The convenient case of our long-distance solidarities

We live in a subcontinent where the ideas of home and roots are being constantly challenged by a minority who look upon these things as a hindrance to their upward mobility and lifestyle choices. They are being able to mount a challenge because of their disproportionate over-representation among the rich, the powerful, the Anglophone and the connected — all of which amount to their casting a long-shadow in the world of urban opinion-making and general policy. They increasingly dominate in setting the goal-posts of aspiration and are able to talk down to the rooted majority without having a stake in anything. That translates into having a superficial stake in everything. Here I describe the ‘saving’ type.

It wasn’t too long ago that ‘Saving tigers’ became all the rage among ‘them’ – ‘them’ being the Anglophone sliver of society. The tiger’s principal subcontinental habitat is the Sundarbans. In all this love of tigers, how much does the peoples and locale and cultures and life and the feel of the Sundarbans figure? Apparently, not much. Because, on 9th December 2014, there was a huge oil-spill at the Sela river of Sundarbans. This released 3,50,000 litres of oil into the downstream rivers and water channels and everything that is connected to them, touched by them, lives in them, on them, by them and dependent on them. But alas, there was little sympathy or even awareness on the most part among the very vocal and public ‘Save the tiger’ Facebook cover-photo changers and others. They had moved on to the latest ‘saving’ stance. Members of the species who had become one with the tiger, have moved on to another ‘issue’, another ‘saving’ act, another bout of rootless global awareness. In the meantime, those in the Sundarbans also know it by another name — it’s called home. They don’t exactly ‘explore the exotic’, neither do they describe themselves using that pathetically vacuous giveaway called ‘interested in other cultures’. The Sundarbans of ‘Save the Tigers’ origin is a make-believe idea that was the flavour of the week in the make-believe world of the self-certified righteous Anglophone brown ones. Elite rootlessness has its advantages.

But there is something more to it. It has to do with warped ‘White’-love. When the BP oil-spill happened near Florida, there were squeaks of concern from this class. When I used to live near Boston, a small-town by subcontinent standards, a city-wide chase for two young suspected terrorists happened. This spawned a lot of solidarity with Boston. This is the brown class that is now riled up about racist police violence against black people in the United States (Eric Garner #icantbreathe). This is the same class that is interested in an armed hostage-taking crisis in Australia and the Muslim-friendly concerns of a section of the resident population (Sydney #illridewithyou). Very worthwhile human causes indeed. But there are other humans too. Every brown city has frequently had unjust police shoot-outs against the downtrodden. In this cold winter in Delhi, more than 30 slum homes were demolished in Wazirpur of Delhi. Remember Golibar? Online is one thing, but this real. They even have to march. As friend Uday Chandra bitingly puts it, ‘‘Are we really going to march with our servants? We can't even kiss them and they don't get our jokes in English.’ Even in cybersphere, with only so much ‘bandwidth’, what one choses to engage with, is a political choice. Also, most practitioners of long-distance solidarity are typically out of depth when they step out into the real brown world that’s ‘exasperating’ except when they talk to ones belonging to the nodding, clicking, liking set.

The author is a commentator on politics and culture