Crimes of 'polarised' convenience

We all suffer when we let politics and religion determine our response to crime

Alok Tiwari

Selective outrage has been a thing with us for some time. As the society has become increasingly polarized, so have things that used to upset us. Crime, corruption, brutality, cruelty have all become neatly categorized into ours versus theirs. If it is theirs, we get angry. If it is ours, we just ignore or, worse, we find excuses. We try to find parallels in similar violations done by them and thus condone acts done by people on our side. Now, we have a president, who lives in a fortress-like Rashtrapati Bhavan and one who will have a security ring around her all her life, feeling insecure over rape and murder of a doctor in Kolkata in a state that conveniently is governed by an opposition party. But the same president did not have a word to say when worse outrages had occurred serially in places run by her own party. She somehow failed to notice that people in her own party had felicitated and celebrated convicted rapists.

Also, please go back a little to the time when filmmaker Kiran Rao had said she was feeling insecure in the country following mob lynchings of Muslims. She was advised to go to Pakistan by some very responsible people. What advise shall we give our Hon’ble President now that she no longer trusts security provided by her own government? But it would be wrong to find only the President guilty of this. The Badlapur case in Maharashtra happened around the same time. This time the parties protesting were mostly from opposition. It is a now familiar playbook. The opposition will shout in protest and the ruling group will appeal not to politicize the matter, which is another way of saying just ignore the crime and how they dealt with it.

How we react to the crimes also has to do with nature of the crime. As it happened even as protest about rape-murders continued, the beef murders returned. One man was lynched in Haryana while an elderly man on a train in Maharashtra was badly roughed up by some youths over suspicion of carrying beef. Both the victims were Muslims and were targeted solely because of their religion. This should logically make about a sixth of our population very insecure. However, so normalized has targeting of Muslims become in the new India that most leaders, including Muslims, do not even care to speak about it. If at all someone does, the army of online trolls stands by to remind them of all the time when perpetrators were Muslims and victims Hindus. Hence, such incidents recede into background after token reporting. No all-India strikes, no candle marches even about them.

Nor is it only a Hindu-Muslim thing though that takes the centre stage more these days. Dozens of rapes and some rape-murders have happened in the country since the very unfortunate and tragic Kolkata incident. Where are the protests about them? Not just the religious identity, but also the economic and social background of the victim matters. If the victims are poor and from backward social background, then all of us are happy to ignore the crime. It is just one of those things that happen.

It feels much closer home when the victim is one of us, middle class and above, educated, vocal, and socially privileged. We are supposed to be safer. The system is supposed to work for us. The police are supposed to listen to us and pick up the case quickly. It is our cases that go all the way to supreme court. So we get worried if the system fails us. We do not even try to hide our expectation of privilege. How many times have you heard, if it could happen to a doctor in a well-known medical college what about poor women elsewhere? We never ask ourselves why it is okay for a poor woman living in a slum to be less protected than a doctor in medical college.

I was also struck by the fact that the protests about Kolkata case were led by doctors though the incident itself had little to do with the victim belonging to a particular profession. But that is how it is, casteism of a different sort at play. Lawyers protest when one of their own is shot dead in court premises. It becomes a safety issue for lawyers, not for all citizens.

Some of it is inevitable, even natural. We feel it more when the danger is closer. Hence our instinct to react more strongly when a crime happens to people in our circumstances. We may feel sorry for others but what happens to them does not really hit home. Yet, such responses diminish us all. Yes, there are dangers peculiar to some professions and they are right to seek special protection. Doctors are more vulnerable to violent reactions from patients’ relatives and would be right to raise that issue. Journalists would be right to protest if they face violence because of their reporting. But there are a vast majority of crimes that we face merely as citizens. Our class, caste, status, profession are not important. Our response to them should be human, not political.

We cannot honour one set of rapists and killers and outrage over others. We cannot keep releasing known sexual offenders on parole because of political exigencies and shed crocodile tears over victims of others. Our hypocrisy will be noticed and called out. Worse, it will erode the respect for law and decency in the society thus emboldening criminals. If perpetrators are assured of social and even legal support from system based on their religion or political affiliation, we might as well say goodbye to the rule of law. If that happens, all of us suffer not just a select few. That is the danger we need to guard against.

This column appeared in Lokmat Times on Sept 6, 2024