Years ago, I wrote a newspaper article on certain wrongdoings in Bengal. A former student now working in another state mailed me: “Sir, why are you writing about this? There’s far worse happening where I live, but the people don’t air such matters in public. Rather, they invent nice things to say. You’re just giving Bengal a bad name.”
She had a point. I know quite well that the grass across the fence is often greyer rather than greener, that appalling things happen there which we in Bengal do not suffer and may not even imagine. I seldom write about them for two reasons. First, I do not know about them in detail. Second, they do not concern me so closely. There might also be a schadenfreude factor: I would like to think we are better off than others, and feel let down when it is not so.
It should be a good and reasonable defence to say, ‘There might be worse things happening elsewhere, but I am focusing on my city/state/country because that’s where I live. Let people in other places voice their own grievances.’ True, they often cannot do so: for fear of persecution, from lack of a forum, or from sheer indifference or resignation. That in itself makes them worse off, but their plight finds little or no public outlet. True democracy (as opposed to the periodic staging of elections) allows free speech, and thus criticism and protest. Hence the citizens appear worse off than those under oppressive regimes, while the reverse is the truth.
It may thus seem a good idea to forgo or even suppress protest and criticism. But here again, the reverse is the truth, as silence would weaken the democratic structure and thus the actual condition of society. By desisting from complaint, we end up having more to complain about. That seems a bad bargain.
Yet we still think of doing so because we have moved almost totally from a guilt culture to a shame culture. We are not perturbed by the actual wrongs we commit or the loss and suffering they entail, but about what people think or say. In other words, we are not bothered by misgovernance but by bad publicity.
Put that way, it is a scenario we recognize all too well. But that is not all. A greater danger is that the publicity creates its own unreal reality, what we have come to call post-truth. We do not go by experience or substantive report but by what we are told or not told, which in turn is shaped by what we want to be told. The complicit mass media and unchecked social media build these kingdoms in the clouds, so much more alluring than ground realities.
The effect is aggravated by another prominent feature of our democracy. It is a feature only possible in democracies, however flawed. To see this trait in full bloom, we must indulge our masochism by sitting through what our news channels call debates. In other countries, expert commentators, not politicians, are called to discuss public issues. In India, the core panel invariably represents the chief political parties. When at all audible above the din, these adversaries all sing the same tune: my party X might be doing these dreadful things just now (hence they are no longer dreadful), but did party Y not do the same (or something vaguely similar) in its day? Never mind that X came to power promising to undo all the wrongs perpetrated by Y. They are utterly ecumenical in defending their misdeeds.
The nation does not exist for these speakers. They are addressing one another, not the body of citizens. If they can silence their political opponents (thus hopefully cornering their votes), what the common citizen, member of no political party, thinks or suffers is of no consequence. As we are realizing more and more, here lies the degeneration of our electoral democracy. Public issues have dwindled to irrelevance insofar as they actually concern the public. They have become pretexts for the shadow-play of politicians thumbing their noses at one another. Facts are superfluous. Governance lies in the art of concocting fictions, partly by suppressing inconvenient truths.
Shocking and pernicious events abound in Bengal. There are parallels in most states of the Union. In one, a rape survivor had to seek justice by threatening to immolate herself before the chief minister’s office. In several states, rape survivors were left helpless and wandering on the streets or even filmed by passers-by. There have been at least two notorious state-wide networks of corruption in public appointments. Few Indian states are entirely free of malfeasance in hiring schoolteachers. Many states blithely deprive malnourished children of the already meagre rations for mid-day meals. As for general silence on burning issues by the highest authorities — did someone whisper the name Manipur?
None of these provides the slightest pretext for misdoings in Bengal. On the contrary, we must deplore the fact that we have joined the league. At the same time, we should not mortify ourselves by imagining Bengal to be unique in this respect, or blindly accept claims of the alleged superiority of other states. But then again, there are indeed things that other states do better: no parochial pride or political stake should prevent us from emulating them.
No state is an island. A divisive agenda common to all political parties is to set one state against another, depending on who rules them. All Indian citizens share a common pool of grievances and deprivations. What happens in one state is generally a mutant of what happens in another, or might happen at any time. The schadenfreude I mentioned is not only ignoble but unjustifiable.
We can entrust but not outsource governance to political parties. To exchange one clutch of rulers for another, as though signing a contract with a new vendor, solves no problems. Will the day ever come when we can truly say we are our own rulers?
Sukanta Chaudhuri is Professor Emeritus, Jadavpur University
