The tehelka that killed Delhi’s silent era
(The Indian elite can no longer remain silent.)
Every city has its defining habit; a tick, if you will, that makes it tick.
In London, it is avoiding eye contact, that messianic dictum that has run unchallenged for a century on the Underground. In Bombay, it is side-stepping, skipping away neatly from the filth and hopelessness; it is sometimes described as the ‘spirit of Mumbai’, a tip-toeing perhaps necessitated for survival of the world’s largest city with two simultaneous names and an identity crisis.
In Delhi, far before name dropping became cool, it was the action of door shutting. The sleight of hand where you slip into the position of privilege, or into a gated colony, and then swiftly shut the doorway.
Its colonies have gates like other cites have attitudes. Its clubs have waiting periods of 30 or 40 years. When admission opens in one of its cultural centres, 75,000 forms sell out in days, though only a couple of hundred would be allowed in.
But what are doors if they cannot hold in silences? So it is that Delhi is the city of confined whispers. The rustle of saris hides a multitude of sins. What holds it all together is an unspoken promise of silence. You quieten my lies, and I soundproof your untruths.
In the last one year, though, there has been, from afar, the sound of distant thunder. Its intermittent lightning shows up sometimes on our television screens. Some say those on whom the doors were shut so briskly, they have today found voice enough to distort our silence.
Silence as a social contract is not new. It happened in the Treta Yug, the first of the four ages of man described by ancient Indian texts, with Lord Ram as he was exiled for 14 years. During Dwapar, the age that followed, the disrobing of a woman — and 13 years of unjust exile again — was met with stony silence.
But elite silence was perfected as an art in this, the Kali Yug — the most despicable of ages when, or so say the texts, man reaches his nadir — in Delhi. There is a difference, though, these days — in our PR driven age silence is bad image management. You must be silent but must strategically appear not be so.
Therein lies the dilemma in the curious case of Mr Tarun Tejpal, the god, as it were, with a something (hint: not feet) of clay. Here is a man who has made one-sided-ness a virtue, an adept khiladi of on-tap outrage, a perfect example of how yesterday’s crusader can turn effortlessly into today’s arbitrator of political arbitrariness. He lampooned some political parties while taking money from their rivals — at the same time continuing to win awards for fair play reportage. But even so, some of his early journalism was like that proverbial candle in resonant darkness — even a flicker seemed overwhelmingly illuminating.
His story, though, is not just his story. Mr Tejpal understood early that at its best journalism is the art of the metaphor, seeking the universal in the minutiae. His tale today is a telling metaphor for the crisis in which Delhi’s door-closers find themselves.
The latch has come loose. The lock so rusty that it won’t shut. Through the Cohen-ian cracks, the light is disturbingly slipping in.
Delhi’s elite, for long used to settling public policy like they used to ball games in their hill station boarding schools — say for instance, commerce minister Bunty could have chai with cabinet secretary Topsy at the Gym and settle a few minor issues of taxation — suddenly find themselves rudely interrupted by the janata from the grass roots and tweeple from the top.
They are hesitantly coming on to Twitter but they just can’t get a handle on it. (Mr. Tejpal is on Twitter but has never tweeted, nor does he follow anyone. He has, naturally, gathered 2,341 followers.)
For evidence of jitters notice the trajectory of elite reaction to Mr Tejpal’s alleged crimes — it began with a no-no-can’t-be-him-he-lives-down-the-road, then guillotined by a million hash tags they did what elites do, they turned upon him. As Mr Tejpal, once upon a time the publisher of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, attempted to subjugate the law with synonyms, the narrative of his once upon a time friends swiftly became more ethnic — it involved, in short, variations of the use of Delhi’s favourite cussword, ‘He is a ch#*%@a’.
In her response, Ms Roy has said she had been silent for days after the incident because, ‘It seemed vile to kick a man when he was down’. And because, ‘My silence is liable to be vested with all sorts of absurd meaning’. Both sentences so typify an acutely Delhi reasoning that they are self-explanatory. She has also said, echoing so many who live ‘just down the road from Tarun’, ‘ What has happened now has not shocked me, but it has broken my heart’. As if her heartbreak needs to be valued equally with the violated-ness of a twenty-something-year-old-girl. When Ms Roy writes about rape by army jawans in Kashmir, or Chhattisgarh, it is more about her anger, and justice, and less about her private sorrow.
Self defence is the best form of offence — and Delhi, the graveyard of seven empires, knows only too well how to swing with the wind. Today before a dramatic election next year which might bring in an un-coopted outsider to the throne who might kick open those shut gates, the city’s elite are on bunker-mode. They are digging deep, raking away the picturesque autumnal leaves, like moles and badgers, or populations fleeing carpet bombing, to build postures, arguments and public positions suitably argumentative and yet malleable enough to genuflect if a new master arrives.
As they shift the mud, they are muttering loudly — but not louder than the echoes of those distant voices — that their beloved silence is gone. This is the winter of their disruption.
