The high-speed,
high-tech Tejas Express, plying between Bombay and Goa, was launched a couple
of weeks ago. The launch of this train was much hyped because it offered
state-of-the-art facilities to the passengers. The Tejas Express boasts of
automatic doors, infotainment screens, vacuum bio-toilets, touch-free taps in
the toilets, and much more. While the train’s maiden voyage was expected to be
a triumphant heralding of a new era in rail transportation, the news that
filtered in afterwards suggested otherwise.
It was reported
that even before the journey began in Bombay, a window pane was smashed. By the
time the train reached Goa 12 headsets were reported to be missing or stolen;
there was garbage littered all over the train, and the toilets were also
reported to be filthy. Opinion-makers reacted stating that Indians do not deserve nice things and lack the civic sense to take care of public property. Given the manner in which urban Indian liberals
are blind to the most fundamental problems of the society, it was not
surprising to observe that absence of civic sense being discussed without
reference to caste.
The Indian
Railways is said to be the largest employer of manual scavengers in the country – under the guise of employing sweepers – as contract workers across the length of the rail
network. Almost all of these people who dispose human waste with their bare
hands come from the Dalit castes. Though manual scavenging has been outlawed by
law since a long time ago, the Indian Railways only started addressing the issue – albeit incompletely – from 2016. In other words,
if the railway platforms and tracks bear the slightest resemblance of ‘clean’
it is only because of the thankless and demeaning labour provided by thousands
of workers from such castes. If guests on board the maiden journey of the Tejas
Express had left behind garbage and dirty toilets and/or wash-basins it was
only to be expected as that is how things are done – it is simply someone
else’s problem.
The South Asian
idea of cleanliness is that someone else is responsible for doing the cleaning.
While it is true that the authorities are responsible for collecting and
disposing of garbage, there is no justification for collecting wet waste in
plastic bags and dumping them along the side of roads, for someone else to
collect. There is blindness to the fact that the labour provided come from
persons who are denied the basic right of human dignity, let alone benefits
like health insurance and proper working conditions. This is a problem that
concerns not only the government but everybody.
This behavior
with regards to disposing garbage tells us something about the way in which
Indians approach public spaces and public property. On the one hand, one
doesn’t view public spaces and public property as deserving care and
maintenance. On the other hand, the full burden of maintaining public spaces
and property is dumped (pun intended) on the members of the most
discriminated-against strata of society, who, not ironically, are excluded and
pushed either to the margins or outside the boundaries of villages and cities.
There is simply an absence of a ‘collective feeling’ or of a ‘community’ when
the issue of public spaces emerges. The reason many argue, is the existence of
the caste division. (In fact it was Dr. B. R. Ambedkar who argued
that it was impossible to build a common community in the form of a nation when
thousands of castes or jatis were in
existence in British India).
In a slightly
different context, the theologian Philip Vinod Peacock in his essay ‘Hostility,
Hypocrisy, Hospitality: Rethinking the Politics of Theology and Hospitality
from a Dalit Perspective’ (2013), offers
an interesting suggestion to understand the relationship that Indians share
with public spaces. Peacock suggests that public spaces, containing hundreds or
thousands of people unfamiliar to us, tend to be sites of repelling strangers:
“Within the caste system all strangers are automatically considered to be lower
in the caste hierarchy than oneself.” Public spaces therefore are sites where
aggressive behavior is displayed or performed that goes against any form of
civil behavior, in response to the underlying structures of casteism. Thus, he
further suggests that “it is perhaps this logic or spirit [of the caste system]
that is at work when Indians jump queues or push themselves before others, or
basically choose not to follow the norms of what can be considered publicly
acceptable behavior”.
Peacock’s
suggestion can be used to argue that the physical location of public spaces –
be they parks, roads, beaches, trains or anything else – are sites or spaces
wherein the development of civic sense is constantly subverted because we are
unable to relate to one another as persons outside of our narrow and individualistic
identities. There is something that prevents us from being publicly-oriented
citizens. Being in a public space leaves us supposedly vulnerable to physical
overpowering, caste pollution, and even diseases. This is the reason why public
property is often repeatedly vandalized or left to decay without any care. In
many ways, it can be argued that a sense and concept of the ‘public’ is yet to
evolve within Indian society.
The unfortunate episode of the Tejas Express is not an aberration; in fact, one of the maintenance staff remarked that the amount of garbage left behind was just like any other train. As expected the educated, ‘middle class’ who can afford such expensive fares are the ones who are causing all the problems.
(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 7 June, 2017)
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