There is a connection between what happened in Hyderabad recently and the protests taking place against the government all over the country now. It’s a fight for space. Space on the road, space in the universities, space in civil discourse, space in each other’s mind. In both cases similar questions are being asked. What do women mean to men? What does a citizen mean for a state? Both, fundamentally questions of space which is allotted only after some meaning around it is generated. This meaning cannot be democratic in nature. Meaning doesn’t expect a majority to agree or disagree; meaning, like you and me, only expects space.
A hundred years ago men the world over were contemplating the concept of space. Einstein’s theory of relativity (special case) had, just a few years ago, disrupted conventional thinking about how heavenly bodies interact with each other and, excitement in the scientific world was palpable. Today, space is again at the centre of human thought. Not the space inhabited by heavenly bodies, stars, planets and, blackholes; but the space where human beings engage with each other.
The news of the Hyderabad case and the reaction, mostly from men, in the aftermath of the encounter, confirmed a doubt lingering in my mind for a while now — that more than the women, who feel unsafe, terrorised, violated, every time a new incident is reported, it is the fragile collective male ego that really feels violated. Think of it as a ‘not all men’ campaign that gets punctured with every fresh case. What does it mean: Patriarchy has successfully managed to appropriate a crime against women as a crime that violates every sensitive, thinking, responsible, man. Which is why men so gleeful celebrate encounters like the one in Hyderabad. Men aren’t interested in ‘what were the rapists thinking’ anymore. In the aftermath of the ‘me too’ revelations such questions have become deeper, darker and can be investigated in every male soul. When powerful educated wealthy socially conscious men and the unnamed, and mostly uneducated, poor rapist can be located on a single curve of masculine desire differentiated only by degrees, is there even a point in asking what were the rapists thinking? Isn’t the answer obvious: You’re safe because I want you to be safe. The space women think belongs to them actually belongs to the men, which they can claim at will. The adjudicator for how much space is healthy for a woman is the State — the strongest masculine presence in our lives.
Today, the protest against the government by mostly young people has a deeper meaning. It is a fight to claim space for their anger and discontentment. It is a struggle for acknowledgement that ‘we the people’ are really very angry. So far, such efforts have only been met by denials and dismissals. This isn’t so because the mind of the State cannot create space for emotions its people are feeling. Far from it. Any acknowledgement of anger will lead to the State to a predicament it is loathe to even dream about: thinking. After all, what do emotions do than to force us to think, mostly about how did we end up here? Such thought is detrimental to the ideology of the masculine State, known not for contemplation but action or not-action.
Ideologies and political inclinations aside can you even imagine a cabinet meeting where the ministers led by the Prime Minister think about where have they gone so wrong? This sounds simplistic because it is.
Thinking is simply the hardest thing to do. Thought by its nature is revolutionary. For the masculine State taking this route to social engagement is fraught with risks, missteps, doubt, self-hatred, even though the process may eventually lead to a less harmful society.
Hearing my friends talk about the Citizens Amendment Act and the NRC allowed me an opportunity to tap into the subtext. Wherever I looked I found anger. At not being heard. At not being seen. At being denied the space they deserve simply because they exist in a social field. The question floating in the air: Why does the State find it so hard to give space to an emotion so pervasive in humanity?
Let us not make any mistake about it. Be it the rape culture or the fascist tendencies of the State, our grouses may be different but our enemy is the same: the all pervasive masculine presence in our lives. This presence appropriates space because like an amoeba it thrives on it.
It’s not the State, this male presence. Dismantle the state and you will feel it elsewhere, in some other shape and form. So how does one engage with this presence? The trouble with protest is that it is a modified version of a prayer. And as Jim Morrison so aptly surmised three decades ago: You cannot petition the Lord with prayer. Anger, as so many reformed and now corrupted former revolutionaries will never confess, burns only the angry. And nothing is more tragic for a society when the young burn themselves away.
Mayank Tewari is the writer of Newton, Accidental Prime Minister, and Bard of Blood
