By Valson Thampu
An actress is waylaid and molested. Sex, we are told, came in by the backdoor in this carefully scripted episode. The plot hinged on extortion. (As though rape is not extortion: murderous extortion).
Maneka Gandhi makes a feeble effort to link this to the Kerala political dispensation. Political opportunism, the lady must know, is the problem, not the solution. I hold no brief for the Pinarayi government. But, it takes extreme prejudice to arraign a newly formed government, for the deformation of human nature that abduction and rape involve. Even so, creation of a sturdy security environment for all, and in particular for women, is admittedly the duty of the state.
This is not the first time a woman has had to face the beast in Kerala. Crimes against women are rampant in what is offensively labeled as God’s own country. The label masks the truth about the state and mocks God. For one thing, Kerala is not a ‘country’. God has neither country nor home. God is not partial and has no sense of ownership. It’s high time we discarded this stupid, tourism-driven caricature of Kerala.
Going by available evidence, Kerala is, among all Indian states, the place least safe for women. It is also, at the same time, the state in which the sex ratio favors females. It is a pioneer in education and the front-runner in liquor consumption. It is a demesne of consumerism and a backyard of crime, which is explained away by attributing it to better crime reporting, rather than rampant crime committing.
What is worse: Kerala lives in denial. Every now and then shocking and shameful things happen. Barring a fleeting flutter, nothing by way of healing the malady or rectifying the social aberration is attempted. Crime portends to become part of our way of life.
No crime, sex crimes included, happens in a vacuum. Crime signals social degradation. It is in a sick society that crime thrives and seems irremediable.
We must make a distinction between individuals who are criminals and society that is getting oriented towards criminality. There has never been a society in history wholly free from crime. But we have had healthier and saner societies.
Like in the case of illnesses of individuals, social illnesses too are largely life-style and culture driven. Just as the individual would not know what ails him –except symptomatically and in a vague, uncertain fashion- so also a society may know its illness. It may, surely, know “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”
Here is the truth about Kerala which, in my opinion, is the background to the present horrific and condemnable instance of atrocity against women.
Over the last half a century, Kerala pursued acquisition of wealth at all costs as its supreme obsession. People in droves migrated to other countries, disrupting homes and neighborhoods -tearing families apart- in pursuit of quick and big money. The social cost this exacted is exacted is still to be studied.
In Kerala it is money, not man, that matters. So, when Kerala is held up as a model of development worthy of emulation, I feel uneasy, even angry. Valuing material gains higher than the richness of being human is a recipe for disaster. This is the foremost lesson Kerala exemplifies. I can only hope that this is not lost on the rest of the country.
Second, Kerala has been, now for a few decades, in the throes of consumerism. Barely half a century ago, it was considered awkward to eat out. The family was the haven of life. As a young boy growing up in a lower middle class home, it was natural for me to be back in the house “before sun down.” Meeting basic needs, not thrashing about in a sea of indulgence, was the norm. I now live in a different ambience. It is far more expensive to live in Kerala than in the metropolises of India.
Where this becomes a double-edged sword is that the pursuit of wealth breaks out of all ethical and social restraints and assumes an extent of brutality that is truly worrisome.
A few years ago I engaged a young contractor, a fellow Christian, well-known to me as a man of fervent spirituality, to renovate my old house in Trivandrum, acquired second-hand. Even his ring-tone was spiritual! Having been out of the state for nearly half a century, I was naïve enough to trust him with the work. The initial estimate was 12 lakhs (1.2 million) rupees. By the time the work was half done he put up bills for double that amount. What broke my heart was the cool callousness with which he bled me to near-death. I realized that this was the norm. You trust at peril. Criminality of this kind is not even reckoned.
Each time I have engaged anyone for any kind of service –from hiring auto rickshaws to doing maintenance work or pursuing any piece of work involving government agencies, I have stumbled on the hard rock of predatory greed and sheer lack of fellow humanity.
Kerala needs to revive its sense of sanctity about life if it is to make any headway. At the present time, this is a blind spot. I had a couple of young Japanese students visit me the other day. When we sat down to lunch, they insisted on saying their prayer. The essence of that prayer was, “everything is sacred”. For us, everything is ‘up for grabs.’
Kerala is a pioneer in mass-basing education. But what has education contributed to the cultural and human wholesomeness of Kerala? I became an educational refugee at the age of twenty — had to leave the state in search of acceptable standards of education. The education sector in Kerala is in shambles. Is that not a crime against the people? Is not a silent atrocity routinely committed on the students day after day? Why is it tolerated tamely?
What I encounter routinely is the distressing dearth of higher interests. Keralites are fiercely focused. That is their doing and undoing. They are like horses bridled, capable only of a tubular vision. This reduces life to a hand-to-mouth existence. This vision of life can be defined simply, “Man lives by bread alone.” The problem then is that man becomes less than human.
Also, everything gets converted to bread, or means bread. This truth is writ large over the molestation of the film actress. If the version reported so far is true, the accused only wanted to trap the actress and extort money from her. Sexual perversion came in only along the way. (This canard strains my credulity. But let’s take it at face value.)
What needs to be noted is the easy convertibility between bread and flesh from the perspective of those who have the appearance of men, but are worse than animals.
The crucial question to ask is this:
Have these animals dropped from the sky, or have we nurtured them by default? Is there no social responsibility in a way of life sliding and slipping towards crime, violence and depravity?
It is dishonest to put on, in a knee-jerk reaction, the mantle of victim-sympathizers. There is guilt and denial in this posturing. Kerala culture is tainted with the logic of crime, if not the doing of crime. Why is politics, to take just one example, so violent and murderous in Kerala? Why do we allow routine life to be routinely paralyzed by bandhs and marches?
Kerala is a vast tragedy. The people are immensely talented. But the cultural, social and political matrix that has prevailed now for a few decades is inhospitable for the development and empowerment of the people.
What is the result? Those who can, leave the state. They go to various destinations and become excellent workers. They prosper and command respect. The rest stay in the state, unemployed and directionless. Their only refuge is the beverage corporation. Some commit suicide; Kerala suicide rate being three times higher than the national average. Cochin or Kochi, the most developed city in Kerala, carries the dubious distinction of being the crime capital of India.
All this would not have mattered, if Keralites were substandard. They are not! Give them a hairline of an opportunity, they will excel. But, not in Kerala. There is something about Kerala that is almost oppressively inhibiting when it comes to soulful work. My foremost struggle in re-locating to Kerala was, in the first six months, to break free from this “something-in-the-air” and to imbue my living environment with fiery earnestness and express enthusiasm for work.
We are a sentimental people. We beat our breasts when aberrations surface. But we are not interested in averting these aberrations. We think the noise we generate and sentiments we air will sweep human nature of its deep-seated perversions and rid the extant culture of its criminal propensities. We will not educate ourselves to be a saner society. We will not refine public sentiments and imbue human outlook with respect for life. We discount courtesy towards one another. We do nothing to create the requisite foundation for justice. We would rather curse the rot than get a grip on it.
And that’s the pity.
(Valson Thampu is a former principal of St Stephen’s College, Delhi)