The shop of the father of a 15-year-old was demolished, he and his parents arrested because on the day of the recent India-Pakistan cricket match, a “passerby” claimed that he heard the boy chant “anti-India” slogans. The passerby did not offer any proof.
A first information report was registered against the family and a “motorcycle rally” was taken out by those demanding “further action”. What could this further action be when someone’s shop has been demolished, their vehicle destroyed, and they have the police and a mob after them? What further action can be taken to appropriately punish a 15-year-old?
The brave and courageous Shinde Sena MLA Nilesh Rane, son of former Union minister Narayan Rane has been quoted in a report in The Indian Express, promising to “ensure he [the minor’s father] is eventually thrown out of the district”. Rane said “for now we have destroyed his scrap business”.
Have you ever been a 15-year-old in your life? Do you remember it? Charles Dickens scratched the surface when he wrote “In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.”
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I have been a 15-year-old. So this pained me plenty. I imagined myself in his place, how he must be feeling, how I would have felt. When the mob stood in front of me. When I saw the rubble of the demolished shop. When my parents were dragged away to prison, and I was dragged away to a “centre”.
I want to be a patriot. I am telling myself that being an Indian patriot requires me to look away from, if not celebrate the injustice and pain 15-year-old children suffer, especially if they happen to be Muslim.
I understand that patriotism lies in what the mob which took out the “bike rally” was doing. It lies in the decision of the police to join the mob and arrest the child instead of protecting him, if not by invoking the law, then by telling the mob to not do this with a child, please.
I see people on social media saying “law will take its course” and I understand that patriotism demands that one says “law will take its course” after a 15-year-old’s father’s shop is demolished and not before. The Supreme Court has passed a judgment saying that someone’s property should not be demolished just because they are accused or even if they are convicted of a crime. Is the law taking its course?
Anyway, I am an Indian patriot and I do not care whether democracy works or not, whether rule of law works or not, whether the police is fair or not, as long as the person being persecuted is a Muslim.
Earlier this week a SUV drove over a mother and her baby sleeping on the road in Mumbai. The baby died. The father is a food delivery agent. They were forced to sleep on the road because their home was demolished by the BMC. They are not Muslims.
I see politicians making claims that Mughals demolished what was of value to them hundreds of years back so now they want to demolish what they believe the Mughals built. When the day or the century comes that the economically marginalised successfully and powerfully organise themselves, and demand revenge in the same framework, I wonder what will have to be demolished.
There are so many positive things happening, why don’t you focus on them, someone asks me. They are right. I will try harder to ignore the man who works as a delivery worker all day for pennies, comes back home to find his baby is dead and is occasionally told that things are this way just because he does not work hard enough. If he was doing the 80-90 hours prescribed by the corporate titans of India’s business community, maybe things would have been different.
I am trying to focus on the positive. I live in Madh Island in Mumbai in a gated society, which has a club with a swimming pool, plenty of greenery, home delivered groceries by delivery persons such as the one in the story earlier. My gated society has mandated that the people who pick up my garbage don’t ring my doorbell. They are not allowed to, even if I want them to. I have to leave the garbage out, they will pick it up. Any possibility of community, of him being able to tell me that he or his family have any grief or joy is eliminated. Not only are there separate lifts for workers, there is an entirely different floor from which they enter and exit the building. All this is to help me focus on positivity. People of my class and my religion are the positive. The rest are negative.
There may be cultures where if not the illegal demolishing of the shop of a 15-year-old, then the being crushed to death of a baby would jolt the community if not country into compassion and action. That is not my culture. My culture stays positive.
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To reach my building cluster, I have to unfortunately work much harder to ignore negativity. There is a two-kilometre a journey through slums of poor people and garbage. Once I had a guest who was expressing disgust at the garbage. After the guest left, my domestic worker asked me, “You do know that the garbage there comes from your homes right? They pick it up from you and dump it where we live. We don’t consume enough to create so much garbage.”
I fear that some of the negativity may still be managing to enter our homes. A friend who lives in the same society has a school going child. That child comes home coughing every day. It’s not an infection she tells me. Every child in the class is coughing. It’s the pollution.
In the WhatsApp group of my gated society, there was a discussion about persuading the government to provide a 24x7x365 ambulance exclusively for the society residents. Someone said that if the government is providing an ambulance, it should be for the poor people outside also. To this, another person responded and this was met with near unanimous approval, why should the poor get anything? The government gives them everything, it gives us nothing.
Dushyant Arora is a lawyer and research consultant.
