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I'm Venal, You're Scum

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.

Dilip D'Souza