The thing that stands out in one of the videos showing a Moradabad woman demanding retraction of the sale of a house to a Muslim couple is her measured tone. The absolute certainty of the affront she claims to feel is unmarred by any hint of anguish, confusion, hurt; that people feel when their lives really collide with real hurt. Her tone demands in a very reasonable voice that we owe it to her to grant her the very reasonable demand she is making. What harm can be there in it? Having observed this measured, reasonable tone in countless Residents’ Welfare Association aunties (and uncles) delivering righteous diatribes, I have made some notes on it.
In reasonable voices, the RWA pipsqueaks who never take up issue with a real issue – trees being chopped, the dug up roads, the broken pavements – will tell victimhood tales and demand that delivery boys and servants must not be allowed to use lifts, that children must not tread on grass, that maids must not sit on benches, that strays should be exterminated, that giving heaters to guards in winters would inflate RWA electricity bills. For them, human decency, logic, law; all are barred entry at society gates. The rise of these uncles and aunties has been coterminous with the rise of the smartphone and WhatsApp. They are experts in couching their language of hate in ‘reasonable’ tone and idiom. Puffed up on self-certified, self-validating claims of injury, above any proof, they fill up their inner emptiness by performing collective orgies of ‘reasonable’ hate.
They spread toxic hate messages falsifying, vilifying communities exuding a bland, holier-than-though manner. Maybe they grew up eulogising a larger-than-life authoritarian parent, beneath whose gaze any different way had no right to be. Any spontaneous joy was never allowed to sneak in. Trained in strenuous conformity and strict obedience, they never tried anything because of a need felt in their bones or tasted life at the fount. Now, the powers, by making it legal to air imaginary angst over imaginary injuries on WhatsApp, have given them their moment under the sun. So, with gusto they recall ‘experiences’ they’ve never had; constantly prefacing their statements with, ‘in my experience.’
It’s very difficult to physically identify the pipsqueak of either gender. In a large group of people of the same class and religion you will never be able identify them by their clothes. Inconsequential looking, plastered with a vacuous smile, they can be marked by their inability to catch irony, let alone a joke. They love slapstick, the cheaper the better. At core, they lead a thought-process free, humourless life, radiating constant toxicity. Their viciousness erupts at people powerless to hit back. If confronted, they will at once switch on a smile and claim that if they did something, it was totally unintentional. They’d meant nothing.
Also read: ‘Take Your House Back’: Hindu Residents Protest Sale of Flat to Muslim Doctor Couple in Moradabad
‘Nothingness’ is the main thing about pipsqueaks. Through some alchemy of nature and nurture; genetics and socialisation; the pipsqueak has acquired – one can’t call it an achievement, even though they’d consider themselves to be achievements – a nothingness of being. They have a great capacity to be form-free, opinion free, vacuous vapours while seeking favours from anyone. This personality free personality paradoxically makes them identifiable. They are quite alive to the fact that the absence of content and context makes them perfect vehicles for ferrying and spouting profitable bullshit. With complete absence of qualms, questions or conscience they constantly seek advantageous alignments and make ready vessels for any contagion. As long as they derive a sense of self-importance, they will enthusiastically and doggedly proceed to spout any bullshit.
There is a subtle superior glee to the evil they spout. Subtle, not due to any nuance; but because even this gives them no joy, only a sense of satisfaction overlaid with the virtuous glow of having done the given duties to get a pat on the back from some validating authority. They deploy an inflection free certainty, a measured, sotto voce to deliver toxic statements that preclude any questions, debate or even conversation. This tone only shifts in its insistence around ‘reasonable’ degrees of unreason. This tone is so free of any feeling that you can touch its coldness. They will make a virtue of their fundamental coldness by calling it Chanakyaneeti or sanatan wisdom.
Take away their manufactured virtues and manufactured injuries, remove the manufactured dharma and they slide back into nothingness.
Varsha Tiwary is a Delhi based writer and translator. She has recently published 1990, Aramganj a translation of the best-selling Hindi novel Rambhakt Rangbaz.
