A rant on tattoos and trains and more

This is a rant, and nothing more. There could be errors of all sorts, feel free to call out. What prompted me to write this are certain remarks made by some of us over the past few days. Since those were comments made by people that we personally know, I am going to name them, for the sake of a clearer context. However, I am only commenting on the remarks, not the people themselves. With that said: first, there was a remark by Mahesh on the incident of an Australian being harassed because he had a tattoo of some goddess on his leg. Mahesh thought if the picture was related to some other religion, he would have lost his leg rather than being harassed. At another point, in response to my comment on India becoming an increasingly more difficult place for religious minorities, he remarked that it is merely a case of majority struggling for equality. And at some other point, in response to my outburst on the Kerala house beef menu incident, Suja said something in the lines of it was trivial compared to the fact that we have trains running on time, and it was anyway a law and order issue and not indicative of anything sinister. Mahesh also said something about CPM being rowdy and murderous, by which he possibly meant that there are other bad people too or all other viable alternatives are bad. I would like to comment on these, and perhaps add some other thoughts too.

First, the tattoo. I agree with Mahesh that if someone were to get a Mohammed tattoo, some deranged extremist Muslim would have possibly murdered him, and there would have possibly been some apologists for the said extremist too. However, my point is, that doesn't make harassing any better. If you are going to set some extremist as your benchmark, you need to very thoroughly think through it once again. What they have done is to harass someone for having a tattoo. I am all for understanding people's sentiments and it would have been best if this man could have covered his tattoo somehow; however, that doesn't excuse anything that ensued. It was not a case of one man expressing his anger at this person - it was an angry mob threatening him, and that indicates towards a systemic problem with our society - that somewhere deep within, we believe mob justice is justified in some circumstances, and a hurt religious sentiment is one such circumstance. What followed was far worse, and nothing short of calamitous. The police who got involved made the man apologize to the mob! It just shows how badly broken our law and order system is. How did the police behave any better than, say some kind of a village headman who condescendingly forgave the sin of having a tattoo, in return for a humble apology to his people? The police should have tactfully disbursed the mob, taken the man to safety, acknowledged his difficulty, and perhaps offered a friendly word of advice. That exactly is what they should have done as part of their job.

Second, the idea of the struggle of religious majority to attain equality. This is a very complex topic, so I'll talk about what I believe is the crux of it. You see, there is something called privilege - something that enables you to do certain things, and live certain way, while denying others the opportunity to do so. Everyone who has it wants to protect it. Since it is difficult to protect it as an individual, people form groups, and try to protect the group's privilege. In a democracy, someone in the majority group always has it (the extremely wealthy are exceptions, but that's another story). In the case of a democracy like India, someone in the religious majority is literally born with it. In the sense, although there are forces such as income levels, in the context of India as a democracy, religion happens (or was made) to be the most powerful force that creates groups, and therefore the religious majority happens to be the privileged ones. Now back to equality: the trouble with equality is, when applied as is, it always favours the privileged. This may not be intuitive, so here is a humourous quote that might help understand it: "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread." In essence, when laws and policies are applied equally, they affect people unequally. To balance this and to achieve equal effects, we need to tweak the laws and policies - in other words, make them unequal. The architects of modern constitutions, including that of India, were conscious of this, and hence created the provisions for special or protected status for certain groups. So, if you think the policies are unequal, you are right, however, they are done so with a purpose. To conclude, in my view, if there is a struggle by the religious majority for equality, in reality it is a struggle to keep the benefits of their privilege.

Third, punctual trains in return for a no-cow diet. I am all for acknowledging and applauding any government, official or politician who played a part in making trains run on time. It is a fantastic achievement. The problem at first is that I see absolutely no relation between that and a restriction on eating cows. That is not necessarily a bad thing. The bad thing is that, now I do see a relation. That is, they have successfully managed to push their religious agenda with not many people talking about it because they are still not over the punctual trains. Even worse, they now have intelligent people ready to forgive them because they did something else rather well. That is one part. Other thing is, if the cow meat ban is indeed a law, rather than supporting its implementation, I would question the law itself. This is an example of the point I made above about unequal effects of equal application of law. We know that at least in North India, Hndus don't eat cow meat. So the only affected people are those belonging to religious minorities. We also know that beef is far cheaper than any other meat in India. So it was an affordable part of their diet, and now they are deprived of it. Why can't they eat buffalo, you might ask. Here is why: cows outnumber buffaloes ten to one in India, and if your only source for beef are buffaloes, the prices are going to be high. So, why do we need this law again, apart from pushing our religious beliefs on to other people? Those who don't want to eat cow can always stay away, can't they?

Fourth, Kerala, CPM etc. You see, by almost any HDI metric, Kerala leads the rest of India by some margin. Literacy is the most popular example, but since that has been publicized and politicized to no extent by LDF, my personal favourites are life expectancy and infant mortality rate. Those numbers are not very far from those of first world countries. Actually, they are closer to the first world than to rest of India. So how does Kerala do this, with no big industries apart from tourism? Exactly the way tiny Denmark beats US - by prioritizing inclusiveness. That is, appreciate everyone's right to a reasonable standard of living even if it comes at the cost of a reduced gross productivity. In other words, by being on the left of the spectrum during policy making. I am not crediting CPM for this, because, after all, in Kerala, the governments have been alternating between LDF and UDF for a good while. However, the thing is, both have actually been on the center-left in their political stance - case in point, there are labour unions associated with both fronts. Or that the CPI government of Achyutha Menon was actually backed by Congress. The only credit CPI or CPM can take is that they actually started the leftist movement in Kerala and popularized it in some incredibly creative ways, such as employing KPAC. Yes, there are far left elements such as Maoists and Naxals, but none of them ever received much support in Kerala from any party. I agree CPM has a lot to answer regarding the political murders, especially in Kannur. I would love to see them held responsible. When I say I support left, I don't really mean I am fan of CPM. All I want is Kerala not to fall to right wing where the majority gets to do whatever they want leaving out the minorities and the generally under privileged. My fear stems from the fact that Mr.Modi seems to have nudged the Malayali sentiments ever so slightly to the right. It is not by much, but you can feel it. Hence my plea to leave us alone.