Comment

“Such small incidents keep happening”, said Shivpal Yadav, PWD minister in the UP government and brother of Mulayam Yadav. “Such small and routine incidents happen.” Thirty-eight children missing in less than three years, at least 22 of them sexually abused and murdered… This is routine? Uttar Pradesh must be far more gone than any of us suspected.

When there is a national uproar over his remarks, the minister will no doubt say that he was misquoted. But isn’t it astonishing that he even thought it in the first place?
Or is it really astonishing? Wasn’t the minister, in his insensitive way, giving uncouth expression to a depressing truth? What sickens us about the Noida case is the grisly details of innocence abused, of children sexually assaulted, killed and mutilated (and the latest horror, of being cannibalised). But set aside these hideous details for a moment, and the grotesque truth dawns upon you: that this is the reality of a village in our country, that this is the ordinary, business-as-usual, daily life of the poor in 21st century rural India.

The main protagonist of the Noida murders is Moninder Singh Pandher, a well-educated, well to-do industrialist. The minor protagonist is Surendra Kohli, his cook. Pandher asks Kohli to procure women for him. Kohli complies. Pandher asks Kohli to abduct children for him. Kohli complies. The first is not unusual; the second is. But, seemingly, at no point does Kohli protest. The children abducted, abused and murdered are, after all, of Kohli’s background; if it had ever come to that particular crunch, Kohli might have stood up for his caste, but he does not even demur on behalf of his economic class. In fact, he actively and, later, enthusiastically participates in the grisly rituals.
Then there is police inaction. Years of experience have taught us not to be surprised that for the upholders of the law the poor are less than equal. But even by these cynical standards, doing nothing about 38 missing children can only be called shocking. The fact that the police do not even bother to register an FIR when poor people are complainants, isn’t news; yet, the sheer scale of their indifference in this case goes well beyond cynicism. Contrast this with the national furore that erupted when the son of an IT company’s CEO was kidnapped from Delhi a month ago. In that case, the cops went into overdrive, a veritable frenzy of action. If you wanted to quantify human misery and formulated the equation: one rich child is equal to 38 poor children, you would be wrong, simply because the 38 children weren’t even a blip on the police radar.

If the police didn’t spring into action, neither did the National Commission for Women. This body got involved when the father of a ten year old reported that his daughter had gone missing in August 2005. The NCW investigated and found that “about half a dozen girls had gone missing over two months”. What did the NCW do? It “shot off a letter” to the UP authorities and sent a reminder in November, when no action was taken. That was the extent of the NCW’s action. As for the authorities, the UP government’s Principal Secretary (Home) had this to say: “If NCW wrote a letter, what’s new in it? Everyone knew that children had gone missing.”

There’s one more area of startling neglect. We know from experience that the smell of one dead animal — even one small dead animal — becomes, in time, unbearable. How was it that so many dead bodies around Pandher’s house didn’t raise an unbearable stench? The answer to that is simple: the nallah behind the house in which the bodies were thrown hasn’t been cleaned since 1994. There must be an all-pervasive, all-the-time stink anyway, so who would notice if it got worse?

Callous, cynical, cruel… Use all the C-words you like, but none of this matches up to the final horror of it all. Which is the villagers’ own apathy. Would you or I so submissively accept the fact that our children had disappeared? Wouldn’t we be more like the Delhi father, moving heaven and earth to get them back?

That, really, is the Noida case’s final tragedy. Centuries of poverty, plus the modern Indian state’s neglect, have deprived the poor of the knowledge that they have rights, too; have deprived the poor also of any sense of outrage. They accept whatever is given to them; they accept whatever comes their way.

In a few years, the horrors of Noida will fade away. What won’t go away is the very silent majority’s very resigned acceptance of its fate.