As a postcolonial nation, we are fond of launching into diatribes against the colonial ideology – using snappy phrases like ‘civilising mission’ and ‘the white man’s burden’ – and asserting our commitment to decolonisation. But every now and then we end up exhibiting how superficial and hollow the whole project has been.
Wittingly or unwittingly, we disclose our full subscription to the principle that served as an axle for the genocidal juggernaut of colonialism – the principle of inequality. Recently, three civil servants were found brazenly doing what they are under oath never to do in public life – harbouring casteist, classist and sexist opinions about people they are duty-bound to serve and allowing those opinions to influence how they discharge their duties. Their egregious behaviour, reflective of a deep rusting of “the steel frame”, must have had Sardar Patel, who christened them so, turning in his grave.
The first incident took place in the office of Neha Kumari Dubey, the Mahisagar district collector. She was approached by Vijay Parmar, a law student from the Dalit community, during the state government’s taluka-level, grievance redressal programme. The programme, held on October 23 at Lunawada, was ironically named SWAGAT (welcome). In an unwelcoming tone, the administrator was briefly seen and then heard in a viral clip, berating the student who questioned her inaction regarding his brother’s complaint launched months ago and if his grievance would meet the same fate. In a do-what-you-want gesture, an angry and ‘insulted’ administrator asked him to go to the apex court and then got the security officer to strip the complainant of his mobile phone. What happened next is deeply disturbing and alarming. Dubey was heard making comments about harmful stereotypes around the Dalit community and women in the context of the alleged misuse of statutory safeguards available to them under law. Sitting in her office of power, she allegedly aired a contentious view that about ‘90%’ of registered cases of atrocities were fake, motivated to ‘blackmail’ ‘non-SC/ST’ people for different kinds of vested interests. She didn’t back her opinion with facts or data. Dubey applied the same logic to cases filed under section 498A of Indian Penal Code (IPC) which protects women against marital cruelty. In so many cases, she said, the complainants’ husbands committed suicide due to the ‘torture’ they had been put through. Her loose-tongued bravado that began with expletives ended with “these kinds of nonsense people have nothing…(else to do).” However, she wasn’t scared of such people or their complaints, she concluded. After protests by many groups and Dalit organisations for her suspension, the administrator issued an amusing statement which, apart from invoking the criminal cases against the two brothers, claimed that Parmar was hiding his misdemeanour by putting forward his community and that the administration “never supports casteism/separatism”.
The second case pertains to a senior IAS officer in Rajasthan, Gayatri Rathore, who was heard ostensibly asking an unemployed youth what sounded like a rhetorical question: “Did you consult the government before being born [as to whether you’ll get a job in time?]” In a video that has since gone viral, the senior bureaucrat – recently appointed to the health department – can be seen outside the Swasthya Bhawan in Jaipur, surrounded by the press and job aspirants handing her their representations. Visibly outraged, perhaps by the media attention or the rallying crowd of unemployed youth, she shot back when a young man – worried about exceeding the age limits for the posts – pleaded with her to intervene.
The third incident might not seem as uncivilised because of the absence of any obscene verbal exchange that marked the other two episodes, but it wasn’t less so on that account. It framed an encounter between Tina Dabi, the 2015 UPSC topper and the district collector of Barmer, and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Satish Poonia, the former obsequiously and repeatedly bowing her head with folded hands while greeting the latter upon his arrival. Not long ago, Dabi was at the centre of a media spectacle, peremptorily asking Barmer shopkeepers to ensure cleanliness around their shops, else she would get them sealed.
The simultaneous emergence of these acts of incivility by civil servants – duty-bound to work with empathy, efficiency and impartiality – raises questions about the scale of corrosion within the steel frame and the erosion of the constitutional values they are meant to embody. Are these instances exceptions to the norm, or is it the reverse? Has the system always been so corroded, or has it been influenced by shifting socio-political climates? These are not rhetorical questions.
The appalling conduct highlights two problems – the utter derision among the elite for the toiling masses and a corresponding scale of sycophancy towards those in power. The real question is what kind of reading these officials must have done to familiarise themself with the existential realities of this diverse and complex country in the run up to the UPSC exam. More importantly, what are their training academies doing to wean them away from harbouring such gross ideas? However, they cannot be faulted beyond a point, in view of the government’s policies like lateral entry to the services among others. The root of the malaise lies somewhere else and before probing it, let’s analyse the implications of the language these bureaucrats used, humiliating in the first two instances and cringe-worthily unctuous in the third.
Callously calling a majority of cases related to caste-based violence as motivated is reflective of the upper-caste disgruntlement with the statutory safeguard accorded to a community which has suffered the worst kind of oppression for centuries. This reaction, not merely against the safeguard but against the accordance of human dignity and equality, has found most hideous expressions in the history of independent India – the most pronounced being the two gory anti-reservation riots that rocked Gujarat in 1981 and 1985 and in the anti-Mandal mania.
It is even more striking that the officer (Dubey) branded a majority of women, who courageously took their assaulters to court, as malicious and sadist. The language used by her stereotypes not just their immediate referents, but entire communities as intellectually lesser beings and immoral for being born ‘unlawfully’. Especially the term ‘harami’, the illegitimately begotten, maligns a great multiplicity of communities and cultures in which a woman’s sexuality is not policed and birth of human life is not legitimised by the demands of wedlock.
The vicious jibe of the second officer (Rathore) to the beleaguered youth derides a class of people with the Churchillian insult of breeding like rabbits. Linking the accident of birth to one’s unemployment and then using that skewed logic to categorise people can only be imagined by a colonial mindset. What is worrisome is that such characterisation of the ‘other’, has been in vogue and expressing it in a competing scale of incivility, starting from the public offices to drawing rooms, has become a national sport.
Also read: What’s Behind the Lure and Abuse of IAS?
Where does this incivility come from?
Historian Aishwary Kumar attributes this to the ‘neodemocratic’ condition that inheres a neoliberal hatred of the poor and the underprivileged and collapses identity politics in the conventional sense.
The insidious workings of the neoliberal order makes it difficult for the privileged sections to forge their identity in solidarity with fellow human beings. As a result, identities are curated today in the regimes of indifference, a regime that drives its subjects to disregard ‘the undesirable’ while being interested in its destruction. Equipped with such a self-contradictory mindset, these people then proceed to forge their own majoritarian identity which becomes the norm. However, these privileged coalitions of identity, in the process, end up bereft of any language of humanity, morality, constitutionality.
The neoliberal era, thus, becomes not only a witness to the ‘eviction’ of the wretched of the earth from their ‘home’, both material and symbolic, but even constitutes what Matthew Desmond calls “…a traumatic rejection…a denial of one’s most basic human needs, and an exquisitely shameful experience.”
Indeed, in recent history, we saw this kind of eviction taking place at a macro level in the turmoil created by legislations surrounding citizenship and subsequently in the short-noticed national lockdown, proclaimed by invoking the provisions of colonial-era Epidemic Diseases Act (1897). What is pertinent to note here is the fact that the translation of the evicted into disposable beings was ‘written’, legally and legibly, by the same institutions of governance and state power that were responsible for their welfare and protection. In the atrocious aporia of democracy, as Etienne Balibar reminds us, the evicted and the excluded are ‘produced’, by disciplinary/institutional mechanisms and a perverted politics of representation, as ‘abnormal’ or monsters on the margins of humanity.
However, neoliberal order in India, to my mind, is too young to distort the collective unconscious, if it wasn’t already so, in such fundamental ways. Digging deeper, one would realise that the despicable attitudes of the civil servants stand firmly on the discriminatory ground, laid over millennia by manipulations of ‘caste’ in the broader sense of the term in which Isabel Wilkerson uses it. Caste essentially sustains on the denial of equality. Dr. Ambedkar described it impeccably when he said, caste constituted “…an ascending order of reverence and descending order of contempt.” The contempt the two officers exude towards subaltern groups and the reverence the third oozes for her political master can be explained only by the insidious and invidious manoeuvres of caste.
These manoeuvres spawn and feed on a vicious politics of identity, whereby one contrives one’s superior identity by maligning and stereotyping the identity of the other. In this process of calculated denigration and dehumanisation, the other is invested with traits and essence in contrast to which one’s sublimity gets curated.
Historically, caste has carried out such otherisation by belittling the bodies, skills, knowledge and world-views of the underprivileged sections of Indian society. Today, it is achieved by something as innocuous as asking a citizen to keep her mobile phone out when she steps into a public office. With no statutory sanction for it in any rulebook, such an injunction strips a citizen of constitutionally guaranteed equality at the outset of her interface with the state. At times, this happens in settings as enlightened and egalitarian as an institution of higher education. Secondly, caste is also sustained, as Dr. Ambedkar brilliantly observed, by gatekeeping of female sexuality, by an unfailing observance of endogamy. Thus, a woman transgressing caste boundaries for a relationship is considered loose and her offspring, by a logical extension, inferior; a harami, born without consulting the (casteist, colonial) state. And a culture which endorses such a convention automatically becomes backward.
Finding fault with the uncivil officers as individuals is naïve for it’s not them but the hydra-headed demon of caste, sexism, neoliberalism and colonialism within them which is blabbering indecencies in public space. They are just dummies of a dangerous ventriloquist, which makes them forget that India had chosen a path to self-conception, fundamentally different from the ethno-nationalist trajectories of European nation-states.
To ensure equality and dignity to all citizens and to build a strong nation, the constitution had killed that ventriloquist juridically and entrusted the responsibility of calling the canker’s political and ideological endgame to various institutions, guarded by the proverbial steel frame. But the task of guarding the frame itself was devolved to educational institutions, which have failed in doing their job.
During the quarter of a century since freedom, Indian universities have worked overtime to produce generations of citizens in whom inequality as an overarching worldview has sustained in one form or the other. As a result, today we have independence, not swaraj; we are a sovereign nation, but with her fragments invisibilized, whom Partha Chatterjee calls “the outside” of the political society, the riffraff who cannot make effective claims on governance. Our failed education system has spawned a bunch of people, the dummies of caste and neoliberal orders, who cannot even frame the right question when confronting a complex situation, just like the senior IAS officer in Rajasthan.
In the aftermath of national lockdown, when I asked a group of postgraduate students in my online poetry circle what they thought of the blood-curdling tragedy in which 16 migrant workers, on their way to Bhusawal, got run over by a goods train, everybody fell eerily silent. When probed further, having briefly expressed sympathy for the ‘unfortunate’ victims, they began to complain about why they were travelling and not following the norms of ‘social distancing’ – a phrase used throughout the pandemic by everyone, including the state, despite its connotation of caste apartheid. Wasn’t it in everybody’s interest that the lockdown was declared? How was it possible that they decided to sleep on the tracks and not anywhere else?
I wasn’t shocked because these were the questions being asked in all bourgeois spaces. Nobody could ‘see’ that they were not consulted beforehand or were seen through by the state, that they were the hands that literally ‘built’ the nation, that their frantic cries for help on social media and news portals went unheard. After the second wave of pandemic ended, I was speaking to a class of law students at an elite university. The discussion veered to the plight of migrant workers who walked thousands of miles during the lockdown to their homes in rural India. Most of the i-Pad wielding millennials in the class felt that it was a necessary step, and the suffering of over one-crore migrants was an unavoidable by-product of the ‘greater good’. These students were the steel frame in the making. Being purblind to one’s motivations is the hallmark of a puppet and nation-building is not a puppet show. Are the makers of steel frame listening?
Hemang Ashwinkumar is a bilingual poet, translator, editor and cultural critic based out of Ahmedabad, Gujarat.
