What the situation is, 65 years after independence.
· 20 crore
Indians live without adequate food
· Eight
thousand die every day of starvation
· 2 crore
children don’t go to school
· 20 crore
Indians are illiterate
· 43% children
suffer from malnutrition
· 66 crore
Indians don’t have access to hygienic sanitation
· India ranks
66th (Pakistan is 61) on the international hunger index
· India ranks
132nd among 142 countries in terms of developmental index
These are numbers from a bunch of information links doing
the rounds online. While they may not be exactly accurate, (at least, I am not
sure whether they are) they are pretty close to the real situation overall. Not
much cause to celebrate, if you ask me. Add to that India’s “record” showing at
the London Olympics 2012, with 6 whole medals, not one of them gold, and I
really don’t think there’s much to CELEBRATE right now.
And then there’s the madness going on all over the country
with thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of people FROM the seven north
eastern states fleeing their places of residence all over India because
they no longer feel safe in those places. And why did I just put the FROM in
all caps?? Because many of them have been living in those places of education,
work, residence, for years, decades even. Yet, one whiff of trouble in some far
corner of the country, and they are being attacked, harassed, and driven out to
go BACK to this place they are supposed to belong to. Rumours are flying,
threats being issued and realized, attacks made, and a large segment of Indians
are feeling threatened within the
sovereign territory of India. And news channels and papers are playing up the
immigrant situation and the harassment of immigrants. (are these people
immigrants in their own country? By what definition? What law?)
It began as a riot/ethnic clashes in certain areas of Assam
primarily between illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and the resident farmers.
The trouble was over rights to the land, and the attempt to prevent
sneak-over-the-border-in-the-night people from encroaching on it. As is the
nature of such conflicts, things got bigger and more complicated as it was
allowed to go on for longer (although local Muslims are still pretty happy
there, and safe), and since the news channels didn’t bother to even try to put
anything other than a religious/communal colouring on it, this territorial,
anti illegal alien clash began to be seen as another of the Hindu-Muslim riots
that we are getting more and more used to. That’s new, although riots in
themselves are not. What is really new this time, the year of the 65th
anniversary of our becoming a nation, is the backlash against people seen to be
from the “north east” in far flung parts of the country -- parts that have
nothing to do with Assam, and face no added pressure from the refugee movement
generated by the clashes.
From flash riots in Mumbai, to threats and rumours in Pune,
Bangalore, and more, the overall perceived threat level has risen sharply,
especially in places with a considerable presence of students and workers from
the north eastern states. People are leaving in droves, with something like
9700 tickets to Guwahati booked in a single day from a single station, and four
extra trains having to be made available to accommodate the huge waves of
people leaving from Bangalore on a that ONE day. So, what’s really going on
here? Does a bunch of mixed ethnic, mixed community hooligans (the bunch
arrested in Bangalore for rumour mongering etc include Hindus and Christians)
really care so much about the trouble in Assam? Are they so emotionally
invested in, and swayed by, the people rendered homeless in Assam that they
have to avenge them by harassing, assaulting, and killing people from Manipur,
Nagaland, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Assam, Tripura, and West
Bengal?
What it is, is a bunch of people making a noise, lashing
out, creating trouble, for reasons and motives of their own. From chauvinistic
political parties looking to strengthen their communal vote bases, to ruffians
looking for any excuse to indulge in a little vandalism, reasons and motives
are many and varied. What concerns me however, really worries me, is how easy
it seems to have become to drive a large number of people out of your city,
area, state on the pretext that they don’t belong. I am concerned because, this
has a lot to do with people like me. As I blogged in January 2010 in SporadicDiaspora (premonition? Foreshadowing?), I belong to the increasingly larger
segment of the population who are not really FROM anywhere. Of course, this is
a concept most Indians don’t seem to get. So, for me there was never a question
of going BACK to some safe place where I belong.
As populations grow and resources become strained, such
things are only going to get more common. The refrains of “go back to where you
belong” will continue to get louder as the years roll by, as they have in the
last few decades, posing a massive problem for me and my ilk. I don’t BELONG.
Having lived in some six different states till date, I have no domicile, no
hometown. As for Bengal, I have no roots there, I don’t have a mental emotional
connection there, and I don’t belong there. Yet, I have recently acquired a
flat in Kolkata, a sort of roof over the head arrangement, even though it is no
secret how much I have come to dislike the place over the last few years. A
childhood friend, someone I have known for the last 36 years, and who is in
kind of the same predicament, was fantasizing last week about selling up
Kolkata flats when we are older, and moving back to Dehradun, where we were
born, to live out our retirements.
While that sounds unbelievably lovely, and nostalgia
inducing, I realize it is never gonna happen. As I was explaining to my chuddy
buddy, no matter how much we feel like we are not REALLY Bengali, no matter how much more
comfortable we are outside Bengal as opposed to in Kolkata, no matter how much
Doon, or Pune, feels like home, like where the soul belongs, for the “other” we
will always remain outsiders. People will always ask “are you a local?” and
mean “are you Garhwali/Maharashtrian?” they will always ask “where are you
“originally” from?”, leaving you speechless, and when push comes to shove, they
will – nicely or not so nicely – ask you to leave. It happened and continues to
happen in many states, and is only getting worse. The Bengalis I know who chose
to remain in Dehradun after their retirement are already facing problems, and
they belong to my parents’ generation. How much worse are things going to get
by the time we are ready to retire? In Maharashtra too, the erstwhile muted
murmurs of the “Maharashtra for Marathi manoos” political language have been
getting louder over the last decade. As the focus shifts from Biharis to the
North Easterners, I can only wonder how long before it shifts again…to the
Bengali.
And if it does, as it eventually will, where do I go? So, I
have that little roof over the head insurance in the land that I feel no
belonging in, in case I have to leave all the lands I feel connected to, in
case it becomes impossible for me, or my child, to live threat free, safe lives
in all the places I would rather live in. what makes me really sad, angry,
disillusioned, disgusted, and depressed is to see this drama unfold each
morning on the news, where on the 65th anniversary of the formation of a nation
people of the nation are not free to live in their choice of location in it. To
see that in this free land, this secular democracy, a segment of its own
citizens is being called “immigrant”, to see that they are being driven to drop
educations, livelihoods, settled lives to go BACK to a state where they
supposedly BELONG, makes me fear for my future and that of my child outside the
mythical land of my belonging.
