An elephant, Sadhus and Delhi riots

The value of Indian lives

An elephant, Sadhus and Delhi riots: The value of Indian lives

Rajeev Srinivasan

On the evening of 2nd June came the horrifying news that a pregnant wild elephant had been killed in Malappuram, Kerala. There was also news that AAP leader Tahir Hussain had been accused in a chargesheet related to the horrific Delhi riots in February. 

But nobody paid any attention. Everyone was riveted to the news about nationwide riots in the US. 

And a news report said actress Kangana Ranaut questioned why the Hindi film industry, which was very exercised over the #BlackLivesMatter campaign in the US, had been more or less silent about the brutal murders of sadhus in Palghar, virtually next door.

Even the news about what looks like strategic Chinese incursions into Ladakh, and the possibility of a shooting war, went off the headlines. 

There is something seriously wrong here. The news of the killing of George Floyd, a black man,  by a policeman in the US, and the riots there, deserved our attention. But there is terrible information asymmetry: similar atrocities in India do not get any attention in the US; even if they do, they are used for colonial, racialized tropes about how beastly Indians are.

We can understand the US media and its imperial omphalos, to use a phrase from Suhash Charkravarty’s masterful The Raj Syndrome, about British propaganda that successfully created a fantasy of India as the uncivilized Other: we are still enslaved by that. 

But Indians really have to stop thinking of themselves as the periphery in contrast to the imperial metropole of New York, London, Los Angeles. A great deal of this cultural confusion and lack of self-confidence can be attributed to our subservience to English, which condemns us to be forever second-class. 

The value of an Indian life has to be at least as high as that of an American life. The fact that Madhu is forgotten is ominous. He was a starving tribal youth in Kerala’s Attappadi, beaten to death by a group of middle class settlers in tribal lands, for stealing a handful of rice, after they took selfies with him, tied up with his own lungi. 

The pregnant wild elephant came into a village in search of food, but she didn’t go on a rampage. She trusted the people who fed her a pineapple laced with fire-crackers, which exploded in her mouth and destroyed her lower law. Instead of running riot with pain, she merely walked into the river and stood there, presumably trying to get the water to soothe her pain. She died standing in the river for days; she was not even euthanized. 

An elephant calf takes a couple of years to mature; the fetus too died, of course. The double murder of this majestic creature and her baby, possibly the most revered, loved and respected animal in India, is a crime against Indian culture and shakes us to the core. 

There was another incident in Idukki district, Kerala, where an illegal cross on a forest hilltop had saw blades installed in it to deter elephants. An elephant was found bleeding with its trunk hanging, cut open halfway through. There were several cases of stray dogs being sliced with swords from two-wheeled vehicles: apparently terrorists training in the use of weapons. 

Why does this happen in Kerala? Why did Madhu’s murder happen in Kerala? Perhaps because Kerala is the place where the whole concept of ‘rights without responsibilities’ has taken hold the most. Everyone is aware of what society owes them, but not vice versa. Cynically, in the ‘most literate’ state, people believe they can kill animals and people without consequences. 

That is true of some people in Delhi as well, as has been seen especially in college campuses during the recent riots. The rhetoric around the riots was about ‘rights’ people, even if they were illegal alien Bangladeshis or Rohingyas. The fact is that illegal aliens have next to no rights anywhere in the world. Ask the Central American illegal aliens in the US, cowering in fear of the dreaded ‘migra’.

The Delhi riots were apparently not spontaneous: they were well-planned and executed, with stockpiles of stones and bricks on rooftops, home-made large catapults to deliver them, guns, acid, etc. The hunting down and extraordinarily brutal torture killing of an IB officer, Ankit Sharma, suggests that a message was being delivered to the law and order establishment. 

In fact, some of the tactics from Delhi were visible in the US riots too: unexplained pallets of bricks (perfect to throw at shop windows), mysterious outsiders. These were planned.

The fact that two Sadhus, Swami Kalpavrisha Giri and Swami Sushil Giri, and their driver Neelesh Telgade, were beaten to death by a mob in Palghar district, Maharashtra, with the act being captured on video, is astonishing. Religious figures are generally treated with respect; but here it appeared that even the police were complicit in allowing them to be lynched.

Those who have no concerns about these horrifying killings in India really have no business mourning George Floyd. It becomes either empty virtue signaling, or, even worse, a profound case of an inferiority complex. #BlackLivesMatter, #IndianLivesMatter too.