Between aspiration and exclusion

So much has now been written about the shooting of Jessica Lal. Horror has given way to a preoccupation with investigations and police pr...

So much has now been written about the shooting of Jessica Lal. Horror has given way to a preoccupation with investigations and police procedure. Understandably so. But in my mind what stands out are the first reports of the incident, the bare bones without the ensuing discussion on who was there and did what and why. The picture that emerged was this: A customer walks up to a bar and demands a drink. The two women behind it refuse to serve him. The man is young, drunk and crude. The women are attractive, fashionably dressed and very much in control. They are saucy in their refusal. There is a hint of double entendre. The man is enraged. He pulls out his gun. The women laugh. He shoots one dead. What was the provocation? Hurt male pride? An immature mind that could not bear to be refused. A proclivity for playing with guns? All these certainly but there is a wider issue here that needs to be considered.

Let me throw up a couple of incidents at random. Some years ago, police raided a nightclub in Mumbai forsafety infringements. The cops were so shocked at seeing young men and women in revealing fashions dancing and mixing freely that they went wild, roughing up the boys and even slapping one of the women. More recently a TV channel organised a bash in Goa where entry was restricted to couples only. A group of stags when refused entry were incensed enough to return with knives.

Isolated incidents? So they seem. But there is a thread tying them together. And one way of understanding it is by borrowing and updating a notion from the past. The notion of Bharat versus India. I think it was the Shetkari Sanghatana’s Sharad Joshi who popularised the term to describe the cultural divide between a rural, ethnic entity and an urban, English speaking one. It was a significant concept in the eighties. Today though, for some reason, nobody (apart from an occasional Chautala and Devi Lal) seems to mention this divide anymore. Perhaps it is because the socio-cultural clash implied by the phrase has moved to the city. Ithas also emerged between people who appear to be more homogenous.

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Take Manu Sharma for instance. By all accounts he had a privileged background : a politician father, elite schools, an independent business. In fact, those present at the scene of the crime are alleged to have been awed by his connections. And yet, the truth is that this privileged person travelled miles to mingle with `high society’. And despite his connections he was an outsider, a marginal player to the `in’ crowd. The only way he could gain entry was with money and the only way perhaps, in his mind, he could vanquish it was through violence. It is a similar factor that operated in the other cases whether it was with lower and middle class policemen or the young studs excluded from a bash in their own town for not being accompanied by women. It is the norms of one social set clashing with another.

Admittedly it is a difficult thing to avoid in a country of such diversity. The writer Arundhati Roy once said something interesting in thiscontext. When asked about the person who had filed a case against her by an interviewer immediately after she had won the Booker she said something to the effect that : India lives in different ages at the same time and while she was grateful that he hadn’t chosen a less civilised way of expressing his disapproval, she still thought it was important for her to hold out for her space.

Different worlds, different ages have always operating simultaneously. Usually these coexist without open conflict. But take a look at the Jessica Lal case. Why is it that there has been so much adverse comment about Bina Ramani, the owner of the restaurant where the tragedy occurred? The only confirmed allegation against her is that she served liquor without a licence – a crime certainly, but one routinely committed by any number of establishments.

Why has she not been able to argue, with any conviction, as she could have, that this incident could have taken place anywhere? Is it because there is a general feeling that sheand her elite set have already got away with too much?

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The existence of a social elite is not new. India has always had its boxwallahs, its film stars and its rich. The composition of the social elite may have altered over the years. But what can be said of it today is that it is affluent, preoccupied with physical beauty and international if not westernised in its tastes and its attitudes to sex, behavioural codes for men and women and consumption of alcohol. Wrong or right is not the issue. This segment has as much right to hold out for its space, its lifestyle as any other. That, after all, is the essence of democracy. The question is: how much space?

Over the last decade, thanks in large measure to television and a growing preoccupation in the print media with celebrity, the values and outlook of one section of society have been magnified and exalted far beyond their size and with little regard to social context giving rise to the very real and widespread danger of conflict between our diverseworlds. What Manu Sharma did was horrific and inexcusable. But perhaps we need to look at the combination of aspiration and exclusion that threatens to provide fertile ground for the other Manu Sharmas in our society.