The Hindu : Competitive bandhs

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Oct 01, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

Competitive bandhs

By Dipankar Gupta

Political demonstrations of grief are often a smokescreen to avoid performing public responsibilities.

THE FREQUENCY with which bandhs are declared in India does not so much signify concern of political actors with the stated issue, as much as a way of displaying a whole lot of emotions in order to get out of hard institutional work. Bandhs, in this sense, are a mischievous distraction for they pretend to convey the impression of sympathy when they are actually a stratagem for self-glorification.

In many ways these bandhs are analogous to the scene around the sick bed of a person suffering from a major illness. The room is crammed with so-called well-wishers who with the longest of faces voice platitudes of extreme solicitousness. They are quick with all kinds of advice on what the treatment regimen should be, and they are even willing to go as far as second-guess the specialist who is looking after the case. They will loudly commiserate with the patient's relatives, and even cry copiously in the presence of the poor patient.

But, if at that time, a nurse were to enter asking for blood that the patient urgently needs for surgery the next day, the crowd quickly melts away and soon the room is quite empty.

Bandhs are very nearly the same. In most bandhs there is a lot of wailing and a huge public display of lachrymose sympathy. After the bloody killings in the Akshardham temple in Gandhinagar, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Congress quickly got into an impromptu chest-beating competition and tried to outdo each other by calling for bandhs in protest against the grisly temple massacre. The fact is that bandhs have little utility in such a situation.

A bandh is presumably called when a political organisation wants to draw attention to a long-standing grievance. But in this case the Government, and, indeed, every political party, was fully aware of what happened to innocent devotees in the temple. Where then was the need for a bandh?

On occasions such as this a bandh is really an empty exercise. Like the crowd around the sick bed, the protagonists of a bandh are only interested in displaying how concerned they are instead of buckling down and doing something which is concretely useful to the situation.

An adequate institutional response in such instances would be to look after the victims and their families, and to trace the terrorists to their disreputable lairs and flush them out. But the bandh activists had none of this on their minds.

The VHP-Shiv Sena combine declared that the bandh was a success in large parts of India. Success in this case was measured by the number of shops that were forced to close down, by the number of buses that were damaged, and by the number of trains that were stalled by agitators.

In none of these demonstrations of political power were the victims of the massacre even remotely taken into consideration. In not one instance of stoning trains, damaging transport vehicles, or forcing commercial activities to close, did we get any closer to tracking down the terrorists.

The real inspiration behind a bandh is really to look for an excuse from getting away from hard work. It is hard work indeed to apply the healing anodyne in a constructive and caring fashion such that the victims and their families are actually rehabilitated.

It is also very hard work to track down the flow of terrorists and seal off all reservoirs of sympathies that they may possess among the population. This is a job that the security and the paramilitary forces cannot accomplish alone. They need the support of all political parties and concerned citizens.

Once again, these bandh activists did not have the slightest intention of proceeding on any of these fronts.

In fact, it is legitimate to argue that when a public tragedy occurs there should be a political taboo on bandhs. If people have time and energy on their hands they should help relieve public distress without adding to the strain on national resources.

Unfortunately, wasteful activism of the bandh kind has been condoned for all these years because the public too is largely uncaring when a tragedy occurs that affects other people. This is why the enormity of the cynicism with which bandh operators carry out their shallow demonstrative exercises goes by politically uncensored.

Contrast this with the public response to terrorism in America. When the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed in New York there was no bandh, strike or sit-in anywhere in the United States. The most urgent task was to rescue victims, to get to the terrorists, and to make sure, as far as possible, that such attacks do not happen again.

That New York was able to show the world that it was not just the Big Apple but also the big heart was because the thought of a dharna, strike, or bandh did not occur to any political party or rabble-rouser anywhere in America. This is what allowed firemen, doctors, volunteers and state officials to effectively help victims of the tragedy.

Bandhs are ways by which VHP and Shiv Sena activists hope to gain political capital but by doing the least work.

The New York experience demonstrates the contrast between how politicians in India handle public tragedies and how they should be dealt with by a citizen-caring political system. When bandhs are called in times of national tragedies they are hatched by people who are supremely callous of what citizens really need. This leads one to wonder why our political system tolerates such behaviour time and time again.

But it is not just the bandhs held in the aftermath of tragedies that demonstrate the uncaring character of our political system. In most cases, the governmental response to public disasters is equally thoughtless and gives every evidence of not wanting to do the hard work that really counts. Most Governments, this one included, usually believe that it is enough to make some ex gratia payment to victims and their families and then conveniently forget all about them. Governments therefore are also guilty of taking the short cut.

No matter what the nature of the disaster — a terrorist outrage, a train accident, a natural calamity — the Government of the day announces within hours that the victims and their families will be monetarily compensated and then a strange administrative amnesia sets in. Railway lines continue to lie in disrepair, cyclone affected areas are routinely devastated year on year, and terrorists strike with impunity now in Jammu, now in Gandhinagar.

What we must realise as concerned citizens is that political demonstrations of grief are often a smokescreen to avoid performing public responsibilities. As citizens then we must also let our political classes know that we have seen through their game.

(The writer is Professor, Centre for the Study of Social Systems, JNU.)

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