Development PTSD

India is developing at a truly frightening rate

Mitron, when you get that feeling of your belly whooshing out through your nostrils, don’t worry. It’s not that the bottom has dropped out of the country, yet, just that it has dropped lower suddenly. It’s exactly like flying through an air pocket, with all of the anxiety and none of the thrill. It’s been happening a lot lately, which explains all the sweaty palms and tachycardia.

Seriously, mitron, given all the development India has seen in the last three years, a lot of us are suffering from PTSD just from hearing the word. 

We’ve developed nationalism into a huge and ugly witch hunt, so that those of us who actually liked the country now sit through the national anthem. We’ve developed misogyny ever further—though it was doing fine, thank you—so that the Supreme Court recently passed orders that directed a woman to behave herself and look after her husband. We’ve developed communalism into an art, so that unhinged people make films of themselves raping and axing and burning each other, for release into the no-certificate-needed film festival of social media. 

We’ve developed politics into an exercise in spinning, twisting, and dodging issues—to be fair politics has always been very good at that, but now it can spin, twist and dodge better, faster, longer, and way past the point of rationality. We’ve pulled journalism back from the brink of doing its job, and developed it into a large bullhorn for politicians. We’ve developed so many religious sentiments, genuine or dubious, that we’ve also developed random public censorship of the arts. To help that along we’ve developed a law and order crisis that has knocked the collective conscience out cold. We’ve developed an aversion to intellect and education.

We’ve developed skins as thin and fragile as glass, and a huge blind spot when it comes to the environment. We’ve developed infrastructure called Aadhaar, so badly designed and dangerously pervasive that nobody knows what it’s for anymore, though it’s a sure bet that someone is making a huge amount of money off it (probably the people who designed it). We’ve developed military capabilities in civil society, arming large numbers of brainwashed youth to prepare for some undefined war—they call it ‘fighting ISIS’ but what they mean is Muslims. We’ve developed an uncanny ability to focus on easy, gossipy, slight news, while ignoring crucial laws passed in Parliament that will regulate our lives, and the problems that actually plague us. We’ve developed a habit of putting monumentally incompetent ideologues in charge of ministries and institutions.

Every time one of these developments takes place, it first feels as if the bottom has dropped out again, but we eventually settle into it. The place we dropped from begins to feel like some wondrous unattainable past, a distant glimmer above. Needless to say it isn’t actually wondrous, it’s just somewhat better than where we are now.

Frankly, mitron, if this is development, I feel we should back up a little. Scratch that—we should back up a lot. We took completely the wrong fork in the road, so no matter how far we progress down it, it’s taking us in the wrong direction, to a place we do not want to go.

The word used to mean something like ‘onward and upward’. Now it’s weaponised, and used to justify violence of many kinds. We won’t need violence much longer, though—if the courts do not intervene, all the government will have to do, to end you, is have someone at the UIDAI press a button. Ah, development. 

Mitali Saran is a Delhi-based writer
mitali.saran@gmail.com