We never tire of boasting about India’s ancient “aarsha bharat sanskaar” and more prominently the Hindutva brigade under the RSS umbrella. Juxtapose this with the “urination” incident in Madhya Pradesh, where a ‘representative’ of the local BJP MLA peed on a hapless tribal labourer. The heinous nature of such an act cannot simply be covered up by an outreach by chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, who invited the labourer to his official residence, draped him in a shawl and washed his feet in a “show” of penance. The urination atrocity is demonstrative of the larger society’s ugly underbelly; a kind of barbarity that is widely prevalent across states and worse, in the Hindi belt. Hapless humans are treated worse than cattle.
Chouhan has been running Madhya Pradesh repeatedly for several years. The state is notorious for its feudalistic culture mixed with acts of lawlessness and dacoity. The media there has been in a captive form, its personnel enjoying the patronage of the establishment and having no commitment to the society. The social media that exposed the despicable urination act on the tribal man could, however, not be “purchased” with government largesse as it is composed of a large army of ordinary individuals or activists across the spectrum. In normal course, this would have been dismissed as just another intemperate or condemnable act and the matter put to rest. But, the chief minister crawled on his knees this time to wash the feet of the poor labourer for the obvious reason that Madhya Pradesh is at the doorsteps of the assembly elections and votes of the SC-ST communities are important for him and his party to win it and retain power. After performing this “escape act” and self-publicizing the visuals of him hosting the labourer at his official residence, Chouhan could be trusted to give a decent burial to the whole matter.
The case filed against the perpetrator, or the police demolishing a portion of his house on the contention it was illegally built, were all for public consumption. The BJP ‘representative’ might face no serious repercussions for his notorious act as has been the trend with most cases of atrocities against those in the lower rungs of the society. The RSS that lords over the nation’s ruling party is well within its rights to concentrate on campaigns like Ghar Vapsi or on several mundane topics unmindful of what’s happening right under its nose. But, the question is who will clean up the Augean stables. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s two terms in office were marked by a disinterest in changing India for the better in most respects.
