By Valson Thampu

Power can license you to say anything you want with assured immunity. It can also shut you up. Ask Maneka Gandhi, if you want further enlightenment on this anomaly.

One of the most astonishing features of the ongoing Jallikattu imbroglio is this archetypical animal activist’s deafening silence. For once, Maneka has nothing to say! Startlingly significant; because she is not the one to keep quiet on animal rights issues.

Late in 2014 it was. I was then the Principal of St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. My phone rang. Maneka Gandhi was at the other end of the line. I felt honoured.

She was peremptory in tone and text.

“Are you hounding out dogs from your campus?” she queried. Before I could respond she resumed, “You are in violation of the court order.” She instructed me to renounce my anti-canine intentions and activities.
What was the context?

St. Stephen’s admits a substantial number of visually challenged students. They are allotted on-campus accommodation, with all attendant facilities, on priority. Dogs, demographically virile and fertile, in increasing numbers park themselves in the corridors of residential blocks.

Blind students, emerging from their rooms, step or stub on them accidentally and get bitten. Instances after instances happened. It is not merely a matter of getting bitten. The follow up of anti-rabies vaccination is even more traumatic.

Even for a sighted person getting dog-bitten is a trauma. For blind students, all the more so. Should an educational institution, established primarily to serve young men and women, and not nurture dogs, take cognizance of it or not? Should dogs or students be the priority for an educational institution?
Students are admitted through an elaborate process of selection. An unwritten covenant exists between them and the institution. Especially in respect of resident students, the institution is in a state of special responsibility. If anything happens to them, the college will be hauled up, denounced and demonized. It will then be not a matter at all of animal rights, but of administrative callousness. Why couldn’t the Principal ensure, in person, that blind students were safe on his campus?

The dogs, in contrast, invite themselves. They are squatters. The institution has no obligation by them. Such obligations as might exist must be treated as wholly and purely voluntary. I have not been able to make sense, despite trying hard, of the wisdom that a stray dog that manages to sneak into the campus of a college should have rights that supervene the rights of students to be safe. Rabies is, after all, a life-threatening disease.

I recovered from my initial bewilderment on account of being addressed by a VVIP–always an unmanning experience for poor, insignificant pedagogues-and submitted to the Hon’ble minister, “Madam, why don’t you, given your passionate commitment to animal rights and welfare, take away these dogs and arrange for their welfare elsewhere?”

I was, again out of sheer nervousness, unguarded enough to ask,
“Should charity be practised at the expense of someone else, especially of blind students? Why not pay for one’s own convictions?”
The phone was banged at the other end.

I remembered Nikolai Berdyaev, (1874-1948) the Russian philosopher. (Philosophy, by the way, comes in handy when you are completely out of your wits.)

A false and spurious sentimentality, Berdyaev wrote, will arise in the wake of the dominance of man by machine. The world of technology, with its army of machines and gadgets, is invasively powerful. It penetrates deep into human nature. The machines we use slowly shape us after their own image and likeness.

The German philosopher of religion–Ludwig Feuerbach-argued in the mid-19th century, that rather than God making man after His own image, the truth is that man makes gods after his own image. Now, a century and a half after Feuerbach, we can say with some conviction that it is a case of machines-man-made, no doubt-making man after their own images, something which the French philosopher Jacques Elul describes as “the great betrayal of the west.”
Only consider the way our written language has changed in the wake of our addiction to cell phones and SMS-es. It is “gr8” isn’t it? (SMS is, after all short mail service. It demands that words be shortened, even gratuitously!) I know young people who delete files of friendships. There are people who keep their ‘foot on the accelerator’ when it comes to situations and human dealings. Instances can be multiplied.

A major casualty in this technology-machines age is our emotional vitality. It is not long ago that we started talking about “emotion-quotient.” Now the fashion has shifted to spiritual quotient, which means that we haven’t been able to do anything about the former.

When genuine emotions wither away, its vacuum will be filled, Berdyaev argues, by a shallow and spurious sentimentality. Shallowness craves to be seen. As a rule, whatever is deep shuns public display and whatever is shallow is exhibitionist by instinct. The value of everything is only to the extent that it is seen by others.

Perhaps (who can say anything for sure these days?) this explains the yawning gap between our sentimental fervor for animals in public and our callous indifference to their welfare in reality. As Prime Minister Modi asked, in his own inimitably rhetorical and caustic fashion, why is that gau rakshaks are found wanting in caring for cows? Why do thousands of cows die consuming plastic bags month after month? Had Modi read Berdyaev he would have had a ready answer.

So, in Tamil Nadu a public drama of epic proportions is being enacted in the glare of national attention. The Supreme Court says that Jallikattu involves cruelty to the bulls involved. The fervent advocates of Jallikattu admit that to them bulls have a divine status. So, dear Maneka Gandhi? Won’t we like to hear from you?

Why are you so tantalizingly quiet?
Intervene and afford us the clarity that only you can!

(Valson Thampu is former principal of St. Stephen’s College, Delhi)