Contemporary public life in India gets murkier by the day. Young people adept at using Information Technology are allegedly complicit in creating applications where they are ‘auctioning’ women from the minority community. This followed a series of other incidents where the minorities have been targeted for being who they are – people of different faith. The past tardiness in bringing the perpetrators to justice despite their brazen arrogance in disregarding the law of the land, all canons of public morality and ethical behaviour may have contributed to these cyber-based atrocities. But what is outlandish and, I dare say, no longer shocking, is that the alleged perpetrators of this heinous act of misogyny and hate are all young and educated, and at least one among them is a woman.
How are young, educated Indians, barely out of school and their teens doing this? Are we to be surprised or are we to take it as par for the course in a novel emergent India where we are re-drawing and re-negotiating a ‘new normal’? Sociologically speaking, such acts of hatred and utter disregard for human dignity and life cannot be a knee-jerk reaction or a-spur-of-the-moment act. The apps are a reflection of a certain poisoning of young minds that have been going on for a very long period of time. Further, it can very well be said, given their age, that for these young persons, their socialisation has coincided with a development in the social milieu where they have learnt that such utter disregard and contempt for the ‘other’ may not draw the sanction of their elders, the mores of their community or the law of the land. This perhaps lent to these alleged perpetrators the ‘strength’ to be so brazen and uninhibited.
But I also propose that these acts indicate a far deeper malaise – a matter that directly implicates the manner, content and intent of our education system and the pedagogy that we have embarked upon. What we have done incrementally is that we have created a pedagogical system where the entire idea of education has been reduced to the immediacy of finding a job. While no one can dispute that we all require economic recompense to sustain ourselves and our family, it is surely no one’s argument that the vision and reach of learning would be restrictive and utilitarian only.
But that is what we have precisely done. Subjects and disciplines that would create a reflexive individual, one whose practice would open up new doors whereby a more humane, just and ethical world is possible have been played down.
We have created and continue to create self-absorbed individuals whose understanding of public life (where the ‘other’ resides) and the self (the ‘ego’ through which one perceives) is shallow and marked by a naivety that refuses or fails to cognise the deeper structures of the social.
On the other hand, and as a complement, our pedagogical structures have merged their values onto the institutionalised values of the corporate world, where everything of note can be measured, including their ability to imagine a world and themselves in relation to others. What cannot be measured is not worth the effort is what we have made loud and clear to them, so that we have an institutionalised apathy for everything that does not rake in money.
Consequently, those ideas that elude our collective ability to measure and institutionalise are merely secondary or tertiary attributes. In effect, we are not asking our students and the young to go beyond the structured boundaries that the contemporary world has created. They are cocooned by their own ‘naivety firewall’ (to borrow a phrase from the world of the internet) where information so readily available for expanding their horizons fails to make a dent. And that is an irony that we may never understand fully – how is that while we have an information highway at our proverbial finger tips, we have so little knowledge and thus wisdom?
Our cocooned individual and the system of naivety that has been put in place cannot be uprooted so easily. The rewards for being naive, arrogant and ignorant are heavy. The practice of a disciplined but critical enquiry has all but disappeared. This displacement and replacement of critical thinking has effectively created a mono-chromatic world of ‘us’ and ‘them’, a binary tailor made for easy understanding and execution. This binary is not limited to the creation of identity, so very important for each individual, but extends to the demonization of those who do not belong to ‘us’.
The question that then become uppermost is this – do we have an understanding of the ‘other’ in terms that are non-demonic, non pejorative and rational? Further, how can we understand the intelligent and focused pursuit of self-interest to also encompass the elements of sympathy and welfare for the other?
Also read: Are laws against online harassment enough?
While apparently the pursuit of self-interest now riding the wings of a cresting corporate culture seems to be incompatible with that of sympathy, self-reflexivity and other discursive practices that are ‘soft’, we have to find a way to insert in our pedagogical practises awareness of these so that our teaching does not become merely the reproduction of a ‘package’ distributed by teachers and consumed by students. If we fail to create through our collective efforts this strategy and keep on succumbing to a soulless and heartless idea of progress, ritualised and normalised to produce the myth of unending consumption, the delinquents, like the ones who created the ‘Bulli Bai’ apps, will only multiply.
Let’s face it – the young delinquents are a stark reminder for us that we are failing in creating a more humane and just order through our teaching-learning processes and the consequence of our failure is the creation of an authoritarian, misogynistic and undemocratic state and society.
(The writer is a senior academic and Professor of Sociology at Amity University, Chhattisgarh.)