In 1990, when I had just begun working, I had a colleague who lived with her widowed mother and two sisters in Ghaziabad. She used to keep talking about how her neighbours kept calling the police because they thought the family was a “prostitution ring”. She thought it was because there were no males in the house and the boyfriends of the girls visited the house. When my mother and I moved out of a primarily “defence services retiree” complex to a “civilian sector” in Noida, truth be told, this anecdote was in my mind as a possible source of pain. But I was not going to let some unknown unrelated people decide where and how I live. I invited all the new neighbours to my housewarming and that was the first most of them knew that two single women were going to live there. Most of them looked quite surprised. Some later mentioned that when the house was getting built, the contractor did tell them that the owner is a woman who is too busy to come and check progress every day. But they just assumed there was some guy bank rolling the whole thing.
Over time while they are friendly enough as we are, there is not much in common between us. Most of our interactions are restricted to exchanging pleasantries on the road or visiting to invite for some function or to look up someone unwell. So would I give them a clean chit on liberalism? Not the cynical me!!
About six years ago, before the Paying Guest Boom in NCR households, an enterprising guy hired a house two down mine and set up a hostel. The neighbourhood was up in arms against them. Next thing we knew the cops were being called on some pretext or the other against them. One day it was a complaint that their maid had propositioned someone’s manservant. Another it was that they had thrown rubbish into someone’s yard. There was rarely a week that the squad car was not in the lane. Must have been the safest period in the history of the lane. But truth be told, the guy was not doing anything illegal or immoral. It was just that in a lane where most houses had 2-10 people living, his had about 15. Yes there were more mobikes coming to pick/drop/visit people. But the kids themselves were not particularly noisier or messier than anybody else. They could sustain the neighbourly onslaught only for six odd months.
For one year, I was a representative on the RWA also. The complaints I received included a case where a woman wanted me to get a second floor flat of the house opposite hers cleared out, because three unmarried guys lived there, had girlfriends over and may be throwing out condoms on the street. I asked if she had seen them throw them out. No she had not. I asked if she was sure it did not fall out of the sweepers’ barrow. No she was not. I asked her how often she found them. She said so far twice!! I refused to intervene. More such instances and the neighbourhood by next year decided I was not who they believed represented them.
Who are these people in my neighbourhood? Most of the guys are either lawyers, chartered accountants, officers in the government services or run SMEs in varied fields including trading, computer hardware and so on. Most of the women, graduates and postgraduates but have chosen to be home makers. Most families are likely to have incomes in tens of lakhs. All of them upgrade or augment cars every few years. Yet if there were no laws, I am pretty sure they would behave as khaps and set up panchayats right here. I have no illusions that if I had not met their “standards” on morals and ethics, they may well have hounded us too.
If the Khirki Extension people are happy with Somnath Bharti’s intervention, I would be very wary of agreeing what he did was right because it was what the people wanted. People in general have an illusory line of acceptance and anybody who does not meet it, is generally an outsider who makes them uncomfortable and they want them out. There are colonies were being a non-vegetarian is unacceptable!! While it may well be true that some of the Africans living in that area run a drug and prostitution ring, it is as likely that there are some Indians doing so too and that some or all Africans don’t. While it is as likely that the police did not act because they are on the take, it is just as likely that they stopped acting after they found baseless calls being made regularly. While people seem to think it is acceptable to take the most cynical of views about the police, I tend to have an equally cynical view of our entire society.
I also have this crazy anecdote from my life that happened in 1993-94. About 7-8 of my friends, most living in the “retired defence officers” sector of Noida, went out to dinner. On the way back we split into the two cars and as it happens I was in one with three guys. My friend, whose car it was, decided it would be a good evening as any other to explore the new horizons of Noida, which was expanding fast. About a kilometre from our houses, at a lonely crossing stood two police constables, who saw a car with a girl and three guys and decided we were up to no good. First all of us protested at being stopped at all for being on the streets. Then all of us told them “why don’t you come home with us and meet our parents they will tell you that we are all friends”. Then all the guys were equally protective of me, telling the cops to leave me alone.
To give the cops some credit, they separated us, interviewed us including asking each of us to give the others names and addresses. I was never asked to leave the car. After ten odd minutes, they let us go. But I still think back to the day and say, that was the day those cops realized that there was a whole different world that other people lived in. Where men and women were friends with their parents knowledge. They may well have felt that they had wasted time and lost an opportunity to make money, but they definitely did not cook up charges against us to extort. I give all cops the same benefit of doubt that they actually take some action only when they can sense something wrong. Chatting with a cop once at the airport, I asked him about the desultory way they look at the luggage they are scanning. And his excuse was exactly the same – we can figure out when someone has something to hide, well before we actually scan. True or not, we do know that there has not been a case of smuggled gun or knife leading to inflight peril in the last ten years. On the flip side in my most recent trip abroad, I left a gas based tealight lighter in my hand luggage and only found it after I reached home. The Heathrow cops were as good or as bad as the Indian cops may be.
What really baffles me is someone like Bharti who is apparently qualified to practice law, believing that he is above it and his party and other top honchos of AAP supporting that thought. The same police who is being berated here, does several times in a year, send in decoy customers and catch the kingpins and the lackeys in such rings in Delhi and other parts of the country. Since the newspapers rarely report the conviction of such people, it is difficult for me to know how effective the catching was from a legal standpoint, the guys are likely to have spent at least some time in jail. So was there a reason that a proper sting was not done? Or if it was done, what was the need for a midnight raid? Did the raid catch any “customers”? It does not seem like. No guy has been paraded as found on the premises. It looks more and more to me like the failure of the sting to get the girls that prompted the raid, which may well mean that these specific girls were indeed not involved in any illegal activities. To follow it up with this patently unacceptable behaviour like collecting urine samples and so on, actually makes me worried for the society and the repercussions of such vigilantism.
The need to make your constituents happy or for you to posture in front of them, does not mean you can violate others right to live a life that they want to. That is the bottom line in any a society that follows any order, there has to be space for others to do what they like as long as it is not illegal, immoral or directly affecting your wellbeing. To have a government that refuses to follow the basics of human rights, is down right scary not just an anachronism.