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From early August till date, West Bengal has been in the throes of massive civil unrest over the rape and murder of a post-graduate trainee doctor in a premier medical college of the state. Civil society, at best dormant and hemmed in by its selfish concerns at the best of times, has suddenly found a voice and body in the state.
Ordinary folks, young and old, irrespective of gender, religion and class have shown remarkable solidarity by holding night vigils, and street corner meetings. They are supporting the junior doctors, who are on a cease-work protest, with moral and material support. They are pressuring the government and its bureaucracy, with the relentless articulation of resistance and civil anger.
All of this has been done in the most non-violent manner possible with exemplary restraint despite the many attempts by agent provocateurs to vilify the junior doctors by one canard or the other.
Even the celebrities from the tinsel world, so long blissfully ensconced within the quangos and the spaces created by the state and the ruling party, have hit the streets demanding justice for the victim.
This by itself would have been a routine act of exercising rights provided by the Constitution of India and therefore unremarkable had it not been for the fact that such open and bold assertions of demands by these people went directly against their interest, and that they had been silent and complicit in many other preceding cases where their presence could have made a difference.
The massive street presence of anonymous citizens shows their importance as influential agents of public opinion, a lesson that we must start to appreciate in earnest if we in India and West Bengal in particular, are to think of meaningful changes to the structures of oppression that are in place. But then, this is a matter that requires separate attention, time and space.
I wish to draw attention to a few concerns that continue to plague us and refuse to go away despite our progress as a nation supposedly living with and within democracy.
One is the almost automatic and immediate reaction of the police, bureaucracy and the political establishment to duck questions of accountability and play the game of passing the buck and lying through their collective teeth.
Imagine the situation as it unfolded with the rape-murder of the doctor, her parents were given false information initially and then made to wait for hours before being allowed to see her. Finally there was the unseemly and uncouth attempt to cremate her in a hurry.
All the while a very hostile environment made it clear to the devastated parents that help was not forthcoming. To compound the depravity, you have the top cop of Kolkata sauntering in and not doing much even as his divisional commissioner allegedly offers money. Later, a woman police officer would try to fudge the issue even more by holding a press conference where misinformation would flow in a torrent.
Second is the failure of the political executive, elected by the people to be the representative not only of a constituency geographically described but of every emotion and sentiment that describes their lived experience for better or worse. The death of the junior doctor brought to our notice the spectacular failure of ethics and public morality on the part of those who are to articulate the collective conscience of a people.
This bankruptcy of the political executive is reflected in the apathy that has been cultivated over the past 70-odd years, working directly most of the time in brazen disregard for the very people who pay taxes that provide them with the luxuries they have come to see as their rightful entitlement combined with complacence and immense arrogance.
The scale of the protest and the wide support that it is receiving from all sections of society is unprecedented as noted above. The question is why is it so vociferous, sustained, high in visibility and so doggedly persuasive?
Is it simply an outrage against a corrupt police force, the political establishment and a criminal medical institution? Or are we outraged because we have had enough of this extreme apathy, of anomie in practice, of duplicity and highhandedness?
Are we angry because the victim was a young woman (the gender aspect) or a doctor (the status aspect) or the fact that she belonged to the majority community in a sprawling metropolis?
Have we ever seen such a massive protest for the many minority victims equally brutalised and denied justice in the past? For example, what about Najeeb, missing for the past seven-odd years and whose case the CBI has officially closed?
Why did we not see such a massive protest for his disappearance from the campus where he was a student? These are some of the troubling questions that distress us even as we resolve to bring justice to the young lady doctor.
I think all our suspicions – from gender, and status to majority affiliation are valid and have played a vital role in the outpourings that we witness. Add a dash of our nonchalance to the transgression of law and ethics on the part of our senior bureaucrats and politicos as normal behaviour expected of the bosses, and we have begun to get a sociological grip on resistance and protest.
But I think we are missing the elephant in the room. While every section of the people has come out in protest, it is no secret that under these circumstances, it is the middle class that creates the discursive space that compels the society to take cognisance.
The middle class was and is a deciding factor in public opinion with a disproportionate say in the way articulation of grievances and resistance is scripted. From talk shows to street corners, from genteel neighbourhoods to business districts, the show of anger, frustration and resistance has the imprimatur of the expressive Indian middle class.
The catchy slogans, the biting sarcasm, and the well-crafted demands are all declarations of this class playing a vital and decisive role in India and abroad.
The pertinent question is – why now, especially since they have only recently voted overwhelmingly in favour of the party that runs the government in West Bengal? We may never know this but let me argue that in essence, the middle class is outing itself, it is in a mode of introspection, and it is clearly stating that all this while it was complacent and happy to go about feathering its own nest as best as it could.
It is saying loud and clear that its collective back is against the wall, that it cannot bend and genuflect to its vested class interest anymore, it is acknowledging that the young lady has shown how hollow they are as a class, lacking a spine as it were along with the obvious lack of critical thinking that it has mortgaged to the market.
Michael Sandel, one of the great philosophers of our times, has been asking this question repeatedly – what is it that money can buy? Or to put it simply, what is it that money cannot or should not buy?
Post-liberalisation of the economy, the middle class became a class without a soul, having nurtured and reared the toxic atmosphere and a kind of ethics that says that all that is great and good is all that can be quantified and measured.
No other consideration except a fat pay cheque, a luxurious apartment, a fancy vacation, stocks and bonds and advertised consumption makes any sense. Anything that is not glamorous must be consigned to the margins of our already tattered civilisation. This was the pact of the middle class with neoliberalism, as it became its greatest protagonist, its biggest champion and staunchest ally.
In the shadow of this glitz and glamour, of the shallow and hollow life that was advertised and consumed as the benchmark of success, the likes of the criminals who destroyed a young life, a thousand possibilities and the happiness of a family grew up and like cancer metastasis quickly, devouring the collective conscience of a class that once venerated Ram Mohun, Rabindranath, Vidyasagar or Bhagat Singh and Netaji.
It is the arrival of hollow men and women in the centrestage of our public life as leaders of our socio-economic destiny that binds the tragedy of Najeeb of Delhi and Tilottama of Kolkata.
It is the veneration of the market and the relentless search for success at any cost that brings together the tragedy of lynching, of ‘bulldozer justice’, the growth of a spineless bureaucracy, a compromised teacher and a vacuous political leadership mired in endless corruption.
The cry for justice is a cry of anguish not only for the loss of an innocent daughter but the long-suppressed humanity that was sacrificed at the altar of neoliberalism’s success.
It may well be a song of redemption for the middle class, an expiation of guilt for having neglected to do what was right. As Bob Marley would have said “Won't you help to sing these songs of freedom?”
SURAJIT C MUKHOPADHYAY is Dean of Social Sciences, Sister Nivedita University, Kolkata. views expressed are the writer’s own.
