how a group of people with absolutely no authority of the state behind them – they are not the police – can take the law into their own hands and expect to get away with it. This is happening all over the country. Most recently we saw it in Mumbai with the MNS frothing at the mouth at the supposed injustice of the large presence of people from North-Indian in the state of Maharashtra, a state that was later relieved of a siege by terrorists by troops that would be most likely be comprised of those very North-Indians (they were stationed in Hindi-speaking Delhi so that’s a reasonable assumption). No people can function, far less thrive and create, in a society without adequate protection for the individual and his property. Without order there is chaos and without law there is no justice and no order. A fair, reasonable system of laws is the bedrock of civilization. A functioning law and order system guarantees people that their rights and property will be protected and their movement
safe. The ideals of democracy need the foundation of law and order to survive too.

Then there is this common straw man argument of the undue influence of the (decadent/morally corrupt/women-molesting/lawless – take your pick) “west”. The west is a very amorphous word and does not tell us exactly what is meant by it or who is it supposed to include. Does it include the Eastern-Europeans?, the Russians?, the Japanese?, the Australians? I ask this because there are a lot of similarities in the cultural mores of these nations that are not all geographically west of us. For the sake of argument let’s assume that west is the countries with dominant race being Caucasian and then restrict ourselves to the United States and Western Europe because that’s what people mean when the say “the west”.  People who blame the west should realize that their arguments are largely influenced by the programming that comes out from the US (which is in “the west”). What they see on television is not the nation and not an adequate representation of the culture either. Far from it. Sitcom and drama, by their very nature to titillate, incite, and amuse, turn up the degrees of erotica, drama, and generally outrageous behavior to exaggerated degrees.. You really have to live in the west to realize what west is. The western civilization is an entirely different animal. There’s a big difference between their system of living and ours. The rules of mating and the rules of engagement in public are vastly different from that in India. For example, take the pub and club culture (and for the record a pub and a club are two entirely different venues). In the United States there is no system of arranged marriages and no strong extended families to recommend eligible brides for eligible grooms and vice versa. The task of finding a mate is almost always up to the individual himself. The clubs, discs and pubs are then a necessary tool in the arsenal of an individual to find a mate. Besides, what’s harmful in an occasional beer at a local pub? In Australia – where I lived for a year – there’s such a strong pub culture that people sometime saunter off for a pint in the middle of the day with a group of friends or colleagues. It’s a regular communal event with people chatting over a glass of beer.

Let’s take the western family structure. There’s no shortage of families in the US where parents are working as hard as they do in India to secure a future for their children. We can take exception to how they treat their elderly and leave them to the mercy of a retirement home, how the culture prices individualism often at the cost of insecurity and loneliness. But then we too do not have a functionally ideal family structure in India, with our incidents of dowry-related deaths, children neglecting and often mistreating their parents in joint-family homes and others. And then.. before the western influences are bashed again and blamed for corrupting us, please also realize that practically every single modern convenience that you enjoy today came from the west. The United States was where Edison invented the light bulb, where Henry Ford developed mass production of cars, where the locomotive was developed, where flight was invented by the Wright brothers and where both the AC and DC transmission system was developed. Trust me, these are the very big and obvious examples. A comprehensive list would be very long one indeed. A culture that fosters such innovation and entrepreneurship is surely doing something right. You cannot pick and choose aspects of a culture, that you barely understand in the first place, to pass a verdict on it. A culture is an organic whole. You either understand it and take it’s good aspects or you simply leave it alone because it’s a system of living for a large part of our planet.

It’s rather easy to identify the real trigger of these incidents here. It’s almost always those devilish politicians who have made an art-form out of exploiting gullible, directionless group of people with no economic prospect (show me a spontaneous mob expression and I will show you Yeti). But they are just the trigger and just that. The real problem is the malaise running through our nation. Let’s us realize what these incidents of moral outrage are really about. It’s about lost youth with no employment prospects and no future. It’s about a society that has no respect for law and order or any other institutions for that matter. It’s about a misguided group of people who really believe that the only way to protect our culture is through expressions of such hollow moral outrage. Apologists of this kind of incident – the kind that do not take part in the actual violence but justify the violent outrage with the usual arguments of western influence and moral corruption – are reactionary people who are genuinely afraid of winds of changes blowing through their region or culture.

The solution here is to do many things at once. India is a democracy and the rule of law is one of the pillars of a functioning democracy. Without law and order there is chaos and what we have in India is really chaos. It’s the law of the jungle and everybody in the jungle feels free to act out as he pleases. We need to give these people something productive to do and incentives for them to be swayed into joining these mobs would disappear. This is a problem of economic mobility. We need a better education system and then we need to educate ourselves to what’s going on in the world. We need to create employment opportunity for these youth and give them better tools to understand the world around us and it’s drivers and manipulators. People who genuinely fear for our culture need to realize that preservation can never ever be through coercion. Culture thrives in freedom and in free expression. Culture will thrive when people are free to breath, free to create, free to express and free to act (albeit within the confines of reasonable laws). There’s a peripheral issue here too. We need to have a reasoned and informed debate on these ideas of what exactly our “sanskriti” really is and what ideals should the people derive from it. But those are intellectual arguments that can be carried out in academia or in personal venues where such issues are in context. There arguments cannot be carried out in the streets. Cultural arguments should not have any bearing on how law is dispensed and on how order is maintained. These mobs are not agents that can preserve your way of living. Violence begets violence. It’s a tear in the very fabric of culture that these mobs are supposedly trying to protect. It’s not how India will prosper, or it’s culture preserved. Culture cannot be rammed down eveybody’s throat. Culture grows and thrives where people freely nurture it, analyze it, criticize it and celebrate it.

PS: There’s this hilarious post by the (always great) greatbong on this issue and this thread at churmuri.com.

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