Zone of Conflict

MANU JOSEPH IS often termed a provocateur, but it is a lazy label. From his fiction, to newspaper columns to his first nonfiction book Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us: The Psychology of Indians, the provocation, for whoever feels it, is merely a corollary to insights that astutely pick on the raw bones of the Indian condition. Joseph takes no sides in this, patiently making his case with entertaining anecdotes and a tone of bemusement at how everyone—rich, poor, literate, illiterate, men, women, rural, urban, politicians, activists, do-gooders and the malevolent—are characters spinning inside the whirlpool of India’s absurdity.

Consider this extract on accidents; “People cross the road like cows and they are baffled by the appearance of a car—a car on the road, how? People cross the railway track at will and they are shocked to see a train thundering towards them. A train on a railway track, how? Surprise is our national emotion; surprise at the most logical outcome of our actions.” To the poor, the chaos however signals that this is a country that is also poor, turning it into a welcoming feature, a feeling of home.

Another element maintaining this equilibrium is that, in effect, India is a giant village. Joseph uses the example of Gurugram. It rose with all the trappings of a modern city—high rises, malls, nightclubs, office complexes, walled colonies, and yet it continues to behave in ancient ways. The municipality is only in name, hillocks of garbage burn in the open even as apartment prices touch `100 crore, locals gang up and beat outsiders over traffic altercations, mobs riot over religion.

The peace is also maintained with brutal force by the state, as when criminals, terrorists and Naxalites, are casually killed to solve the problem. But there are other not so apparent reasons too. “A crime reporter in Haryana told me, criminals who have too many cases against them, who are too broke to feed the cops, who are thus a procedural nuisance to be ferried between jail, hospital and court, are bumped off.”

The central argument is that revolutions are not between the rich and poor. It is the second rung versus the first rung of the elite, the poor getting co-opted by the former. In India, that phenomenon comes across hurdles and the offshoot of it is often farce. Like the virtuousness of those that Joseph lampoons as avocado eaters. The agitation against Aadhaar, the unique identity number, when it was first being launched, is an instance he uses. Joseph’s observation is that it wasn’t concern for privacy, the stated reason, but the annoyance of activists who thought billionaires had encroached on their turf of “humanitarian activities” that Aadhaar would lead to. Once the agitation gathered momentum, others began to participate for their own reasons.

Many of the ideas here had their seeds in the columns that Joseph has been writing. The book unites them into a theory of India. There is much fighting for space and often you lose track of the compositeness, but it still prods you to scratch the surface of your understanding. Peppered with stories from his experiences as a journalist and writer, the deconstruction is of someone intrigued by the ridiculousness of India and presenting that mirror back. To be provoked then is confirmation of what he has been saying about you.

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