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| India's current outpouring of anger is unprecedented. Can it bring change? | India's current outpouring of anger is unprecedented. Can it bring change? |
| (about 9 hours later) | |
| When she came to hear of the cruelty in Bhagalpur, Mrs Indira Gandhi, then India's prime minister, said she felt physically sick. "What has this country come to?" she asked the Indian parliament in Delhi on 30 November 1980. "How can anybody do this to their fellow men?" In Bhagalpur, 800 miles east of the capital, police had been systematically blinding people by poking out their eyes with bicycle spokes or burning them with acid. At least 30 men had been blinded in this way. It had been going on for many months, and stopped only after an anti-government newspaper, the Indian Express, broke the story. | When she came to hear of the cruelty in Bhagalpur, Mrs Indira Gandhi, then India's prime minister, said she felt physically sick. "What has this country come to?" she asked the Indian parliament in Delhi on 30 November 1980. "How can anybody do this to their fellow men?" In Bhagalpur, 800 miles east of the capital, police had been systematically blinding people by poking out their eyes with bicycle spokes or burning them with acid. At least 30 men had been blinded in this way. It had been going on for many months, and stopped only after an anti-government newspaper, the Indian Express, broke the story. |
| I went to the town soon after to interview the eyeless. How they had been blinded was easily described: policemen had pressed them to the floor of a police station and poked or poured into their eyes until they fainted. "Why?" was the harder question. The local answer was that they were all dacoits, or bandits who belonged to a caste notorious for its criminality. But why blind them? Why not simply shoot them, which in this part of India might have easily been arranged by a well tried method known as the "police encounter", whereby the dead officially get killed in an exchange of gunfire. A local tradition of punishment may have been partly to blame. The medical superintendent at Bhagalpur jail said police would usually deliver two or three blinded criminals a year – it was the recent "epidemic" that was unusual. Perhaps they were meant as walking advertisements for police power. None of the factors thought to explain turbulence in other parts of India seemed to apply: economic rivalries, conflicting religious identities. "From the outside, Bhagalpur seems like pure sadism," I wrote at the time, and though that was horrifying, it was not the most surprising aspect of the affair. | I went to the town soon after to interview the eyeless. How they had been blinded was easily described: policemen had pressed them to the floor of a police station and poked or poured into their eyes until they fainted. "Why?" was the harder question. The local answer was that they were all dacoits, or bandits who belonged to a caste notorious for its criminality. But why blind them? Why not simply shoot them, which in this part of India might have easily been arranged by a well tried method known as the "police encounter", whereby the dead officially get killed in an exchange of gunfire. A local tradition of punishment may have been partly to blame. The medical superintendent at Bhagalpur jail said police would usually deliver two or three blinded criminals a year – it was the recent "epidemic" that was unusual. Perhaps they were meant as walking advertisements for police power. None of the factors thought to explain turbulence in other parts of India seemed to apply: economic rivalries, conflicting religious identities. "From the outside, Bhagalpur seems like pure sadism," I wrote at the time, and though that was horrifying, it was not the most surprising aspect of the affair. |
| That came with the protests that swept through Bhagalpur when Gandhi's government awarded each blinded man about £1,000 in compensation, and suspended 15 policemen. Students and lawyers marched through the streets; traders shut up shop; a mob straddled the railway line and brought trains to a halt. Their sympathies were not with the victims, but the perpetrators. They were demonstrating in favour of a police force which, as they saw it, had made their town safe against dacoits who might chop off a woman's arm to steal her bangles or knife a shopkeeper in the course of raiding his shop. Where was the compensation for their misfortunes, people wanted to know. Why hadn't Gandhi thought about them? | That came with the protests that swept through Bhagalpur when Gandhi's government awarded each blinded man about £1,000 in compensation, and suspended 15 policemen. Students and lawyers marched through the streets; traders shut up shop; a mob straddled the railway line and brought trains to a halt. Their sympathies were not with the victims, but the perpetrators. They were demonstrating in favour of a police force which, as they saw it, had made their town safe against dacoits who might chop off a woman's arm to steal her bangles or knife a shopkeeper in the course of raiding his shop. Where was the compensation for their misfortunes, people wanted to know. Why hadn't Gandhi thought about them? |
| So far as I remember, those were the only demonstrations prompted by the Bhagalpur blindings. It would be fair to say that the rest of India was shocked by the blindings, but also that the shock came nowhere near the present torrent of anger and demand for social change that has followed the gang rape and death of a 23-year-old medical student in Delhi. India was a different country then, of course. Its few radio and TV stations were government-owned, and most of its newspapers rather austere. Bhagalpur was remote and difficult to reach from the big cities, and only a few reporters went. Visually, in that age of black-and-white photography and poor Indian newsprint, all the blindings amounted to were a few grey images of men with bandaged heads, or empty sockets where their eyes should have been. In Delhi this month, crowds have called for public executions and chemical castration, but 30 years ago the demand that Bhagalpur's sadists be punished was confined to a few newspaper editorials. Only one or two police officers served any considerable time in jail. | So far as I remember, those were the only demonstrations prompted by the Bhagalpur blindings. It would be fair to say that the rest of India was shocked by the blindings, but also that the shock came nowhere near the present torrent of anger and demand for social change that has followed the gang rape and death of a 23-year-old medical student in Delhi. India was a different country then, of course. Its few radio and TV stations were government-owned, and most of its newspapers rather austere. Bhagalpur was remote and difficult to reach from the big cities, and only a few reporters went. Visually, in that age of black-and-white photography and poor Indian newsprint, all the blindings amounted to were a few grey images of men with bandaged heads, or empty sockets where their eyes should have been. In Delhi this month, crowds have called for public executions and chemical castration, but 30 years ago the demand that Bhagalpur's sadists be punished was confined to a few newspaper editorials. Only one or two police officers served any considerable time in jail. |
| Accounting for the difference in popular reaction between 1980 and now, however, goes beyond the arrival of 100 satellite channels, Facebook and Twitter. There is the question of recognition: the demonstrators in Delhi identified with a victim who was part of their burgeoning urban, aspiring class, and might have been one of them, or their wife, girlfriend or sister. There is the question of social-cum-geographical distance: alleged criminals from a low caste in a faraway town in a then notoriously backward state, Bihar, were much less likely to attract sympathy or prolonged attention, however startling the cruelty inflicted on them. Finally, there is the question of feminism. | Accounting for the difference in popular reaction between 1980 and now, however, goes beyond the arrival of 100 satellite channels, Facebook and Twitter. There is the question of recognition: the demonstrators in Delhi identified with a victim who was part of their burgeoning urban, aspiring class, and might have been one of them, or their wife, girlfriend or sister. There is the question of social-cum-geographical distance: alleged criminals from a low caste in a faraway town in a then notoriously backward state, Bihar, were much less likely to attract sympathy or prolonged attention, however startling the cruelty inflicted on them. Finally, there is the question of feminism. |
| Rereading the story I wrote 30-odd years ago, I noticed an interesting word that I'd paid no attention to at the time. The word was "even", and it occurred when Jagannath Mishra, Bihar's chief minister, was trying to explain how the fact of the blindings had been kept from him. Legal petitions raised by the prisoners must somehow have got lost in the files, he said unpersuasively, and it was "beyond his comprehension" why no one in the opposition or the press had mentioned the crimes when normally "they highlight even a rape case". A rape, that is, where the police stood accused – a common event for poor women who entered police stations alone. As the Delhi feminist and publisher, Urvashi Butalia, wrote recently in a piece arguing against the death penalty for rapists (or anyone else): "Will we hang all police rapists? That's a lot of people to hang." | Rereading the story I wrote 30-odd years ago, I noticed an interesting word that I'd paid no attention to at the time. The word was "even", and it occurred when Jagannath Mishra, Bihar's chief minister, was trying to explain how the fact of the blindings had been kept from him. Legal petitions raised by the prisoners must somehow have got lost in the files, he said unpersuasively, and it was "beyond his comprehension" why no one in the opposition or the press had mentioned the crimes when normally "they highlight even a rape case". A rape, that is, where the police stood accused – a common event for poor women who entered police stations alone. As the Delhi feminist and publisher, Urvashi Butalia, wrote recently in a piece arguing against the death penalty for rapists (or anyone else): "Will we hang all police rapists? That's a lot of people to hang." |
| In the late 1970s, when I first came to India, the repression of women was easily ignored by the male outsider. The country's prime minister, after all, was a woman, and it was men who were said to have suffered most during her period of emergency rule, when some were forcibly sterilised. Women could travel safely in big cities after dark – though Delhi was an exception. Even in daylight on Delhi's buses, women got molested – grabbed, rubbed up against, leered at – but the press trivilialised these assaults by characterising them as "Eve-teasing". Women journalists, newsreaders and academics, a prime minister in a sari: surely the great struggle was largely historic, its great victories the abolition of suttee and the widows' remarriage act of the 19th century? | In the late 1970s, when I first came to India, the repression of women was easily ignored by the male outsider. The country's prime minister, after all, was a woman, and it was men who were said to have suffered most during her period of emergency rule, when some were forcibly sterilised. Women could travel safely in big cities after dark – though Delhi was an exception. Even in daylight on Delhi's buses, women got molested – grabbed, rubbed up against, leered at – but the press trivilialised these assaults by characterising them as "Eve-teasing". Women journalists, newsreaders and academics, a prime minister in a sari: surely the great struggle was largely historic, its great victories the abolition of suttee and the widows' remarriage act of the 19th century? |
| It was nonsense. In northern India, brides who didn't deliver enough dowry were sometimes set alight by their in-laws, who then told any investigation that the death was accidental – a sari set alight on a cooking fire, perhaps. Feminist protests caught the media's eye because some of these crimes, then as now, were in metropolitan Delhi. But in villages and up-country towns such as Bhagalpur, who knew what was happening, save among people there themselves, who might be too scared to talk, or who imagined rape as a male right? | It was nonsense. In northern India, brides who didn't deliver enough dowry were sometimes set alight by their in-laws, who then told any investigation that the death was accidental – a sari set alight on a cooking fire, perhaps. Feminist protests caught the media's eye because some of these crimes, then as now, were in metropolitan Delhi. But in villages and up-country towns such as Bhagalpur, who knew what was happening, save among people there themselves, who might be too scared to talk, or who imagined rape as a male right? |
| The commotion in Delhi might begin to change that. It would be foolish to think of the rape victim as a martyr in a cause – victims are victims – but enough protest and self-examination might one day mean that rape is punished even in the dustiest town, even when committed by the police, which would be a marvellous thing; especially marvellous if the police didn't beat up, blind or otherwise torture the suspects they had taken into custody. /> | |
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