“ About Section 144″
As a fable, the events at Thoothukudi threaten the very fabric of democracy. It is a strange democracy where people are suspect and hunted down. As a DIG investigating Thoothukudi told me, “I have never seen a more cynical use of Section 144.” What the police confronted was a community of women and children carrying food, school bags. Instead of facing a community in a democratic sense, the government created the myth of outsiders as anti-socials. It is almost as if ordinary people are not citizens but subjects to be continuously disempowered. It is evident now that police went far beyond the area under Section 144 of the CrPC and killed people. Yet our bureaucrats hide truth behind the norms of procedure, as if table manners are more important than the truths of governance. The police reportedly beating disabled people makes one wonder if barbarity is a part of the new training, where every citizen is to be treated as a Naxal by definition. The psychology of fear that they have created is the new model of Section 144 where an old law and order project now becomes an effort to create an ecology of fear, where every citizen is suspect by definition.
In fact, it is around areas like Thoothukudi that one has to write the new history of violence around the body. The state of the body is symptomatic of the vulnerability of the body politic. Ironically, it is the people who look for democracy, while the state and Sterlite seek to subvert it. Words like ‘public and citizens’, once anchors of the democratic imagination, now have become suspect words in the new games of corporate life. Doctors who meet patients from Thoothukudi villages complaining of cancer, skin diseases call these symptoms ‘Sterlite symptoms’. In a similar way, we can talk of the symptoms of a ‘Sterlite democracy’, a disease as debilitating as majoritarian authoritarianism. Yet the answer to the death of democracy is a more intense democracy, stemming from the inventiveness of the community. We have to understand it is communities rather than movements which are resisting the regime, a fact that the regime finds difficult to respect.
Thoothukudi demonstrated this through the resilience of the bar and traders’ associations which worked day and night to get arrested people released. It reminded one of what the sociologist Èmile Durkheim said in his classic Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, that only the ethics of professions like law and medicine can counter the rapacity of corporations and the emptiness of the state. Thoothukudi proved this in ample measure. It also demonstrated that civil society has to be an embedded part of the new knowledge society. The reports of civil society have to become testaments and testimonies for the emerging issues of democracy. For example, the government inquiry commission, State Human Rights Commission or National Human Rights Commission reports are unlikely to go beyond legal and procedural issues. Civil society reports carry a wider burden and responsibility, playing sociologist, ethicist, environmentalist and storyteller. A civil society report on an act of violence has to relate law and order to law and justice, and also to law and democracy, reflecting on knowledge and truth in new ways. For example, experts should not be allowed to get away behind esoteric language. A people’s sensorium of touch, taste, smell has to be translated into science to create new warning signals. Thoothukudi showed the importance of a people’s idea of knowledge to counter expert knowledge. In fact, it suggests the importance of a people’s ombudsman to accompany so-called expert committees.
Proactive citizenship –
Yet such civil society reports cover not just past and present. They are warning bells for the future. If one juxtaposes the reports on Thoothukudi with the nuclear site at Koodankulam, one senses the deep suspicion about proactive citizenship. Government attempts to create the bogey of the outsider as antisocial, alien, intruder, missionary, Christian are dangerous steps and need to be challenged. The citizen as a person of knowledge must be seen as central to democracy. Only a proactive citizenship and an experimentally open civil society can challenge, question and domesticate the emerging “Sterlite democracies” as the new diseases of our age. This then is the emerging fable of Thoothukudi.
WORDS AND MEANINGS –
Cynical
Meaning: Doubtful as to whether something will happen or whether it is worthwhile.
Example: “Most residents are cynical about efforts to clean mobsters out of their city”
Synonyms: Sceptical, Doubtful
Antonyms: Optimistic, Credulous
Myth
Meaning: An exaggerated or idealized conception of a person or thing.
Example: “The book is a scholarly study of the Churchill myth”
Synonyms: Misconception, Fallacy
Bureaucrats
Meaning: An official in a government department, in particular one perceived as being concerned with procedural correctness at the expense of people’s needs.
Example: “The unemployed will be dealt with not by faceless bureaucrats but by individuals”
Synonyms: Official, Administrator
Barbarity
Meaning: Extreme cruelty or brutality.
Example: “The barbarity displayed by the terrorists”
Synonyms: Brutality, Savagery
Antonyms: Benevolence
Subvert
Meaning: Undermine the power and authority of (an established system or institution).
Example: “An attempt to subvert democratic government”
Synonyms: Destabilize, Unsettle
Debilitating
Meaning: (Of a disease or condition) making someone very weak and infirm.
Example: “Debilitating back pain”
Stemming
Meaning: Originate in or be caused by.
Example: “Many of the universities’ problems stem from rapid expansion”
Synonyms: Issue from, Originate from
Antonyms: Cause, Give rise to
Inventiveness
Meaning: The quality of being inventive; creativity.
Example: “The inventiveness of the staging”
Synonyms: Creativity, Originality
Rapacity
Meaning: Aggressive greed.
Example: “The rapacity of landowners seeking greater profit from their property”
Synonyms: Greed, Avarice
Antonyms: Unselfishness
Ample
Meaning: Enough or more than enough; plentiful.
Example: “There is ample time for discussion”
Synonyms: Enough, Sufficient
Antonyms: Meagre, Insufficient
Esoteric
Meaning: Intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest.
Example: “Esoteric philosophical debates”
Synonyms: Abstruse, Obscure
Antonyms: Simple, Familiar
Juxtaposes
Meaning: Place or deal with close together for contrasting effect.
Example: “Black-and-white photos of slums were starkly juxtaposed with colour images”
Bogey
Meaning: An evil or mischievous spirit.
Example: “Bogeys and other unpleasant denizens of the night”
Synonyms: Bogle, Ghost
Intruder
Meaning: A person who intrudes, especially into a building with criminal intent.
Example: “The intruder had pulled out drawers and dumped their contents on the floor”
Synonyms: Trespasser, Interloper
