It is a sign of the times that the news from Sitapur doesn’t make it to the front pages: twelve children have been mauled to death in the past week by packs of feral dogs. Parents have been told to escort their children to and from school – and, for good measure, schools have been closed until the dogs have been despatched. Meanwhile, please keep your kids from playing outside. Or whatever. The speculation is that the dogs have gone feral because the local slaughter house was shut down, in deference to the vociferous, and easily-hurt, sentiments of high-caste Hindus – thereby depriving the stray dogs of an important source of sustenance. And if they are forced to hunt for prey, why, children are easy prey.
Ironically enough, feral children have been a durable feature of the popular imagination universally: wolf children are standard, children are believed to have been reared by monkeys, by big cats even. As it happens, these stories – because they are just stories – are actually not about hunting and being hunted at all, but about caring, about nurturing across the species barrier. The helpless human infant – so runs the generous fantasy – arouses the maternal, caring instinct in supposedly “wild” creatures, and is only found years later, babbling incoherently in what is presumed to be the language of its adoptive family. The likely truth is actually sadder. More often than not, these are abandoned children, children who have been abandoned by their human families and left to fend for themselves because of disability, etc. The word “feral” acquires an interesting resonance in these stories – because of course it is the supposedly feral creatures who come out as kindly and caring; it is the humans who are negligent and cruel and, well, “beastly”.
Stray dogs are a common sight in Indian cities. Credit Reuters
Etymology, then. The word “feral” is derived from the Latin “ferus”, meaning “wild”. But there is something rather special in the way that the meaning of the word has evolved in English. So, in the phrase “gone feral”, there is a clear sense of something having regressed into barbarism and violence from a prior condition of domestication or civilisation. Thus, one cannot say of a tiger hunting prey in the jungle that it has “gone feral” – unless it was once a circus tiger. So the killer dogs of Sitapur may well be said to have gone feral because they were once the friendly and undemanding creatures that we see everywhere. Living off our scraps, these much-maligned strays give us loyalty and a wholly undeserved regard. Now, deprived of their minimal sustenance by the actions of the aforementioned high-minded ones, they have gone “feral” – becoming, once again, hunters.
My question, then – urged merely as a matter of academic, purely linguistic enquiry is simple: may one use the adjective “feral” to describe the gangs of violent young men who have become such a prominent feature of our national landscape? Should we be speaking of feral adults? We are living in the throes of an epidemic of violence. Night after night, our TV dinners are spiced with the spectacle of raucous gangs of young men, setting upon helpless innocents in a variety of locations and contexts. Sometimes it is Dalits – and sometimes Muslims, or students, or women and girls or Kashmiris – that are set upon by slogan-shouting gangs of marauding young men, moving on motorcycles and armed with iron rods and swords and other primitive weapons. The hapless victims are beaten and burnt, broken and bloodied, on all kinds of pretexts which the RSS and its gruesome Parivar have been perfecting for a long time. And this is done in full public view, is duly recorded and circulated on the anti-social media, for reasons that appear entirely reasonable to the mobs who are perpetrating and participating in the violence – and the good folk who are circulating this pornography.
There is little point in retailing these gory stories here. The names of these outrages have become iconic, and should never be forgotten. The mere mention of Una, of Akhlaq, of the killer Regar, of Muzaffarnagar (the list is long and still only a work in progress) – the mere mention of one of these names – should be sufficient to index the malignant illness that has gripped our society. And if it still isn’t sufficient – if one is still motivated to if-and-but, and what-about in the face of such violence, such facts, such images – well, nothing will ever be sufficient.
But to return to my original, academic, question – may one describe the young men who make up these violent gangs, these Senas and Vahinis, as having gone feral, like the stray dogs of Sitapur? It is tempting to think of the easily-summoned mobs of rioters, rapists and murderers – the necessary foundation of the political strategy of deploying Sections 124, 153 and 295 in order to terrorise dissenting or even merely demurring voices – as “feral”. Heaven knows they are savage enough. But are they really feral, in the sense of regressing from some prior quasi-civilised state into something primitively instinctual, something animal and violent? This violence is frequently camouflaged in a rhetoric of concern for cows – hence the closure of the slaughter houses, and the virtual shutdown of the post-dairying trade in cattle, by means both legal and flagrantly extra-legal. So that there is a an ironic connection between the dogs that have gone feral because of the closed slaughter houses, and the apparently feral young men who have forced them to shut down.
Obviously, the violence that we see erupting all around us was already present in some form, albeit latent. It couldn’t have been invented on this scale overnight – or even since 2014 – even by people who are as malign as the authors of the present dispensation. It seems undeniable that they are tapping into some ancient appetite for blood. But we must recognise also, behind the baying mobs, the patient contribution of the vegetarian ideologues of Nagpur, who have been sowing the seeds of hatred for close to a century. That harvest of hate is now ready to be brought in – and it is, by the bushel – by motorbikes, and trucks, and tractor-trolleys. Of course terror has no colour, except when it is green – but the fact that the price of saffron gamchhas has doubled because of increased demand, because saffron gamchhas are the preferred livery of the small-time lout, this too must signify something, except to the terminally stupid.
So not feral – even though they resemble the dogs of Sitapur. Their’s is, to use the currently favoured expression, not instinctual, “feral” violence – it is “manufactured” violence. Assiduously cultivated hostilities can now be deployed tactically and politically, in the pursuit of hard, material ends. These quasi-feral mobs can be afforded the immunity of state protection, and turned against the weakest and most vulnerable sections of society. That assurance of immunity is crucial. A complicit executive, a cooperative and criminalised police force – which can be hyper-efficient, and/or incompetent, depending on the requirements of specific situations – and an indifferent, some say even compliant, judiciary, all the pieces are in place now. And the gladiatorial show in which the most vulnerable sections of the population of India are going to be served up for the wolves of the Sangh parivar and its rapidly proliferating secondaries, is only just beginning.
Alok Rai is a writer who doesn’t teach in Delhi any more.
