This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines

by Barkha Dutt

  Being a television journalist at a time that has recorded some of the most seismic shifts in Indian society has allowed me rare insights into the way my country works. It was my desire to explore what to me are the most interesting aspects of the ongoing churning within Indian society that made me first want to write this book.

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  It is true in many ways that India has changed more dramatically over the last twenty-five years than at any other period since Independence. That massive and rapid change is also reflected in the transformation of my own industry.

  As a journalist—and a generalist—who is more suited to working from deadline to deadline, you may wonder what made me actually go through with the writing of This Unquiet Land. First, I felt that it would be interesting for me to explore the underlying causes and effects (some obvious, some less apparent) of the cataclysmic change that I had been reporting on for decades. Second, I wanted to write about the impact my profession—the world of television news—has had on every major Indian event from the 1990s onwards. Riots, the challenge of left-wing extremism, our staggering economic and social inequities, the centre-staging of corruption, the evolution of politics as a performance made for TV and the birth of middle-class activism (and thus, middle-class politics) have all been framed by television discourse.

  Like the country, my own industry today stands at the edge of major transformation. Anchors have become more glamorous, some networks even have in-house stylists. Talking heads have ousted on-the-ground reportage during prime time. Hashtags occupy the space once meant for pictures in a perfect illustration of a reductionist national debate. Judgement is served as instantly as 2-minute Maggi noodles and the more strident and hyperbolic you are, the better. Television news has begun to feel the pressure of social media, and Twitter trends tend to determine the ‘content hierarchy’ of a news bulletin. Because the online commentary is so politically polarized there is increasing pressure on journalists to affiliate themselves to stated ideologies and take sides. Most worryingly, journalists—especially younger ones who are less used to being constantly judged by viewers—have begun to worry far too much about being ‘liked’ on Twitter or Facebook, often modulating what they say based on the sort of abuse they think they may have to face online.

  The flux within media, the clash between old (mainstream) media and social media mirrors the multiple battles being waged between Old and New India every day. It is these strands of change that bind my narrative together. I am neither a pundit, nor an academic; I have only written about areas that I have reported on. Many of the conversations and encounters in this book took place over the course of my career. I have identified those I was talking to, barring a few cases where I have not in order to protect the confidentiality of the source. I should also say that this is not the definitive ‘India’ book—not that there has ever been, or can ever be, such a thing. Rather, this is a book about some of the major fault lines that I have followed for nearly four decades.

  The place of women, terrorism, sectarianism, Kashmir, the games politicians play, the rapidly changing class and caste equations within our society—all these are aspects of India that I have obsessed about throughout my career, and it is these that I have explored as deeply as possible in the book, although each of these subjects could do with a book to themselves. I have not gone too deep into the law and order situation, the judiciary, the crying lack of infrastructure, corruption, our defective education and healthcare sectors, pollution, environmental degradation, our foreign policy and corporate scams, among others, because these aren’t necessarily stories I have reported on at any great length. However, many of these fault lines make their appearance in various chapters, because nothing that is good or bad about society exists on its own (to state the obvious—everything is linked in one way or the other).

  As I have said earlier, the great advantage of exploring ideas and events, at some length, and after the passage of time, is that one is able to have a better sense of them. Working on the book gave me the opportunity to get a proper handle on the rumblings beneath the surface of this unquiet land and enabled me to measure visible and unmeasurable tremors that will change it for the better or worse in the near future. And when I finished writing it I realized it had helped me understand my country better.

  One

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  THE PLACE OF WOMEN

  I

  ON MY EIGHTEENTH birthday, my father asked me to choose any two books I wanted as a gift. I picked Daughter of the East by Benazir Bhutto and a collection of essays by Germaine Greer entitled The Madwoman’s Underclothes. At the time, my often impetuous formulations on the gender debate had little nuance, and my understanding of poverty, privilege, caste and other elements of my country was limited; consequently my feminism was simplistic, and without context.

  Regardless, I was proud of my feminist sensibility. As I have said, it was largely shaped by a real person—my gutsy, unconventional mother—but also by the much more abstract world of books by writers like Greer, Gloria Steinem, Virginia Woolf and, much later, Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi. That I did not read the great Urdu writer Ismat Chughtai’s iconoclastic Terhi Lakeer (The Crooked Line) or Sarojini Naidu’s poems until long afterwards was evidence of just how culturally unidimensional I was during my student days.

  Back then—on the cusp of the nineties—we debated gender with a certitude that left no room for the slightest self-doubt. Why was the woman expected to take her husband’s name after marriage? Did the institution of marriage even make sense? Why did we bring up our daughters on a Barbie diet and our sons on a staple of mindlessly violent video games? Was waxing our legs and painting our toenails an example of pandering to the male gaze?

  This is not to say that these do not remain valid questions in the eternal, and I would argue, universal, debate around what makes us women who we are. I have never understood the scorn with which these issues were, and are, sometimes dismissed as ‘westernized’. Today, more than two decades later, I still get worked up over these intractable questions. But, in the years of our youthful feminism, we certainly didn’t understand just how different things were outside our circle of comfort for millions of Indian women who were battling brutality of a kind that made some of our concerns seem luxuriously self-indulgent.

  As young student activists and feminists, our battles were sincere. We vowed never to accept a ‘Ladies’ seat in the overcrowded university bus. We petitioned the well-heeled St Stephen’s establishment to open its doors to women in the BA Pass programme—no one had thought of questioning why they weren’t allowed, to begin with. We fought with our male friends to get St Stephen’s to open its Residence (hostel accommodation) to female students. Only students-in-residence could run for college president; with no such option for women, the top union post was closed to them. The boys, only half jokingly, argued that women-in-residence would take away their freedom to walk about the corridors half-naked. Dr John Hala, a former principal, had quipped, without the slightest trace of embarrassment, that he’d have to open a maternity ward on campus if he accepted the demand for half the residence blocks to be reserved for women. He’d shown the same brazen chauvinism during one of the institution’s most infamous controversies in 1985 when three male students had smuggled skirts, shorts and panties out of the ladies’ common room and strung them across the cross in the main balcony of the college. As protests erupted, Hala told newspapers it was a ‘domestic issue’.

  There was a seeming paradox about this. On the one hand, our beloved college was steeped in the best liberal traditions—it encouraged dissent, argument and rebellion. At the same time, it would keep throwing up instances of sexism within its precincts, some subterranean, some overt. Authors and bureaucrats, ministers and artists—some of India’s biggest names had graduated from St Stephen’s. Yet, all these years, the tradition of the ‘Chick Chart’—a public roster listing the ‘sexiest’ women in college—had survived in the name of ritual and custom. Were
we going to be ‘cool’ and laugh along, replace it with a list of our own that similarly objectified the men, or protest its very existence?

  We remained preoccupied with these battles—big and small. In our little world, we saw ourselves as crusaders for equality, unmindful of an entire universe of gross prejudices that lay outside the boundaries of our socio-economic cocoon. It would be many years before we understood how class and culture complicated the gender discourse.

  There was only one issue that did cross the economic and social barrier—sexual violence and abuse. Even though every single girl I knew had her own sordid experience to share, oddly, it was not at the forefront of our heated college conversations. For all our ostensible empowerment, like so many Indian women, we had probably come to accept, albeit subconsciously, that some form of sexual violation was an inevitable consequence of our coming of age. So, day after day, crushed into a corner of a packed public bus, we would alternate between anger and resignation when leery men pawed our breasts or pinched our bottoms.

  Some days, we would slap our assaulters, on other days we would push them away or shrug them off. In both situations a voice inside us would suggest that we were lucky—this was not rape or abuse, it was what was (and continues to be) hideously described as ‘eve-teasing’. This was the level to which we had internalized society’s denial of sexual dignity to us. We mentally calculated how bad the abuse could have been and were ‘relieved’ when it didn’t plummet to the absolute depths of depravity.

  In the middle-class neighbourhood of South Delhi where I lived, boys who were not yet eighteen would stalk me on their two wheelers, swerving towards me as they whizzed past, an arm outstretched to grab my breasts or pull my hair, laughing and whistling with glee at my visible rage. When I wasn’t feeling combative, I learnt, like many women of my generation, to walk alongside the rows of residential houses instead of on the road, so that I could quickly slip inside an open gate and pretend it was my own home if I needed to duck an especially unpleasant set of goons. Yet, there was no conscious sense of victimhood to our lives. Instead, I suspect, in a peculiar Indian version of boot camp we saw ourselves as hardy women made stronger by the wars we fought against the frequent infiltrations into our private spaces. We came to treat such instances of harassment and abuse as the rites of passage of growing up female in India.

  II

  In 1990, around the time I was proudly proclaiming my feminism in college, the Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen wrote a discomfiting essay in the New York Review of Books that revealed that 100 million women were ‘missing’ from Asia and parts of Africa, most of them in China and India. A few years later, in 1995, a UNICEF report revealed that there were between 40 and 50 million girls and women ‘missing’ from India’s population. Missing was a polite euphemism for gender-driven genocide.

  In 2006, the UN published another staggering statistic: every day 7,000 baby girls were aborted or killed right after being born. In other words, a girl was aborted or murdered every twelve seconds in India. If she wasn’t murdered in the womb, sand or tobacco juice was forced down her nostrils when she opened her mouth to cry so that she would choke and die. Renuka Chowdhury, the then Minister for Women and Child Development in the UPA government at the centre, admitted that in the previous two decades alone, 10 million girl children in India had been killed by their parents. She called it a ‘national crisis’.

  But, on the sun-soaked lawns of St Stephen’s College, in our well-intentioned if elitist bubble none of this was what we were anxious or outraged about. Our privileged existence channelled our aggressive fight for identity and equality in other directions. Indeed, most of us thought of ourselves as glass-ceiling busters, supremely independent and free of the shackles that women in other countries were ensnared by. I remember the sense of superiority I felt years later when I found a copy of the The Rules by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider tucked away in the underwear drawer of my American roommate at Columbia University. It was self-help pap that ostensibly helped you land Mr Right. The book urged women to be ‘easy to be with, but hard to get’. I would watch in astonishment as my super-bright roommate, a post-doctoral history candidate, fought back her urge to phone the attractive man she’d just been out on a date with, because The Rules forbade the woman from making the first move. She had all the usual questions about arranged marriages in India and whether my father was going to bundle me off with some man I’d never met. I didn’t fit a single one of her stereotypes about India, I thought rather smugly to myself. Instead, I sneered at the institutionalized dating rituals that trapped otherwise accomplished women, even in New York, the world’s grittiest city. I would proudly list the many women who had become prime ministers and presidents in South Asia, astonished that Americans had been unable to crack the political glass ceiling in their country.

  At Columbia—while filming a documentary about the premium placed on motherhood and the lengths couples were ready to go to for a biological child—I remember standing on the editing room’s radiator in frustrated anger when a classmate from the Midwest demanded that the clips of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem leading an abortion-rights rally be deleted from the finished version of our student project. An otherwise laid-back and quiet sort of guy, he was an adamant pro-lifer who did not believe in a woman’s fundamental right to abortion.

  Once again, I retaliated with the Indian example of how we had closed the debate on abortion and women’s reproductive rights long ago, while the so-called developed world still grappled with these issues. My self-righteous outbursts made no space for gender-driven illegal abortions—mass murders really—that were my country’s abiding shame; quite truthfully, in the sliver of India that had been my little universe, I did not even stop to think about them. In effect, I had confused the many paradoxes of India for progressiveness. It would be several years before I would confront the fact that, for a woman, India was one of the most hostile and unequal countries in the world.

  This wasn’t to say that the generalizations made about India and the place of women, especially in the West, weren’t infuriatingly distorted or, worse still, lacking in any self-awareness. I sometimes wrestled with competing impulses—rage at the relentless horrors women battled every day and simultaneous impatience at the Western world’s many caricatural notions about us. But this was not before I had undertaken my own journey of ‘unlearning’ and introspection.

  The first challenge to my simplistic certitudes came from reporting on the gang rape of a grassroots activist in a dusty Rajasthan village in 1992. I had just become a journalist and this was one of my earliest assignments.

  Her saffron dupatta draped around her head, red bindi gleaming in the sun, her demeanour stoic, her body hunched over a potter’s wheel, Bhanwari Devi betrayed little emotion as she spoke about how she had been sexually assaulted by a group of so-called upper caste men. Her husband, Mohan, was forced to watch mutely as the men took turns at thrusting themselves on her. They assaulted her with impunity because they were protected by custom and village tradition. Bhanwari Devi was a Dalit, an ‘untouchable’ who was expected to keep a respectful social distance, draw water from a different village well and accept and obey all that she was commanded to do. She was theirs to do with as they pleased.

  In the eyes of the accused, there were many reasons for Bhanwari Devi to be a ready target—her caste, her gender and the fact that she had dared to campaign against child marriages in the village. In this instance, she had tried to stop her rapists from marrying off a nine-month-old baby to a one-year-old child. Ironically, as a saathin or volunteer with a government-sponsored campaign, she had only been doing her job; one for which she was then paid all of Rs 200 a month. For this, and for daring to take the perpetrators to court after she was raped, Bhanwari Devi had been pushed to the outskirts of Bhateri village, where she lived ostracized by the rest of the community.

  When I arrived in the village with a television crew to report on her battle, the men were a
ggressive and hostile to our questions. The leader of the gang that had raped Bhanwari—Ram Karan Gujjar, also the father of the infant who was being married off—scoffed at the charge against him and said Bhanwari had fabricated the entire story. The panchayat—meant to function as a self-governing, locally elected body—led the tirade against her. Thirty-nine village heads came together from across the district to demand that Bhanwari withdraw the case. If she failed to do so, every saathin attached to women’s groups in the area would be boycotted.

  ‘Hum tumhare saath nahin rahenge aur na hi sahyog denge (You cannot live as our neighbour and we will not support you in any way),’ bellowed the sarpanch of Bhateri to Bhanwari Devi, happy to go on the record and on camera to issue his threat. But unfazed and determined, Bhanwari Devi was adamant about punishing the men who had violated her ‘izzat’. Most rape survivors choose to hide behind a veil of anonymity, daunted by the stigma that still attaches itself to rape, but not Bhanwari Devi. She refused to pull her pallu over her face. She wanted the world to see the rage in her eyes. With virtually no one to support her but her husband—even her brothers cut off ties with her for refusing to accept the monetary compensation later offered by the accused—she stood alone, and strong.

  In the immediate aftermath of the rape, Mohan told his wife he wanted to drown himself in the village stream. She urged him to be stronger. The nearest police chowki was ten kilometres away but was manned by an officer who was a Gujjar, the same caste as that of the accused. Bhanwari Devi knew she would have no luck there; she’d have to travel further, closer to the state capital Jaipur. The next morning, they took a bus for the city, in what would be the beginning of an interminably long journey.