Black Lives Matter but Indian lives don’t? Our response to violence is double faced

The bullet that took 26-year-old Breonna Taylor’s life this year in Kentucky, USA was probably no different than a bullet fired three months later on June 6, some 7,600 miles away in the hot and humid town of Amroha in Uttar Pradesh.

Taylor’s death, followed by the killing of George Floyd in May, has set America’s conscience on fire. Young and old, rich and poor, white and Black, Americans have come out on the streets to demand change, justice, and healing. In Amroha too people came out, but to go about their daily lives.

While Vikas Jatav, a 17-year-old Dalit boy was shot dead in broad daylight for simply trying to offer prayers in a temple, it was business as usual everywhere else and not a word was spoken about the casteist violence that claimed a life. On June 4, three Dalit men were beaten by a mob, tonsured, and paraded with shoes around their necks for the crime of allegedly stealing a fan, in Lucknow’s Khalilabad village.

On June 10, a dozen Dalit hutments were torched in UP’s Jaunpur when a brawl among children turned into a clash between adults. Three goats, a buffalo, utensils, clothing, and several other articles of everyday life were burnt to cinders while residents of the Dalit basti were beaten up.

In the midst of all this, woke Bollywood celebrities posted black squares on their Instagrams tagged with #BlackLivesMatter and #BlackoutTuesday to support the righteous rage of American civil society. Their equally woke fans dutifully copied them and shared protest photographs captioned with the first Malcolm X quote that popped up in their Google search.

Neither these celebs nor their fans bothered with a single sentence of solidarity for the minor killed in Amroha or the families who lost their homes in the Jaunpur violence.

While Indians don’t mind speaking about race and white supremacy, caste makes them squirm in their shoes with a combination of indifference, impunity, perhaps a tiny twinge of guilt, and oodles of ignorance.

Afterall, to solve a problem, you must first know that it exists.

The ongoing row around online exams for university students is an important example of the discriminatory nature of our social, economic, and educational power structures, which often manifest themselves as caste-blindness and apathy.

Despite UGC guidelines to cancel or postpone the exams, several universities like Delhi Technical University have plans to conduct online exams which will require the students to have access to an internet connection with minimum speed of 1Mbps and a computer with –minimum RAM of 2GB, a web-camera, a microphone, and Google Chrome Browser (ver. 75 or above). When Delhi University announced its guidelines for online Open Book Exams in May, a 4G internet connection was on its list of requirements as well.

This is where we must engage in some sociological number crunching.

According to data collected by the National Statistical Office (NSO) in its 75th round (held in 2017-18), only 9 percent households in India have both, a computer at home and an internet connection. While this number is 20% in urban areas, it falls to 4% in rural areas.

Even when the data is adjusted to parse out how many households with students have access to a computer and internet, the number remains stubbornly fixed at 9%.

Within this, the number of Dalit and Adivasi students who have a computer and an internet connection is also just a meager 4%. In states like Jharkhand, Bihar, and Andhra Pradesh, only 5% of all students have a computer and an internet connection. It should be noted that these states have significant Dalit and Adivasi populations and that they routinely feature among the most poverty-stricken states in the country.

The scourge of caste-blindness is such, that the plight of these students didn’t even cross the minds of the university administrators who wrote these guidelines that would only benefit the privileged 3% of all students, who unsurprisingly belong to upper caste and upper-class urban backgrounds.

And this is just one type of institutional violence that is inflicted upon students from marginalized communities.

To add insult to the injury, we also trivialise the caste-based oppressions perpetuated by us in everyday life. We call our marginalised folks “quota wale,” and treat them as talentless slobs in the classroom and greedy opportunists at the workplace. We see reservation as a theft of rights from the “hardworking general category students,” and we treat our SC/ST/OBC colleagues as inferior and undeserving of promotions and pay raises.

The tragic suicide of Dr. Payal Tadvi is a classic example of this. Incessantly abused and bullied for her caste by three of her upper caste seniors, Dr. Tadvi took her own life last year at the Nair Hospital in Mumbai, where she was pursuing her MD.

Outside of official settings, we hurl casteist slurs at our friends and strangers without knowing what they mean. We make fun of the poor and their “ganwaar” language. And we filter out specific surnames from lists of applicants, on both LinkedIn and Shaadi.com.

But the great Indian hypocrisy doesn’t end with our soulless reactions (or their total absence) to casteism.

Police brutality against George Floyd elicited a very strong and unequivocal condemnation from Indians across the political spectrum. But the wrongful detention of a 27-year-old pregnant student stirred nothing in their hearts simply because her name is Safoora Zargar.

Zargar, who had been an active organizer in last winter’s anti-CAA and NRC protests was arrested on April 10 in connection with the Jaffrabad road block case (a sit-in protest). Later, she was also charged with the UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act). She spent over two months in jail before being released on June 24, after her fourth bail application.

Despite applying for bail multiple times in her 75-day ordeal on account of her pregnancy and her increased risk to Covid-19, she was denied each time. Her third bail application was rejected because the judge ruled, “When you choose to play with embers, you cannot blame the wind to have carried the spark a bit too far and spread the fire.”

On the other hand, Manish Sirohi, a man held for supplying weapons to mobs during the Delhi riots, was granted bail considering “the fact that spread of COVID-19 pandemic is on high rise and there is always a risk of the applicant being infected with the said virus in case he is left to be confined in jail.”

Arre, hypocrisy ki be seema hoti hai!

Similarly, while Indians publicly mourned the human and animal lives lost in the Australian bushfires last year, far too many laughter emojis were seen all over Indian Facebook when the news of a plane crash in Pakistan came in just days before Eid.

Anguished by this appalling antipathy, my friend Murtaza, a young Pakistani civil servant wrote:-

“Aik hi kashti hai, ek hi samandar

Ek hi maazi, haal, bhavishya

Ek hi maslay, saanjhay dukh hain

Phir hinsa, nafrat, daridrata kyun hai?

Kahan hain aman aur usool ke samarthak?

Kahan hain dil ki baat karnay walay?

Kahan hain mulk aur nasl se pehle

Banday to insaan kehne walay?”

(“We have but one boat and one ocean

A common yesterday, today, and tomorrow

And the same hurts and cruelties of life,

Then why this violence, this hatred, this sorrow?

Where are our pacifists and moralists?

Where are those who talk of love?

And where are those who, before color and creed,

see a fellow person in every human being?”)

His words cut me deep and not just because they are so raw. The reflection of the truth in a friend’s mirror is often sharper than the one in our own.

While hashtags rolled in from Indian netizens for George Floyd, hardly anyone even remembers the name of the Amroha youth who was killed last month. You read his name at the beginning of this article.

Do even you remember it?