[sacw] I'm Venal, You're Scum

[Harsh Kapoor]

17 June 1999
FYI
(South Asia Citizens Web)
==============================

From: Rediff on the NeT
June 16, 1999
http://www.rediff.com/news/1999/jun/16dilip.htm

I'm Venal, You're Scum

By Dilip D'Souza

Pakistan is venal," she said to me. "We are not." This
friend and I were chatting the day the news broke about the six horribly
mutilated soldiers' bodies that Pakistan returned to India. Outrage was
rampant, naturally enough. What a sick, gruesome thing for their Pakistani
captors to do. My friend was angry and depressed, almost unable to
comprehend the brutality of this crime.

I cannot claim I could comprehend it. What possesses
people who do such things to other people? What purpose was served?
What was achieved except revulsion and rage, except six families
shattered? I don't know.

I had not planned it that way, but Rediff On The
NeTcarried my last column, Accused of Being Accursed, on the day we heard
about these six soldiers. That timing set me following stray trains
of thought. May I offer you a sense of where they led?
If you read that column, you will remember that it was
about a member of West Bengal's Kheria Sabar tribe, a 29-year-old man
called Budhan. In February last year, he was picked up by the Purulia
district police and beaten to death. Budhan's fault? He was born a Sabar, a
tribe the British once designated as criminal. That made him an automatic
suspect in a crime that had been committed in the district. That led
the Purulia police to thrash him over seven days until he died.
Budhan Sabar left a young widow, Shyamoli.

Some weeks ago, I had another column here called What A
Fall Was This. That one was about a member of Maharashtra's Phase
Pardhi tribe, a 35 year old man called Pinya Hari Kale. In June
last year, he was picked up by the Baramati (Satara district) police and
beaten to death. Pinya's fault? He was born a Pardhi, another tribe the
British once designated as criminal. That made him an automatic
suspect in a crime that had been committed in the district. That led three
constables and a sub-inspector to thrash him until he died early the next
morning.

Pinya Kale left a young widow, Chandrasena, and five
children.

People die in police custody all the time. Our home
ministry announced last year that in 1997 there were 888 such deaths in
India -- a 100 per cent increase over the 444 of the previous year. (Of
those 888, 200 died in Maharashtra, a 506 per cent increase over the 33 of
the previous year). These are the numbers we officially admit to.
Yes, people die in police custody all the time; yet when
they live, you cannot help thinking they are better off dead.
In 1981, police in Bhagalpur, Bihar, thrust needles into
the eyes of several prisoners, blinding them permanently. When a
move was made to take action against the policemen, the then chief
minister of Bihar scuttled it, saying the blindings had "social sanction."
Social sanction for sticking needles into human eyes:
please give it a thought.

In January 1997, police in Rajkot, Gujarat, rubbed some
kind of paste into the eyes of seven undertrials who were out on bail.
Dr Rekha Gosalia, Superintendent of the G T Sheth Eye Hospital
where these men were taken, told The Statesman that "there was severe
watering, redness and burning sensation and the transparency of
the cornea had been affected and this had resulted in corneal opacity."
The Statesman went on to report that "the use of this torture method
was not unknown in police circles. ... [An investigation by the Criminal
Investigation Department] indicted the Deputy Commissioner of Police,
Dr K L N Rao, and nine Rajkot policemen, including a head
constable, for the crime."

Then there are the children. Human Rights Watch (in
Police Abuse and Killings of Street Children in India November 1996)
tells us about 15- year-old Shantanu, picked up by two officers of the
D N Nagar police station in Bombay on January 8, 1993. He was
suspected of having committed a robbery a week earlier.
In a "separate enquiry room" at the police station,
Shantanu was asked to put his hands on a table; they were then beaten with
a baton for an hour. Later, he was hung from the ceiling and beaten on
the shoulder, back and thighs for 45 minutes. Afterwards, he was made
to lie on a block of ice and hit each time he tried to move; then he
was made to lie in the sun and beaten while being asked where the stolen
property was.

Two days later, the police brought in Shantanu's parents
and threatened to beat them if he did not confess. He did, but was kept
in the police station for another week and beaten some more. Produced
before a magistrate on January 18, Shantanu told the court that
he had been tortured so badly he could not stand. He was right. Two
policemen held him up during the court session.

When he was finally released, Shantanu spent another 20
days in hospital, being treated for the torture.
Nor is it just the police who are responsible for
vicious inhumanity, just supposed criminals who suffer it.
In Bombay in December 1992 and January 1993, Indians
picked up other Indians and threw them off bridges onto the
railway tracks below; more routinely, they burned, shot, slashed and stabbed
hundreds to death. Over 1,000 were so murdered.
In 1984, much the same happened to 3,000 Indians in
Delhi. In Bihar, rival gangs regularly massacre villagers. Hundreds have
been killed in years of this merry-go-round slaughter. In Orissa
earlier this year, a middle-aged man and his two young sons were burned to
death as they slept in their car.

And all this happened because the dead belonged to one
caste or another, one religion or another. Worse still, many
other Indians are quite content to let that explanation stand, content to let
the killers escape punishment. The victims had it coming to them, after
all. Their identity is their guilt, after all.

Budhan Sabar and Pinya Kale were just two humans that I
happened to write about. Two Indians who make up those numbers of
deaths in police custody. Two people who were picked up, tortured
and beaten to death by the keepers of India's laws.
Shantanu and the men who were blinded did not die, but
suffered terribly. They make up numbers too: as do the victims of
rioting, caste warfare and the other carnage that we so quickly
rationalise away.

Indeed, I don't know why the Pakistanis tortured our six
soldiers. It sickens me. I write this to ask -- in all humility and
because I truly want to know -- why that crime was greeted by so much
outrage, but tortured deaths like those of Budhan and Pinya found so little.
I write this knowing there will be patriots leaping to
denounce me for trivialising those six horrible deaths. Not at all.
Instead, I am trying to de-trivialise, you might say, the deaths of those
tribals, the stream of brutality that flows past us 24 hours a day, seven days
a week, all year round. I want someone to tell me why it needs no
comment.

Pakistan is venal, she said. That will be echoed and
applauded everywhere it is heard in India. For that's what the
wagers of war in New Delhi, mirrored always in Islamabad, want us to feel.
That's the way war is waged. In perfect harmony, the beat goes on: you have
writers telling you it is Pakistan's Islam -- or India's Hinduism --
that is the root of the brutality. That it is in "their" very character to
mutilate and torture people. Not in "ours." That "they" are venal. "We" are
not.
Whatever "they" and "we" happen to mean at the time of
writing.

Thanks, the war-wagers are saying. Thanks for allowing
us to turn you away from the venality within, the dirt we don't really
care to clean up. The dirt we will distract you from by telling you that
war in Kashmir is really what we all must concentrate on, must rally
behind.

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