“As they say in India,” the economist Pranab Bardhan wrote in an influential paper on corruption, “in the US corruption is in the process of ‘making’ laws, in India it’s mostly in ‘breaking’ laws.” American – and generally Western – models of corruption require narratives of legitimisation that are often stamped with legislative authority.
So colonialism becomes a project of spreading “civilisation” and territorial aggression becomes a necessity to protect the “free world”. And there is no doubt that the drug, insurance, banking and auto industries all have their legitimising narratives through which their powerful lobbying regularly turns into laws that give them strategic benefits.
In India, on the other hand, the ubiquity of corruption keeps its moral cost low – “everybody’s doing it so why not?” The long history of the public tolerance of corruption paves the ground for the political protection, indeed, the further enactment of corruption. Just break the law with impunity. The only legitimising narrative required here is that it is done all the time and no one really cares.
In this country, the spectre of corruption meets the zombie of apathy. This leads to something far more horrifying than corruption, but something that remains more safely hidden – its nourishment and celebration by its direct and indirect beneficiaries. This includes people in power and dominance as well as ordinary people, sometimes disenfranchised ones as well.
A journalist friend from Bengal remains cynical about the dethronement of the Trinamool Congress government even amidst the spontaneous vitriol of mass-protests against the R.G. Kar violation. Not only is public memory short and elections nearly a year and a half away, they feel that few women who seriously depend on the various dole-schemes of the Mamata Banerjee government will actually vote against her in outrage at the violent murder of a woman.
The various Shree-schemes, it seems, will make electoral decisions even as the internet gets flooded with gory memes about the name of the dole-scheme that needs to be attached to violated women – and what ‘Shree’ that will be called.
Both the recent spectacles of violence against women that have finally seared through the conscience of the nation and their media reveal sustained histories of apathy and even active suppression of dissent behind them.
The alleged in both sets of crimes – the abuse rampant in the Malayalam film industry and the R.G. Kar rape and murder – had many, many fingers of accusation levelled at them, over several years. But they have scarcely made any difference. These figures have remained quite immovable from their positions of power and prominence for a long time.
But how easy has it been to ignore the protests and allegations of the violated, how deafening the silence around the allegations! Exactly what does it take for the safety valve of administrative and political protectionism to be blown – a crime of what proportion and sensory spectacle? Far more ominous remains the question – how long before this outrage settles into passivity again? Why is vigilance, that price for democracy, so elusive in our country?
Suppression and protectionism unleash their inevitable attack-dog – backlash. The actors who joined the Women in Cinema Collective in the Malayalam film industry were quickly blacklisted and dropped from film projects. They were branded the “difficult” women, those who refused to “cooperate” – in a world where the meaning of such “cooperation” is as clear as daylight. Some of the bravest of them, such as the actor Parvathy, have decided to wear the “difficult” label as a badge of honour.
It seems impossible to believe that the long delay of the Hema Committee report is disconnected from the need to protect the prominent and the powerful.
The glare of revealed violations makes it hard to keep in mind the far more longstanding, sustained and insidious processes that went on in the dark beforehand, and continues in the darkness to follow – all the orchestrated attempts to enable, protect and even normalise these acts of violation. Given the endless public capacity for apathy, just about anything gets sucked into this black hole. The tipping point, alas, is always the tip of the iceberg.
Also read: How Not to Discuss Rape
What took a horrific murder to reveal was already hidden in plain daylight in Calcutta. Now we know that everyone knew everything – or at least just about anyone in the medical profession did. Corruption in medical practice and education, which took an extreme form under the regime of Sandip Ghosh, the accused principal of R.G. Kar Medical College, was widespread practice in all government colleges in the city, and possibly the entire state.
Apathy for such ubiquitous realities can be put down to the usual high tolerance Indians have for malpractice. But what can explain the inviolable cordon of protection around the principal that stood impregnable against innumerable complaints, angry protests and demonstrations? The man who had to be shielded from public discontent by bouncers could not be removed from power! Successive transfer orders came to nought.
What was this shield of protection that made this man so invincible till a woman, a physician and an employee of the same institution, had to be murdered in such a gruesome manner that shook the entire nation? What is this but a vicious network between apathy, corruption, terror and the relentless suffocation of dissent?
What is the foundation of apathy? While self-interest, the demands of sustenance and the gravitational pull of quotidian life limit our attention beyond issues that affect us directly, the fact that this sustained apathy for corruption has enabled the dehumanising violation of women points to one of the most distressing realities of Indian life – the widespread and persistent lack of concern for the vulnerable and the minoritised.
A deep patriarchy bolstered by caste and class privileges consistently blinds the dominant to the plight of those on the margins. It is painful to admit that hierarchy is coded in the Indian DNA, always threatening to turn democratic ideals of equality into constitutional platitudes.
There is little doubt that widespread acts of aggression against Muslims, while engineered by particular ideological thrusts and party lines, draw little but apathy and indifference from people at large because large sections of these oppressed Muslim populations are also the most economically disadvantaged of the nation.
Diversity, in India, becomes the ironic name for the staggering inequalities that striate this great postcolonial experiment of a nation. The most obvious manifestation of this structure of inequality is the culture of violence.
“The Indian psyche,” the ruthless Punjab police chief K.P.S. Gill once said, “is full of suppressed violence.” Violence out of the normalisation of inequality, and apathy for violence on the marginalised – the loop easily becomes a labyrinth that runs forever.
In due course, we will be staring at another question that will appear as an inevitable cost of “progress”. This is the perpetuation of discrimination by artificial intelligence (AI). Several reports on “bot bias” and at least one well-researched recent book, Madhumita Murgia’s Code Dependent, reminds us of the heavy price already being paid for AI by women and other marginal communities around the world.
What will deepfake pornography, which has already violated countless women around the world, do to an already entrenched culture of sexual violence? What additional incentives will it offer, and what additional nightmare memories?
If AI-driven racial and economic profiling has already established practices that oppress and exclude women and racial minorities in everything from traffic infractions to job interviews and loan applications, what havoc is AI capable of wreaking in our deeply hierarchical and painfully stratified society? Shall we smoothly transition from a traditional structure of apathy and discrimination to an artificially enhanced version of it?
Saikat Majumdar’s most recent book is The Remains of the Body. He tweets @_saikatmajumdar.
