Rage/Rape

I am sitting in the calm, pristine Peterhouse Library at the University of Cambridge, shaking with rage; a sentiment that is completely at odds with my serene environment. I have been reading about the Kathua rape and murder case for the past hour, obsessively apprising myself of each gory detail that makes what happened to an unfortunate eight year old emblematic of EVERY single thing that is wrong with India. Let’s look at the levels of administrative and structural complicity which allowed this to happen:

Two police officers are among the accused. Two state ministers have openly supported the accused. These criminals were emboldened by the Hindutva agenda of the ruling party, the BJP. The BJP’s silence on the issue/refusal to acknowledge it’s Frankenstein moment. The Prime Minister’s generic, evasive condemnation after days of mounting pressure to speak up.

It’s hard to forget the deeply disturbing nature of this crime and these facts continue to haunt me:

That the victim was a mere eight year old child. That she was kidnapped, beaten, raped and murdered in a place of worship. That the rape and murder was a symbolic gesture meant to scare and threaten Muslims of the area. That a solidarity march was carried out in support of the accused. That despite widespread condemnation and protests, there is a vocal section of the population that refuses to acknowledge the gravity of the situation, questions the “politicisation” of an inherently political crime. That India is a country where law and order flagrantly violated with pride. That India is a country where rape is a political tool, where women’s bodies are repositories of communal honour. That the value of human life is so cheap in my country that every day in its dark corners minorities are brutalised, killed, forgotten and life goes on because what else can even be done?

I am reading Ismat Chughtai for my dissertation. She describes the dying vestiges of North Indian Muslim culture with so much affection, a painstaking love for detail that transcends the limits of the written word and carries me somewhere else; far away from sedate, picture perfect Cambridge to my messy, beautiful homeland. I didn’t think of myself as particularly Indian before I arrived in the UK. Yet, in conversations, I can’t help but explain with a burst of enthusiasm the eccentricities that make my country the weird, wonderful place it is. Suddenly, there is a whole new facet to my identity that has revealed itself. Friends and acquaintances remark on how Indian I am, as though overwhelmed by my tropical exoticism. Almost every other day I shake my head in amusement at the whiteness (and I use this word with a fair bit of fondness here) of my fellow students, at how my life here seems something out of some sitcom on the international channel I would watch in the comfort of my living room in Ranchi, a small town in eastern India. Sometimes, I want to turn around and tell them that, “I am Indian. Because obviously, I am. What else would you expect me to be?” and if that is somehow unsettling maybe they should investigate why they feel that way.

I have been away from India for a little over six months, and have on occasion, experienced what homesickness truly feels like. I spent three years of undergraduate study in a city far away from my hometown with relative ease. Why was master’s so different? Perhaps because the yearning I felt this time around was not just for the people who make home what it is, but for a country. I sound trite, but how does one forget the madness of India’s streets, the disarming informality of its people or the smell of the wet earth after the monsoon’s first showers?

How does one reconcile the love they harbour for India’s warmth with the fundamental rot that plagues its moral conscience? Societal apathy, political vitriol, abhorrent law and order situation, poverty, corruption…the list doesn’t end. Where does my responsibility lie as a privileged, educated Indian with some semblance of values and empathy? Fight or flight? Should minorities just bow out gracefully and realise our time is up in India?

And where exactly do Indian Muslims actually belong? Does a new India now hope to relegate our existence to history books? Does the political establishment care about us anymore? As recent trends in electoral politics have shown, the political class has realised that the Muslim vote is rudimentary to power. Modi’s Hindutva agenda has united Hindus despite caste divisions at an unprecedented scale and mobilised rabid religious polarisation. In this narrative, the existence of Muslims is tokenism at best, a testament to the benevolence of Modi ji and his compatriots. At its worst, Muslims are vermin who must be stamped out, driven away from this pure land and taught a lesson. It doesn’t matter if they are grown men or eight year old girls.

A friend and I recently visited the Topography of Terror Museum in Berlin. We came across photographic exhibitions showcasing the lynchings of Jewish people on the streets of Germany during Nazi rule. The glee evident on those people’s faces in the photographs shows just how utterly drunk they were on genocide. It all felt terrifyingly familiar.