When a Child Is Shot Dead, Who Should Feel the Shame?

The lifestyles we live, are blood-lifestyles. We have so much. We share so little, writes Dushyant Arora.

Our words say we care for the poor. But our lifestyle says the opposite.

(Photo: Aroop Mishra/The Quint)

Two people got married in Jharkhand. I wondered, was it a love marriage or arranged? Who smiled more at the other? Did the boy blush more or the girl? They had a child. What would they have felt the first time they held their son?

Life was hard. Maybe other people they knew were moving to cities to find work. They moved to Delhi, this much reportage tells us. The husband started working in a gas cylinder warehouse and one day he suffered a paralytic attack, after which his left arm became paralysed. This too the reportage tells us. Did the paralysis have to do with a workplace accident? The family must have been stricken with anxiety, no? How will they earn? How will they eat? How much money did they have saved? How many days of food was it worth?

They pulled out their 14-year-old son from school. Did he have a best friend? A favourite subject? A favourite teacher? A favourite song? Did he have a crush on a girl? Did he like Shahrukh Khan more, or Salman? I was 14 years old once, you must have been too. 14-year-olds have a rich inner life, don’t they? 

Killed for Picking Up Fake Notes

I wondered if he was heartbroken the day he was pulled out of school and told he was never going to school again. I wonder if he told his parents if he was heartbroken. The report in The Indian Express says that he told his mother that one day, he will give them a better life. He started working at a grocery store. Eleven hours daily and got paid Rs 6,000 for his labour.

He was going back home after work one day when he saw a wedding procession. People threw currency notes in the air. He jumped down on the road and started picking them up. A man in the wedding procession beat Saahil up brutally, and when he asked, "What wrong have I done?", this man shot 14-year-old Saahil dead.

The currency notes turned out to be fake.

I wondered. How did his parents react when they heard the news? Who told the coffin maker that it will have to be a small coffin? Were they able to hug their child before he was buried? 

The Convenient Police Line

In The Indian Express report, the police are quoted saying that the shooter, a CISF guard named Madan Gopal Tiwari, had mental health issues and struggled with controlling his anger. Poor chap.

This reminded me of another incident I had written, about two Hindu men bombing a mosque in Maharashtra. There too, the police were quoted in The Indian Express saying that the chaps had mental health and anger issues. Quite the co-incidence, isn’t it?

Anyway. Nothing to see here. The boy was poor. He was Muslim. Yet, he had the audacity to ask what his fault was. Dime a dozen stories like this in a country full of Hindu men with mental health challenges and anger management issues. 

The Comfortable Class With Blood on Its Lifestyles

This is not a piece about the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the consequences of the anger, brutality, and violence they have normalised. It is about a group of people I am a part of. 

A group which advocates for peace in Palestine in its Instagram stories, which laments how terrible the Ambanis and Adanis are, who sometimes say “Eat the rich."

I write this on a MacBook Air which cost about Rs 70,000 when I first bought it a few years back. I am wearing an Apple watch, which cost about Rs 50,000, use an iPhone which cost Rs 70,000, I have many gadgets in my possession, which cost about a year’s worth of what Saahil earned or would have earned. Each.

Thanks to liberalisation in 1991, the Indian “middle class” experienced a significant spike in lifestyle. Too many, however, continue to sincerely believe that they are still just a bit better than the poor, hence, the “middle.” Earn upward and identify downward. This requires self-deceit and delusion. 

The Politics We Perform

My group, however, engages in double deceit. We believe we are heirs to Nehruvian value systems, are moral, and care for the poor. We feel bad about discrimination in society, don’t vote for parties whose primary product is bigotry. At some level, we believe that we have some kinship with the marginalised. We speak for them, after all. We know the word 'fascism.'

However, we don't share material conditions with those we claim to care about, or worse, those we claim to represent. As I said, my phone costs what Saahil would have earned after 10 months of daily 11-hour shifts. Everyone knows about Blood Diamonds. The lifestyles we live, are blood-lifestyles. We have so much. We share so little.

But so what? We have now started saying the words, “I acknowledge my privilege.” What else should we do, change how we live so people who live one illness away from starvation can eat? That’s the government’s job, not ours. Occasionally, we even do charity. 

We work on “bringing down the powerful” and speak against the obscenity of the money the “Super Rich” have. It makes no difference to us that for the millions of Saahils in India, we are the Super Rich. At most, our job as virtue signalling saviours is to “Hold the government accountable.” We will hold everyone accountable except ourselves. 

The Bigots We Condemn, the Bigots We Are

People like Saahil don’t make the headlines. Everyday someone dies in a construction site or is run over on the road. This news, if it makes it to the newspapers, is hidden in a corner helpfully. Our “mental health” depends on these people remaining invisible. We deserve the same compassion for our mental health as the CISF guard, Madan Gopal Tiwari. 

Imagine posters about every worker who dies in a construction site, every child being paid Rs 6,000 after being pulled out from school were pasted inside the wonderful, gated societies we live in. We would hate and resist it. Truth be told it is Tiwari who is our true kin, not Saahil. We throw currency notes in the air. We quote Amitabh Bachchan, "Main aaj bhi pheke hue paise nahin uthaata." A 14-year-old saw a meal in those fake notes and died for picking them up. 

I have always despised bigots. I have cancelled and parted ways with some of them. But at least they don’t suffer from cognitive dissonance. They live their life per their politics; they shoot Muslim kids dead and so on. And we? Our words say we care for the poor. But our lifestyle says the opposite.

Maybe we should stop pretending and admit it. They are bigots. We are bigots in denial.

(The author is a lawyer and research consultant based in Mumbai. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)