The Hindu : Karnataka News : Avaunt, thee wretch! Home thoughts, from home

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Dec 25, 2007
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Karnataka

Karnataka

Avaunt, thee wretch! Home thoughts, from home

One of the most famous images in Indian popular art is that of Vishwamitra banishing Menaka

The words appear frequently in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. The context is always the same: The speaker, standing tall and representing or seeing himself (rarely does a female character exhibit such moral certitude) as virtue incarnated, admonishes the cowering wretch lacking such moral fibre, often a woman who has tricked him to digress from the straight and narrow path, to get away from his sight.

The situation has also been depicted in the visual arts. One of the most famous images in Indian popular art is that of that odious prig, Vishwamitra, banishing Menaka after bedding her for years, and indeed getting her with child, forever from his sight with an accusing finger pointing to the exit. Images like these are the common currency of Indian films where the patriarch, or the faithful family retainer, re-enacts virtually the same scene in film after film, admonishing those who have sullied khandan ki izzat.

Such hypocrisy, the peculiar vice of the self-righteous incapable of accepting that like the rest of humanity they too are flawed, nowadays seems to be infecting those who claim to be rational. In political terms, the former are fundamentally anti-democratic, self-righteous beyond belief, seeing evil everywhere except in themselves, in contrast to the latter who view the world and the home in more rational terms and remain committed to a democratic culture and dialogue even with those they strongly disagree with.

The colonial period too presented such contrasting perspectives. Thus, the majority of the pagan and heathen natives, with the exception of those who had made peace with the colonists, were invested with vices beyond the comprehension of the civilising coloniser, or for that matter, the native.

When such natives caused trouble, as they often did, the mildest chastisement was banishment, a procedure for which the colonists coined a new term, ‘externment’, as opposed to ‘internment’. The word is not found in any of the standard dictionaries, though the idea as well as the word continues to be used in India. DNA of December 20 carried this headline: “HC quashes externment order against Sethi”. The Tenth Edition of Chambers Dictionary, following what the earlier editions had said, continues to define the term detenu as a prisoner, esp. a political prisoner in India.

With such a history where the democratic government has seamlessly appropriated so many oppressive features of colonial rule, making these peculiarly its own, preventive detention going back to the days before Independence and continuing since then under different names being the most glaring example, it is sad to see progressive forces falling back on the most repressive measures devised by colonial rulers to fight their legitimate, indeed necessary, political battles. What else can one make of the near unanimous demand of democratic forces that those inciting communal tension in Bababudangiri under the cover of observing Datta Jayanti should be banned from entering the district and those already in the district engaged in such communal mobilisation should be externed from the district?

Assuming that the State concedes such a demand, would communal mobilisation be all right if it takes place outside Bababudangiri or outside Chikmagalur district? This ‘Not In My Backyard’ mindset, with its open invitation to the State to use anti-democratic measures, poses grave dangers to the very democratic values that those protesting communal mobilisation seek to advance. Indeed, measures like externment or political detention are, of their nature, double-edged swords that make no distinction between democrats and fascists.

M.S. Prabhakara

kamaroopi@gmail.com

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