Personalising tragedy: When does an event touch us?

When does an event touch someone, I mean really touch one, beyond the need to cluck one’s self out of feeling it? When do we see something as ours and not of the other? Who is the other? Does the concept change depending on expedience? On comfort? On avoiding the need for action or involvement?

You see an accident on the road. Within minutes a crowd has gathered. A man has been knocked down and is bleeding. Do you remain a spectator or do you try and call 108? Will you try and clear the crowd so that he can breathe? Will you try and nab the offending vehicle or watch the tamasha?

If a girl is being molested on the road? If she is “scantily” dressed or in a burkha? If she looks educated or not? Will you stick your neck out ever? And have you analysed when that would be?

I ask all these questions on the lack of civil society response to the hooch tragedy. Yes, as usual the NGOs are gathering and writing protest letters. They are organising a march for July 14 and having meetings and sending declarations and charters of demands to the chief minister.

But what about you? Have you abdicated all responsibility to the world around you till something happens to you or yours? And what is “yours”? Your community? Another person from the same profession? Your gotra or family? Your son or daughter?

Would we, the educated, newspaper reading - even more superior and more educated, English newspaper reading - public have been more agitated if Scotch-drinking people would have died? Do we consider hooch-drinking people as another class, the kind that are lazy, have nothing to do, don’t want to work and deserve what they get?

When faced with the question of why I do not consider Naxals as criminals to be shot dead without mercy, my response is the same as it is when the question is about eradicating terrorism from the world. Both are a reaction to and directly a growth of societal systems that are unjust, uncaring, selfish and skewed towards the rich and the middle class. Both are cries of help turned into frustration and then anger. And successful.

Those to whom we turned a deaf ear when they begged for opportunities to gain a living, when they cried because their children went to school but were taught nothing, begged when corrupt officials or landed gentry jiggled the papers and left them landless, suddenly take on centrestage when they fire at us, when they throw bombs. Finally we take notice.

Are the poor Dalits who drank themselves to death any different? Have we asked what in our society leads them to such unhappiness and desperation that they can only survive by drinking and forgetting? Why do stressed businessmen drink so much? The only difference is that the Dalits could only afford the killer hooch.

And what about the personal tragedies that2x2 lie behind the numbers? Menaben, mother of two girls, now a widow, who will surely be thrown out of her in-laws’ home? How will she survive? By becoming a sex worker to feed the girls? Or by turning her girls into another statistic, that of child labour? Or Hiralben, who lost her husband and son, and has nearly lost her mind? Will she keep her low-paying, exploitative AMC job as a sweeper?

It’s time to think beyond the platitudes. Or the tragedies will come closer and closer home. And then there will not be time to think, for any of us.