Several Bombs Explode in Jaipur

In a span of 12 minutes, a series of bombs exploded in crowded market areas and near a Hanuman Temple in Jaipur on Tuesday night, killing 60 and injuring 150. Reports vary as to whether six or seven bombs exploded; one was defused prior to detonation.

NDTV:

A senior police officer said that the blasts were of high intensity. The bombs were reported to have been planted on cycles. Four of the blasts took place within a radius of one kilometer.

Bloomberg:

The medium-intensity bombs may have been placed on bicycles about 500 meters (1,640 feet) from each other, police officials said. The bombings are India’s worst since 65 people died when a train to Pakistan was attacked in February 2007.

While no one has claimed responsibility for the attacks, sources at the Indian Home Ministry said that Bangladesh-based Harkut-ul-Jehadi Islami is suspected to be behind the explosions.

My thoughts are with those who are in Jaipur.

Bonfires of Color

Some aspect of the Indian gene pool must contain a tendency towards pyromania. It’s the simplest explanation I can think of for the fact that every national holiday or festival I attended during my (now suspended) time in India involved burning or blowing up something or the other. Behold.

Diwali: fireworks and bonfires.
New Year’s Eve: ditto.
Lohri: check.
Holi (This one had me fooled — I just expected color. What did we get? You got it.): more bonfires.

I was in Udaipur for this last one, and had been advised to remain indoors because it was “very dangerous.” Apparently there’s something about throwing colored powder on people, many of whom are strangers, that often triggers another inexplicable trait specific to groups of Indian men: public misconduct on occasions of public festivity. In a typically Indian fashion, I couldn’t get many other details out of my friends and relatives as to what made going out on Holi dangerous. All I could gather from snippets and sweeping generalizations was that people get drunk or otherwise enter some altered state of mind and become prone to misconduct and deviant behavior. This was enough to convince me to take the day off from visiting sights and wandering through the streets. Given some of the stories I heard from others who either hadn’t been so advised, I had made the right decision.

Nevertheless, we did venture out on the night of Holi. (The festival is celebrated over two days, the second of which is apparently the one designated not for the faint of heart.) Wandering through the streets of the old city, we came upon an — you guessed it — enormous bonfire and party of sorts in the square at the bottom of the steps of the Jagdish Temple . I recorded bits of it for your viewing pleasure. Look out for a cameo by KA.

Cultural Regression, Political Warfare, and an Assault on St. Valentine

Since February 3rd, when Raj Thakeray, leader of the right wing party Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), started making inflammatory statements faulting migrants from North India for not learning the local language or adopting local customs, youth in Mumbai have gone on a rampage. Perceiving migrant workers as stealing their jobs, depressing wages, and corrupting their culture, these party activists threatened migrant workers and attacked taxi drivers, street vendors, and other properties and businesses. As a result of the national outcry, Mumbai police eventually arrested Thackeray and his co-discriminationist Abu Asim Azmi, but not before one bystander — most embarrassingly to the politicians, a Maharashtrian — died in the rioting. Behind the scenes of the violence, as usual, lies a political power grab between Thackeray and his cousin over who is the true heir of Bal Thackeray’s political legacy.

Detailing the clash of politics, culture and religion, the International Herald Tribune points out the increasing incidence of communal tension, social censorship, and narrow-minded sectarianism around India. Citing examples such as the self-imposed exile of renowned Indian painter M. F. Husain (who offended many by painting nude depictions of Hindu goddesses), death threats to Salman Rushdie, the banning of the Da Vinci code, and effective religious zoning (whereby entire neighborhoods have been declared vegetarian, rendering them essentially off-limits to Muslims), the IHT highlights a disturbing regressive trend in social and religious thought in India. Case in point: Delhi protesters yesterday blocked roads, chanting “Down with Valentine.”

Oddly, the underlying out-with-the-migrant-workers theme based on the accusation that some “other,” whether domestic or from abroad, is to blame for the lack of jobs, as well as the perceived corruption of culture is eerily familiar. Does Samuel Huntington consult on the side for the Hindu right-wingers? Maybe his books aren’t bringing in enough cash.

(IHT link courtesy of GM — thanks!)

India on the Brink of Genocide?

Outlook published an abridged version of a lecture delivered by Arundhati Roy in Istanbul on January 18, 2008 to commemorate the first anniversary of the assassination of Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian paper, Agos. As Roy mentions, Dink advocated Turkish-Armenian reconciliation and human and minority rights in Turkey, and tried to fill the nationwide silence on the topic of the systematic murder of one and a half million Armenians in a genocide by the Ottoman Empire in 1915.

The day I arrived in Istanbul, I walked the streets for many hours, and as I looked around, envying the people of Istanbul their beautiful, mysterious, thrilling city, a friend pointed out to me young boys in white caps who seemed to have suddenly appeared like a rash in the city. He explained that they were expressing their solidarity with the child-assassin who was wearing a white cap when he killed Hrant.

Roy’s (abridged) lecture continues as an exposé on genocide, its denial, and its celebration. She highlights incidents of genocide in India and throughout the world, and details the quest for Lebensraum underlying genocide throughout history. Lebensraum, literally defined as “living space,” was the term coined by German geographer and zoologist Freidrich Ratzel “to describe what he thought of as the dominant human species’ natural impulse to expand its territory in its search for not just space, but sustenance. This impulse to expansion would naturally be at the cost of a less dominant species…that Nazi ideologues believed should give way, or be made to give way, to the stronger one.” Connecting dots between the concepts of living space (or economic determinism), “union,” and “progress” employed by perpetrators of genocide, Roy speculates that a country that is standing at the threshold of “progress” might also stand at the threshold of genocide.

Could the India being celebrated all over the world as a miracle of progress and democracy, possibly be poised on the verge of committing genocide? The mere suggestion might sound outlandish and, at this point of time, the use of the word genocide surely unwarranted. However, if we look to the future, and if the Tsars of Development believe in their own publicity, if they believe that There Is No Alternative to their chosen model for Progress, then they will inevitably have to kill, and kill in large numbers, in order to get their way.

The forward march towards “Union and Progress,” or in contemporary Indian terms “Nationalism and Development,” which has been undertaken by the two major national political parties since 1989, and the destruction meted upon communities and minorities in its wake have been documented elsewhere (and are discussed in Roy’s lecture).

Roy presents a question based on that concept of Lebensraum and India’s future: where will the New India go? The nation’s wealth of natural resources and prime industrial real estate are also home to its under-represented poor, and the New India long ago began to lay territorial claim to those resources in several regions, including Chhattisgarh and Nandigram. These states’ internally displaced peoples now live in police camps, tenements, and resettlement colonies, and have been sucked into the spiral of poverty. Yet these are not the news headlines we read in the international or even the domestic media. This is not the New India, the one the world is chattering about.

In this ‘counterfeit’ version of India, in the realm of culture, in the new Bollywood cinema, in the boom in Indo-Anglian literature, the poor, for the most part, are simply absent. They have been erased in advance. (They only put in an appearance as the smiling beneficiaries of Micro-Credit Loans, Development Schemes and charity meted out by NGOs.)

There are Two Indias — one pushing “forward,” and the other supposedly holding back. And the “pulsating, dynamic, new India” is bursting at many seams, and may even be looking for more living space.

Crowd Non-Control

The story “Two NRI Women Mobbed/Molested by 70 Men Outside J.W. Marriott in Mumbai on New Year’s Eve,” or some variation of this headline, hit the Indian national news on New Year’s Day. In short: two women and their husbands emerged from the Marriott around 1:45am and headed towards Juhu Beach. Shortly thereafter, they were assaulted by a group of men, which quickly grew to a number of anywhere between 40 and 80 individuals (depending on which Indian tabloid you’re reading). The young women were grabbed, groped, and pinched, their clothes were ripped, and their husbands were overwhelmed by the crowd. They were all pushed to the ground under a hoard of aggressive men. Photographers from the media who happened to be present captured the incident, and eventually (after about 10 to 15 minutes of the onslaught) grabbed the attention of police officers passing by in a vehicle, who apparently rescued the women and took them to a local police station. No one was arrested at the time, and no incident report was filed until a couple of days later. The police commissioner’s response to the incident basically stated that the event had been blown out of proportion, that law enforcement cannot be expected to prevent such incidents everywhere always, and that “these things happen all the time.”

Several components of this incident have drawn attention: the women were NRIs (Non-Resident Indians) living in the United States, visiting India for the wedding of one of the couples; they had emerged from a five-star hotel in one of the most posh areas of the city; the reaction of the local police was to delay, deflect, and wait for public outcry before taking any action; contrary to popular opinion, women’s safety in Mumbai isn’t necessarily any better than anywhere else in this country; and these women were attacked by a group that grew to at least 40 men, if not double that.

It’s this last bit that boggles my mind. So a couple of guys, or maybe a group of guys, maybe they’re drunk, maybe they’re charged up on New Year’s levels of testosterone, are hanging around on the street with nothing left to do bars are closed, shows are over, they’re not ready to go home, don’t know what to do with themselves… and in some shift that I find entirely incomprehensible, they end up traumatically molesting a couple of women. But it’s not just a few guys or a group of them. It becomes a mob. The other dudes hanging around further down the beach, or on the steps of the hotel, decide NOT to break it up or pull the offenders off the women, but to jump in. How do 40/80 guys attack two women, anyway? At some point, aren’t they just pushing and shoving and jumping all over one another? The situation begs a question regarding what’s going on in the collective mind (or lack thereof) of the group, and what, if anything, can be done to minimize or control the behavior leading to such incidents.

The subjects of such herd behavior and crowd psychology have long intrigued me. What is it that causes groups of people to behave is such drastic ways? Why do their actions vary so dramatically from acceptable societal norms? (This is assuming, of course, that not each and every one of the men in the above example believe in, support, and individually purport to threaten and accost women, or that they find such actions to be socially acceptable — big assumption.)

Many theorists have attempted to tackle this question; Freud claimed that the minds within a group merge to form a unique way of thinking — the “enthusiasm” of each member within the group is heightened, and as a result, the individual becomes less aware of the nature of his own actions. Another theorist, Gustave Le Bon argued that crowds foster anonymity, generate emotion, and that at a simplistic level, they act irrationally. A slightly different theory of convergence claims that crowd behavior is not a product of the crowd itself, but of certain individuals within the crowd. Finally, the emergent-norm theory cuts somewhere in the middle: social behavior in a crowd isn’t necessarily entirely predictable, nor is it entirely irrational. When crowds of like-minded individuals come together, a new pattern of their collective action emerges.

As I am sitting here at our adopted dining table — it’s now around 11pm — I hear some shouts at the market across the street. The neighborhood is usually pretty quiet, seeming almost suburban at this time of the night. I step out onto the balcony. Through the trees lining the property, I see legs scuffling, more shouts. One guy takes off running down the street, and another starts yelling after him, “Pakro! Pakro usko!” (“Catch! Catch him!”) More scuffling in the parking lot of the market, a few minutes go by, someone jumps in an auto-rickshaw and takes off in the direction of the absconder. There are about 7 or 8 guys still arguing, yelling, pushing, stepping away from this mini-scene, and then making their way back to the middle of it. One old-ish guy looks like he’s in the middle of it. Someone picks up a boulder, wields it, resulting in renewed shouts … K had come out to join me. We get sort of shifty. Should we call the police? What should we do? What can we do? Um. Chances of me going down there to try to save someone at this moment, in the middle of writing this particular posting: slim to none. Call 100, I tell K. It’s the emergency number. The guard downstairs has approached the gate to our building and is peering out at the scene. Other guards from the neighborhood are literally lazily sauntering over in the direction of the fiasco. The one old-ish guy gets pushed to the ground. He moves to get up, and is pushed down again. A group gathers around him, pushing, kicking. K, alarmed, heads downstairs. RB, our cook, has come out as well. The old-ish guy looks unconscious. The crowd breaks up. “Daroo piya hai…” someone mumbles. (“He’s been drinking.”) Someone else wanders back over. “Isko utao.” (“Pick him up.”) From inside our gate, K inquires about calling the police. RB, half chuckling, giving the impression that this sort of thing happens all the time, and responds that if we call the police, it’ll be such a hassle. They’ll come over, ask a bunch of questions, they’ll want to file a report, and we’ll be up all night explaining what happened, what we saw… Whatever. He shakes his head and heads back to bed. Slightly uncomfortable, K and I head back up as well. My curiosity has taken off. Were they all drunk? Are they buddies? What started the scuffle? Just drunken idiocy? What happened to the guy who ran off, chased by the man in the auto? Are they all just going to get together tomorrow night and laugh about it? Or is someone going to be knocked in the head by a boulder later tonight as he heads down a dark alley towards home?

There’s more going on here than just crowds and alcohol. There seems to be something simmering under everyone’s surface. Rage, restlessness, frustration, discontent, fear? I’m not sure I’ll ever put my finger on it, and maybe it’s none or all or some combination or so variable that this is a silly effort. But tonight, to me, it’s a stark reminder to not take my or anyone else’s personal safety and security for granted, and that groups of men around here, angry, drunk or neither, are a force I won’t reckon with under any circumstances.