Tragedy and triumph

Hathras tragedy and cricket victory parade expose our nationalism as a sham

Alok Tiwari

The defining images of last week emerged from two crowded events. One set was from the tragic stampede at Hathras in UP that on July 2 ended up costing lives of more than 120 persons. The other was from the victory parade of Team India on July 4 at Mumbai following India’s triumph at T20 world cup. These events, held just two days apart, could not be more contrasting. Even in a country accustomed to large scale tragedies, Hathras was disturbing and numbing at the same time. The photos and videos of bodies, mostly of women, lying in the open could have shaken the most stoic of persons. That those killed had gone to listen to some sort of spiritual sermon made the tragedy that much more poignant.

If that was one extreme, the victory parade that turned Mumbai’s Marine Drive into a sea of humanity was another. The triumphalism, the celebration, the chest thumping topped by singing of Maa Tujhe Salaam by Team India at the Wankhede stadium projected an outpouring of nationalism like few other events in recent past. Watching those images stream constantly on our TV and phone almost one after another made me wonder if, indeed, they were from the same country. The disconnect between the two was as glaring as it was instructive. Could those two events happen in any other country so close together? And what does the fact that they did say about our sense of nationhood?

By the time the Team India victory parade rolled, most of us had already cast Hathras tragedy aside in our mind. It was left to the families of the dead, the hospitals treating the injured, and the officials dealing with mundane matters of offering compensation. Only ones trying to make us remember it were opposition politicians whose voices too were drowned in the cricket cacophony and the usual recriminations of what passes for TV debates these days. The prime minister had moved on to hosting the triumphant team returning from the Caribbean. The contrast of values we assign to death and victory was also lost on us. The families of Hathras victims will get Rs 2 lakh per head while every member of the cricket team is guaranteed a minimum of Rs 5 crore each. We may be a rapidly rising economy for the world with a sterling stock market, but we remain a nation where human life is at a discount.

Many will find this comparison odious. But excuse me for asking, how does this disparity square with nationalism of so-called new India? Aren’t we now the nation that loves Vande Mataram, a song that equates the nation with mother? Even the Team India sang a modern offshoot of that song during the event. If that sentiment were true, then shouldn’t we show a little more empathy for the less fortunate compatriots? A more civilized society would have been in mourning following a tragedy of this scale. The flags would be flying at half-mast. There definitely would be no victory parade of this scale anywhere. The celebrations, if at all held, would be muted, and certainly will not have passed without a gesture of sympathy and help towards victims of the stampede. If something of that nature happened anytime during the extended celebrations of cricket triumph, it escaped me entirely.

If that be the case, then our singing of Vande Mataram and disparaging those who think of country merely as a civic entity and not a mother is simply a sham, merely a tool to put people we do not agree with on the defensive. To me it appeared one set of siblings was indulging in unbridled celebrations while another had just suffered unspeakable losses. If anybody thought of India as a family, a very dysfunctional one was on display in Mumbai that day.

Could it be because the stampede victims were among the nameless, voiceless multitudes that just make up the numbers in this country? I wonder if our cricket and political establishment would have been similarly insensitive if a tragedy of similar scale had befallen people with more presence in our society. What if, God forbid, a portion of Malabar Hill had collapsed taking with it massive mansions and high-end apartments? Would we have shown a more sensitive side then? Amid celebrations, someone would have rose to offer a tribute to the dead, a minute’s silence in their remembrance, maybe?

Our hypothetical Malabar Hill victims would not of course need government compensation of a couple of lakhs. However, it would not have hurt if BCCI, among the world’s richest sports bodies, would have offered a few crores towards Hathras’s very real victims. It would not bring back the dead but would have gone a long way to soften the blow for the survivors. Maybe the BCCI too, like the rest of us, succumbed to victim-blaming. What were those women doing at that Satsang anyway? We already have way too many babas and fakirs. By this time, everyone should know they are charlatans and frauds. No point in going to listen to them. But wait a minute, it would be different if the gurus are of our kind, the kind who speak English and sell expensive merchandise.

I blamed the sham nationalism of recent years for this but maybe I am wrong. Perhaps, India has always been like this. I remember a similar stampede in Nagpur 30 years ago in which nearly 120 very poor Gowari tribals lost their life. They had not come to listen to any Baba, they had come to demand from government their rights which still elude them. As the police cleared bodies of victims from the street, a classical concert was held in another part without a hint of the tragedy. We are a nation not just with many worlds but with many universes. All Indians are not my brothers and sisters, after all.

This column appeared in Lokmat Times on July 10, 2024