Tuesday 26 July 2016

Macho Ado About Cow

BJP supporter turned detractor Arun Shourie recently described the current NDA government as UPA government plus cow. And to prove him right the cow vigilantes are burning gallons of midnight oil, lying in wait at unearthly hours in many highways to pounce upon those transporting cattle. Thanks to conniving police force and an apathetic (and sometimes even proactive) ruling class they have been having a free run in most parts of the cow belt.

Having got away with Dadri and many other such attacks, the impact is now being felt in cattle and leather trade. It has begun to falter, thanks to the fear factor generated by the gau rakshaks. Kolhapuri chappal industry is currently in doldrums and even the prices of cricket balls have shot up as cow hide is hard to come by and manufacturers have been forced to go on a 'leather hunt'.

Emboldened by these successes, the hubris of gau rakshaks got better of them when they posted a video of few Dalit people in the prime minister's home state Gujarat getting beaten up with iron rods for skinning a dead cattle. They thought the grisly spectacle, which happened on July 11, would send chills down the spines of people and quite literally 'cow them down'. 

As they wished the video did go viral, thanks to their social media propaganda machinery, but the subsequent events did not pan out as they would have thought of. They underestimated the penetration of the internet, especially the mobile internet in our society. They failed to realise the access it had among the Dalits, especially their opinion leaders, and the rest they say is history.

Even the government and its intelligence machinery, which had acted with alacrity in banning WhatsApp and internet during the Patel quota agitation, failed to read this smouldering discontent on the cyber space. The administration woke up only on July 18, when in Surendranagar district a group of Dalits dumped cow carcasses at the District Collector’s office.

This dramatic Boston Tea party type incident also knocked mainstream media out of its page 3 obsessed stupour, as it provided a good potential for a colourful copy and package! When the clubbing of Dalits happened on July 11, they had behaved as if it was happening in some other planet.  

According to a Scroll report the Surendranagar march was organised by two social workers Nathubhai Parmar and Maheshbhai Rathod and a businessman Hirabhai Chawda, who trades in the by-products of dead cows. They went from village to village showing the infamous video on a laptop. They also used WhatsApp, Facebook and file sharing apps to spread the video and exhorted the villagers to come out and fight.

To drive home their point the Dalits also decided not to pick up dead cows on the street. This was indeed a rude jolt to a society which pays scant regards to dignity of labour.

Having caught the imagination of the country, leaders of various political hues, many of them with dubious credentials, are trying to court the Dalits of Gujarat. One just hopes the movement sustains itself for a long time and does not fizzle out or even worse get co-opted by some opportunistic groups.

Also Read: Bangalore Beat

Monday 11 July 2016

Two Deaths and Twitter Hashtag Jousts

The blood spattered platform of a Chennai suburban railway station and a grainy footage of a backpacker captured by a CCTV camera located outside the station made for a disturbing viewing on prime time television. It brought back the memories of a similarly spooky footage of a murderous attack on a woman in an ATM kiosk in Bangalore few years ago. And for the record that guy is still on the loose.

In case of Chennai killing, even before the police could pick up the pieces or one could say 'preliminary investigation', the Twitterati was out there with long knives tipped with hashtags and their 140-character barrage only reflected their prejudices, fears and anxieties, with not even an iota of truth. Looks like the rumour mills of yesteryears have logged on to information superhighway and overrun social media platforms such as Twitter and WhatsApp. 

Of the two schools of thought that enjoyed high bandwidth, the first one was that the killer was a Muslim and most likely of an ISIS kind. They reasoned that such cruelty can be done only by those brainwashed by Baghdadi and his minions. They maintained that police and media already knew it but were maintaining a criminal silence over the issue.

A different shade of the similar opinion was that it was the handiwork of love jihad guys. They opined that the victim had refused to fall for their guiles and hence the murder happened. The bottomline was that the killer was from 'other' community and all are preying on Hindu girls, especially the upper caste (higher genetics) ones.

Both the theories gained lots of traction in the social media with celebrities like singer Abhijeet and Tamil actor Y G Mahendran too joining the bandwagon. The former even got into a below the belt hashtag joust with a woman journalist and even has a police case against him. 

The other dominant school of thought has to do more with cultural conditioning than politics. The deeply rooted patriarchy and a haseena maan jayegi mindset have left their thinking totally warped. A girl's consent hardly matters and her 'no' is yes.

With this sense of well entrenched entitlement many wrote that the girl must have 'spoiled' his life by rejecting him or she 'asked for it'. For such guys even stalking or threatening their object of desire is absolutely kosher - a belief that gets reinforced in our films, irrespective of language. And Tamil box office has made a huge fortune out of films related to stalking.

Around eight days after Swathi killing there was a road accident in Chennai, caused by a drunk woman Aishwarya Wilton and it was god send for the troll crowd. She was driving a high end Audi car in top speed and mowed down a pedestrian. Drunk woman from upper crust of the society causing an accident, and the victim a poor daily wage earner - was quite a heady mix for them.

Immediately they started linking it with Swathi murder, saying if the photo of the killer of a 'rich' girl can be splashed on newspapers, Aishwarya's photo should also be shown and paraded in front of TV cameras. They accused media and police of double standards saying female accused were being treated with kid gloves and called for 'level playing field'.

Aishwarya's crime is serious and calls for strict punishment according to law (though I have some scepticism considering how Salman Khan hit-and-run case turned out). But to equate it with a pre-meditated cold blooded murder is taking things a bit too far. The underlying unsettling factor for the troll crowd is the changing social mores of women partying and getting drunk!

Also Read: Bangalore Beat