Hey Delhi, why are you not out with the candles?
Some years back when a little girl named Malala Yousafzai in Pakistan was shot and grievously injured by the Taliban, it made a tiny, third page news in India, pretty much the same way in which, over the years, we have been made to make sense of Pakistan through these routine tragic snippets in daily news papers. She was reported and received as a Pakistani girl fighting for educational rights of Pakistani girl children. What could have been an iconic moment for the subcontinent got shabbily reduced to the sidelines. When Malala was struggling for her life in a London hospital, I asked a group of students about her and to my surprise very few had even heard of her. One of them could barely mutter: "some Pakistani girl"!
More recently when a mentally challenged woman of Nepalese origin was brutally gangraped and killed in Haryana, the news first appeared on the second page of the most newspapers and then swiftly disappeared. This was despite the fact that the case was far more gruesome, macabre and grotesque even in comparison to Nirbhaya's. Not a candle burnt in Delhi, not a placard raised in protest. Was it because the woman was poor? Or was it because she was not an Indian? Or worse, was it because she was not from Delhi? Does our conscience, our tears, our slogans, our sense of violation and protest need a residential certificate before it reacts? What does this territoriality reflect about us?
Are we saying Delhi's conscience only bleeds when such incidents happen within the NCR? How else does one explain the near complete silence in our public space on the gruesome murder of blogger Avijit Roy in Bangladesh just a few days back? There is something curiously exceptional about Delhi. Its self-obsession is hyper narcissistic. Its culture, politics and academics - all need 24x7 camera time to feel relevant. The AAP's Delhi-centrism, for instance, which is at the centre of the current controversy, is another sign of the same narcissistic bent of collective city psyche. The AAP and Arvind Kejriwal wants to focus on Delhi, others represent a voice that wants to transcend the territory and hence the opposition. Kejriwal now says he is only worried about Delhi and nothing else. The sense of politics which took him to Varanasi seems to have been forgotten or conveniently abandoned. The AAP's politics and its emancipatory zeal and aspirations and its centrifugality seem to have been territorialised and contained within the NCR boundary.
Delhi is again in protest mode on the issue of whether or not screening of the documentary India's Daughter is justified, while at the same time, almost on a daily basis, women are being raped and killed around it. When will we ever see Delhi erupting in to the kind of protest frenzy that we witnessed during Nirbhaya case, for the women of Gohna or Ghaziabad?
Delhi is happy being itself perhaps. It proposes one kind of politics for the country and another for itself. Such is the clarity of self-interest. A politics based on raw calculation and everyday pragmatics that promises cheap water, electricity and other amenities, is won for itself. There is not even a pretension for any higher objective now. Yet Delhi wants to believe that it is the voice of the country. Delhi's false claim of being country's conscience keeper however never ever seems to be put to interrogation. The so called national media, mostly located in its territory, caters to its ego, its whims and its undue claim on prime time, perpetuating grand myth making about this enigmatic city laced with duplicity and unabashed self serving temperament.
The women of Gohna and Kohima will have to stand for themselves. Delhi is busy nursing its ego on India's Daughter in the TV studios and on Twitter. The shrieks of the gangrape victim in Haryana, who committed suicide a few days back, unable to handle the cruelty of stigma and an unjust world around, did not reach Delhi. For, Delhi abhi bhi door hai.