T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan: The wages of Robin Hoodism

LINE & LENGTH

All of India now has a sense of victimhood. Everyone thinks he is a victim of something or the other.

For some time now, I have been toying with the idea of writing a book called Villains of Modern India to compete with the ones that talk about its heroes. Since books don't make money for the authors, I am thinking of approaching the National Book Trust to publish it.

But, asked someone, how will you define villainy? Clearly villainy, like heroism, has many dimensions. One of them, I think, may have to be the strategy of divisiveness that politicians follow in our democracy. The results of these policies and political strategies appear to follow the law of unintended consequences.

For example, consider the idea of victimhood, from which all India seems to be suffering. What do you do when entire social groups, for one reason or the other, start to feel that they are victims?

The first to acquire this sense was, of course, the Muslims and the Dalits, the latter with complete justification. Both were encouraged by politicians to blame the Hindus when, actually, a part of the reason for the miserable condition of the Muslims at least was that their rich and famous had scurried off to Pakistan in 1947, leaving the less fortunate behind without political or business leadership.

But instead of telling these poor Muslim Indians that their main identity was not their religion but their poverty, politicians harped on their religion as the cause of their condition. So although there were hundreds of millions of people from all religions who were as poor as the Muslims, the latter got a sense of victimhood in the post-Independence years.

But there was, if you want to call it that, one redeeming feature. Until recently, the rabble rousing was done in election speeches. But now Mandal's derivatives have brought this into the domain of state policy in ways that are all too familiar. The Sachar Committee has written it down on a tablet of stone and now Muslims are officially victims.

This victimhood disease has spread to other communities as well because first the Jana Sangh, and then its son, the BJP, started the nonsense that Hindus were a second-class community in India. So Hindus, as a group, began to feel they were victims, at least qua the Muslims.

However, even that wasn't enough for our creative politicians. Starting with V P Singh, they have succeeded in creating an environment where one set of Hindus have begun to feel victimised by those belonging to another caste.

Tamil Brahmins, for example, regardless of the fact that most of them are better off than most other Indians, suffer from a strong sense of victimhood. The Dravidian movement""one segment of which is led, most amazingly, by a Brahmin, and that too a woman""is responsible for that.

But that is 70-year-old story. Most recently, thanks to what the UPA government has been doing in the field of education and employment, this sense of victimhood has got extended to all upper caste Hindus, who, in spite of their generally satisfactory economic condition, feel like victims. They are acquiring a chip on the shoulder, a deep sense of grievance. Wherever you go, all you hear is griping, resentment and frustration at what the political system is doing to them.

It would be wrong to think that this has something to do only with the abridgement of educational and employment opportunities. Those are important, but only as catalysts. The sense of being oppressed goes beyond and is turning into an irrational anger that is persuading even otherwise sensible liberals to sneer at the non-upper castes and the Muslims. Only hypocrites will deny all the snideness that is on parade.

If this had been, in a sense, a zero-sum game in which the sense of incremental victimhood amongst the upper castes is fully offset by a corresponding diminution in the sense of victimhood amongst the other castes, the game may well have been worthwhile. But politics has not been allowed it to become a zero-sum game.

Instead, everyone is being encouraged to feel that he or she is a victim of some form of injustice. This is necessary in order to reap the benefits of divisive politics. The game has to be projected as a non zero-sum game in which the other castes gain at the expense of the upper castes. Social Robin Hoodism is what pays in politics, it seems.

The result is completely unintended. Even amongst the other castes, thanks to the zillion social divisions, a sense of collective victimhood is now discernible. Indeed, it is being encouraged by our "leaders". Not only does each social group feel that it is a victim of the others, each sub-group feels that way as well.

Not just that, either. People are now told they are victims of other things as well""of growth, globalisation, liberalisation""you name it, everyone is a victim of something.

This is where our version of democracy has landed us. I had always thought, from reading the texts in political science, that democracy was supposed to have the opposite effect, of making everyone feel better off. But it goes to the credit of our politicians that they have made everyone feel worse off.

Keep it up, lads, this is what we elect you for.