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With You? For You? If only that was true for all Indians
Posted by zimbo on Aug 4th, 2012 //
Occidentally Yours
By Somnath Batabyal
Please be careful. Any unattended luggage could be a bomb. Notify the police immediately.”
It was an afternoon last week. I was in Janpath, getting reacquainted with Delhi and the whitewashed changes of post-Commonwealth Games Connaught Place. I missed the winter here and was determined to make most of the last few days of the season.
From the warnings of terrorist strikes, the tone of the announcements abruptly changed.
“Get your drivers and servants verified. Delhi Police, With You, For You, Always.”
I passed a police patrol van and three bored looking uniformed men talking to a distressed shopkeeper. Unable to hide my curiosity towards these guardian angels of ours and their pronouncements, I came back. The shopkeeper had left and I asked the man in the driver seat, small, balding and picking his tooth with a matchstick, if I may ask him a question. He looked at me quizzically. “Pucho?” he spat out something that looked like a leftover from lunch.
“Why are you asking us to get our servants and drivers verified?”
“Matlab?” The man was annoyed. “Do you know the number of dacoities and robberies in Delhi?”
Delhi Police – With you, for you …
Well, yes, I had a fair idea, if not the exact numbers, I told him. But should servants also not get owners verified? He lost interest in me and his colleagues waved me away.
Later in the evening, friends were surprised that I had not heard this particular police advertisement before. I was too. It is one of the most blatant endorsements of class divisions in a country that calls itself democratic and a city that aspires, however misguidedly, to world-class status. You don’t need an Arundhati Roy to tell you the obvious injustice of the message being unashamedly broadcast on our streets: Delhi Police is for us, the moneyed, well-to-do of the city, and against the crooks and criminals: our servants and drivers, the poor who eke out their pathetic existence on our small mercies.
A friend told me gently, “We call them help; not servants.”
I apologised.
Let me recount an incident which highlights my sense of discomfort. It is a story most of us are familiar with.
A couple of years ago, I was in Delhi, once again hunting for a place to live. Negotiating touts and brokers is a nightmare and after two days of hapless wandering, I finally came across something I liked; a second floor furnished flat in Panchsheel Enclave with its own terraced garden. The owner, a young dentist, lived downstairs with his father, wife and a one-year old child. They seemed most amiable and helpful.
I settled in quickly. The couple would leave house early each morning, their retired father in charge of the house, assisted by a full time domestic help.
One morning, a few months later, their maid came up to inform me about some matter or the other. Somehow, I had never seen her before, knowing of her existence only via shouts from the lady and the master of the house. She had a pronounced limp, her face was thin and gaunt and she looked exhausted, unwell.
This is her story: a job agency got her this placement. They promised to give her Rs 2500 and then paid her nothing. The landlord, she told me, has withheld the money, stating that it will be paid to her when she leaves. Without the money, she can’t leave. She is not allowed to call home. Her children and husband have no idea where she is. They expected her to be back after earning twenty thousand rupees, enough money to get their mortgaged piece of land back. After a year and a half, she has not a penny. They have threatened to inform the police who, she told me fearfully, know her master well.
A few days later, the local SHO is at the dental clinic downstairs getting a free check up. Delhi Police is indeed for us.
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Somnath Batabyal is Fellow at the University of Heidelberg. A former journalist, he is interested in news production practices in Indian media. His book, Making News: Behind the Scenes at Star News and Star Ananda, was published recently by Routledge. When not following such lofty pursuits, he dabbles in fiction and is experimenting with graphic novels.
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This column appears in Sunday Guardian as Nomad Notes and can be read here
