Of the most recent incidents to happen in this crazy world of ours, the most incomprehensible for me was the suicide by a Dalit boy. Not the suicide, because what had happened to him would have left him hurting badly. He was invited to a birthday party, but there he was stripped, then urinated upon, and let go. Only for him to find that the whole episode had been filmed and then posted on the internet, where it had gone viral. He then committed suicide.
I’m not saying he was justified. But he was only 17. At that age, things are important. One doesn’t know if one can recover from the effect of having the rest of one’s life ruined by a pimple appearing in too prominent a spot on one’s face on the wrong day, let alone being held up to ridicule for all times to come. And that’s the problem with social media. You can never really live it down. I don’t agree, but it might seem better to die.
But what I really can’t understand is the fellow who did the filming. Did he just let the scene go with the flow, or did he give any directions? And how comfortable were those doing the urinating with exposing themselves on camera? This incident was perhaps illustrative of the poverty of imagination in Basti. And it’s not as if this was caste violence. The four incontinent young men who couldn’t wait long enough to go to the john, but had to do their business on camera, were also Dalits, and had it in for the boy for personal reasons.
I mean, it’s not as if that was the only incident. A 13-year-old was killed after being gangraped. A BJP leader is among the accused, though the party has said it had thrown him out. Also among the accused is a seven-year-old. Him I would like to meet. Or rather the Muharrar who wrote the FIR nominating him.
Meanwhile, a junior engineer of the Electricity Department after a woman complained that he had raped her after spiking her drink when he visited her to check her electricity meter, after she had complained it was faulty. She got the incident on CCTV camera. What is it in Basti with filming? At least no one alleges the engineer was seven.
Basti seems to be where it’s at. In an accident in Basti city, a Hindu cook was hit and killed by a BMW driven by Hani, known as Azmatullah, the son of a local BJP leader, Hamidullah. So far, the party has bot disowned him. There is no film of the incident, but clearly, the BJP would feel vindicated, showing how Muslims are killing Hindus, even when they are joining the BJP.
Minorities are having a hard time. Not only is there Dalit-on-Dalit violence in Basti, but the only Sikh to be Indian PM, Dr Manmohan Singh, passed away. He was also the only man born in Chakwal district ever to become PM. Of course, he had thought he was from Attock district, but a 1981 upgradation muddied the waters. Actually, he was the only Indian PM born in Pakistan, unless you want to count Girdhari Lal Nanda, who had been born in Sialkot, and who was acting PM for a matter of days after Nehru (1964) and Shastri (1965) died in office.
Pakistan has also had just two PMs born in India: Liaquat Ali Khan, who was born in Karnal, and Ch Muhammmad Ali, in Jullunder. I suppose it won’t ever happen now, for those Pakistanis born in India or Indians born in Pakistan, who migrated in 1947, are now in their late 70s or more, and as time passes, will no longer be in politics.
It wasn’t just the Sikhs. The Parsis also lost one of their brightest stars, Bapsi Sidhwa. She was a Pakistani, and wrote one of the most moving novels of the Partition, The Ice Candy Man. And it was a Sikh who wrote another novel chronicling that harrowing time, Train to Pakistan. Neither Hindu nor Muslim have tackled that massive theme in English though. A number of Englishmen have attempted that theme, though. Not entirely cultural appropriation, though. Everyone is involved in the Partition: Muslims, Hindus, Parsis, Sikhs. Maybe a Congolese writer should attempt it. He should be neutral.
Some things never change though, such as winter rains. We’ve had some at last, which deals with the problem of smog. Another smog that might be tickled is the political instability burdening the country. There are PTI-government talks, and 85 of those accused in the May 9 attacks have been sentenced.
