I was born in Jhansi. That was the last time i have ever been there. Before i was 5, i’d already lived in half the states of Northern India. Since the event mentioned earlier, i have made my presence felt in UP, West Bengal, Utaranchal,Nepal,Bhutan,JK,Punjab,Haryana, HP, Maharashtra,Bihar, Jharkhand, Delhi, Kerela,TN and now Karnataka. A modest list. Thanks to my Dad’s transferrable job. Settling down was not on the cards.Ever. When i went to college i was asked my “native place” ((a practice followed in Southern part of india) the other question generally asked : what does your father do?– asked in all parts of the country), this quesion has always troubled me where ever i went. The place of my birth. I have never been to that place!! The place where my father was born. I have been there only 4 times in my entire life and my dad has not been a regular visitor in the past 20 years either. My Mom is from Agra and i’ve been there only 3 times in my entire lilfe. This makes my native place a very hard matter to describe. For the people of south india(SI) i am a north indian(NI), my NI friends tease me as a Madrasi.. ;-P The concept of identifying a person from the place of his nativity is followed in ALL parts of india.
So if someone asks: are indians racist? The answer would obviously be YES. But we normally don’t hate anyone because of their race. Its just that we have begun to live so freely (may be ‘thrive’ is the word) that we have forgotten that calling someone a “Madrasi” is mildly racist… even though the guy might be from Kerela. We’ve gotten used to being “mildly” racist and i’m no exception. But we do it for fun. Its True!! When in school if someone was from Bihar/Jharkhand/Chattisgarh, he’d automatically be labelled a ‘Bihari.’ And the guy would get used to being called a Bihari. Likewise, anyone from the south would be termed a Madrasi, even if Madras was 500kms from them. And what’s more funny is that guys from the North East would be termed ‘Ching Po’ or something else. All those were very funny names.. (‘Were’ because i don’t find them funny any more. Its not as if it were obscene language. But calling any one anything else apart from their name is not something that i do). In the South we have Kannadigas and Mallus, Goltees and what not.. Well..i’m just another ‘ North Indian’ here.
But when i say ‘we’ i am not counting the Apostles of Netagiri, yup! i’m talking about the politicians all right!!! They’re the normally mild racists who act as catalyst causing other mild racists to be excited to a higher voilent form of racism.This has been seen in many parts of india be it assam, bombay or any other part. They are the remanents of the British Empire, who now hold the “Divide and Rule” policy foremost in their list of agedas. That’s all the space i can dedicate to them here..
The most hated of all(migrants) are the people from bihar. That actually surprises me! The reasons can hardly be justified. The Accusation: they come and occupy different parts of the country and take up “jobs of people in those parts.” Why i feel that the reason cannot be justified? Because manufacturers/companies would give jobs to those who are elligible to get those jobs. The state machinery reserves** certain posts(which is debatable) for people from those states thus removing some reasons for migrants to move around. But their private counterparts hold no such restriction. So you won’t find many migrants in state-run enterprises. The main aim of any organization is to maximise profits to satisfy their shareholders. As long as they can hit the goal it doesn’t matter who works for them. All they want is that people they’ve employed have certain credibility in what they are going to do in the company. If you satisfy the criteria for a job in a private enterprise then you would get it, doesn’t matter from which part of the country you are and what race you belong to. Thats the case in private enterprises where people from all parts of the country work and provide the workplace a more cosmopolitan look. That’s why a cosmopolis is called so. And people from Bihar are usally hated because other people from cannot get over the paradigm that people from a tribal belt could be smarter and/or more hard working than them.
Most of the people who voilently oppose migrants are not from the upper middle or the middle classes. They are the backbone of the indian society. The most flexible section of the indian economy. Voilent protests are called on by people spoken of in the third para. They turn the mildly racist low wage earners into high rage voilent racists. Its also seen that the section attacked most often are similar low wage earners. Why aren’t people from the upper economic classes attacked? That’s the question one polititian tried to find the answer of. And he targeted a high profile actor. He got his question answered when his uncle got his mouth shut. That’s when he found out that such things are meant only for people having less economic and social stature than himself. Lesson learnt. So when he started targetting low income groups(to his amazement i’m sure), his uncle joined the bandwagon and they’ve had a jolly good time with no one to oppose cause the gavernments’ also joined in.
The ploy is too impressive to ignore. They make the people believe that their economic condition is because of the migrants and if they were not there the problem would be solved (without specifying, of course, ‘how’ and ‘when’ that would happen). I have no idea how people fall for this one. Never do they realise that the problem is because of the governments’ inability to create employment oppertunities, and its regular appearence in the list of the most curropted beurocracies in the world. Realising their own weaknesses polititians try to find a scapegoat. Easy pickings are the low income migrants who have no representatives. And i mean NO representatives, doesn’t matter which political party comes to be the messiah, they all follow the same policy(refer para 3). Their arrival always causes more divisions and soon we have “North indian migrants” and “South indian migrants.” Thus, the good-old divided society just as the british had planned*(Because indians are good learners, they followed it up much better than the original thinkers would have dreamed of). Hurrah!!
So what should we(all the non political class) do? Ignore the problem. That would only give them(political class) more time to drive their fortunes high. Talk to the Polititians. No way they’ll never accept that they have divided the indian community.. lest they lose out their political fortunes. Plus they’ll pretend to be the saviour of their people. So then we have 2 problems to deal with. Although the situation seems pretty bleak but there is one thing we can do… Talk to people about it since we’re the ones electing them into high offices. Yes i’m talking of the good old democratic procedure. We can say all that we want about democracy in our country but the fact is we as a democracy have failed to live upto its challenges. To debate, crossquestion, redefine problems to sort out difficulties. That has hardly happened. From the time we’re born we learn to adjust to circumstances. Never have we as a society learnt to debug problems to counter the circumstances to which we were made to adjust ourselves. And so we dance to the tunes of our own misfortunes. Things need to change. That won’t happen if people like me just keep shut. Its time for intellectuals to rise up to the occassion.
* To all Britons: It was written in all my history books (and other books/encyclopedia) that the british followed the policy of divide and rule, thus the biased opinion on your ansestors who ruled India.
** Reservation is another big bluff that no one is calling..
