Comment

As human beings who live in society there is a sort of dishonesty that is inherent in our dealings with each other. It is often innocuous and sometimes kind.

A person whom you think is not very attractive asks you how they look. It may be a lie, but you are most likely to say they look fine. Why hurt with an unnecessary truth?

Your boss asks for your opinion on his tie. It is hideous. You don’t say so. Discretion is the better part of valour.

By extension, Pakistan comes to play cricket in India and we go out of our way to be good hosts and they to be good guests. We do not look at each other and bring up Kargil, 1971, 1965, Partition.

Although there have been occasional lapses in good manners, we endeavour to be polite. Another word for lies.

We try not to be like Basil Fawlty in the BBC TV series Fawlty Towers who, when Germans came to stay at his hotel, made every possible faux pas he could about Germany and the Second World War.

Our country was divided on the lines of religion, but we do not blame Pakistan. We blame India’s Muslims.

The Bharatiya Janata Party when it was in power went out of its way to be as nice to Pakistan as it could — friendship buses, visits, trains, whatnot while singing quite another tune at home on Indian Muslims.

Indian Muslims therefore do not deserve the same courtesy as Pakistan’s Muslims, just as Andrew Symonds — being black — did not deserve the same courtesy as white cricketers or the Pakistan cricket team.

This is a strange situation where compassion, sympathy, good manners or even, and this is most important, understanding of the basics of a civil society and a democracy are forgotten when it comes to some sections of Indian society.

Dalits, Tribals, OBCs and our religious minorities all fail meet the criteria that affords them decent behaviour from the rest of us.

Thus, the former Kolkata Police Commissioner Prasun Mukherjee tried to brazen out the accusations that his department interfered in the marriage of Rizwanur Rehman to Priyanka Todi.

The Hindu Marwari father was possibly outraged that his daughter had married a Muslim. The police stepped in to help.

The initial excuse was that there was a great financial gap between the two which the Kolkata police tried to position as being against the law.

Rich girls cannot, it seems, marry poor boys. Yet, is there anyone in this country who doubts that this is a Hindu-Muslim issue? Dalit-upper caste marriages also meet similar anger.

And so we reach the reactions to the claims made by rioters in Gujarat in 2002 that they were assisted by or acted with the encouragement of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

As a journalist who lived in Gujarat in 2002, I — with many others — saw enough evidence of official complicity in the rioting. However, the personal role of the chief
minister is a trickier issue to prove.

The Gujarat riots should not become just an occasion to either demonise or idolise Modi. That diminishes the real problem — which is the same as that of Rizwanur.

The police and the state machinery cannot act on the behalf of private citizens or politicians to the extent that they undermine the tenets of governance.

Gujarat failed in 2002 as West Bengal has done in 2007, with Nandigram and Rizwanur.

But for civil society, any discussion on these subjects becomes another chance to display lack of decency.

The pain of the victim — especially if he is a Muslim or a Dalit — is usually forgotten in some irrational diatribe about how ‘secularists’ did not mention some other crime in the same breath.

The anti-reservation protests by doctors and medical students last year showed a similar level of viciousness against backward castes.

The transgressions of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati attract a little extra smirking — because she’s a Dalit? Some serious social engineering it seems is really required.

Email: b_ranjona@dnaindia.net