The outrage over Malwani students stripped and made to stand outside class

Last week, in Mumbai’s Malwani area, two teachers of a children’s tutorial class allegedly forced two children of Class II and III to strip and stand naked outside class. They hadn’t completed their homework, “hence” this perverted “punishment”. We have adults in our midst who think they have the power to forcibly get children to strip, which reveals the naked power used on the vulnerable. The tutorial owner has claimed that the children’s parents were present and the stripping was done on their insistence. This is not a one-off incident. Some parents are known to inflict sadist, perverted and dehumanising “punishment” on their children. They think that children can be mistreated at will, like private property. Such parents probably nurture deep sicknesses of their own — the hapless and vulnerable children being victims of their failure to come to terms with their own psychological problems. Stripping also has social sanction. In the subcontinent, almost everyday many people are forcibly stripped naked by superior or collective force or threat. A tiny minority of these cases make it to the so-called public domain to provoke outrage. Many of those who may be outraged at one case of stripping may be found cheer-leading stripping or sadist sexual violence on other people in other circumstances, based on their conceptions of who deserve to be dehumanized. There are those with rage issues and then there is outrage at injustice. Many have learned to couch the former under the latter’s cloak.

The Malwani case was made public by a passerby who filmed the abused children standing naked and shared it on social media. The social sharing of the video did not prompt any citizen to file a complaint. Mumbai police filed a complaint on its own — a force some of whose members were and are involved in dealing with “under-age” boys and girls in ways that are sickening. All of this is truly part of Indian values — something that no respectable person should have anything to do with.

Nakedness per se doesn’t evoke the same kind of outrage. I’m not talking about the voluntary nakedness of well-off individuals but about near-nakedness or nakedness of the poor — children and adults. A nakedness that implicates the rest in being complicit in the poor being stripped of human dignity of which nakedness is one of the signs. That has been normalized. They are seen as less-humans or non-humans. When avant-garde urban radicals organise “Kiss of Love” public kissing gatherings in Kolkata as a spectacle, ostensibly to reclaim freedom in public space, we forget that lakhs have always kissed on Kolkata’s streets, in the “open”. Indeed they have made love there, had children there and died there. They exist beyond the purview of solidarity of radical urbanites or the moral outrage of values-mafia. Recently, my friend Adhiraj invited me to a Kolkata event that wanted to “take back the night”. Women’s safety in streets after dark was the laudable goal. When we reached, the assembly point was empty. We asked someone who actually lived on the street about the missing group. We were told that a group had assembled, shouted a few slogans, joked amongst themselves and went away. I don’t know whether this was our missing group. What I do know is that we know nothing about what the women who live on the streets after dark think of those who want to take back streets at night. Those who want to take back the night and folks like me who are in sympathy with such causes may not like what we hear about what they think of us, our spectacles, our taking-backs. Ignorance is safe. It can even be empowering.

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