- Valson Thampu
Anyone who saw even a single-minute video-clip on how charged-up and aggressive Joyti Sharma was, as she launched herself, like Quixote once did against windmills assuming them to be giants- against the nuns and the adivasi girls, would have been struck by the orgiastic state of the lady in action. I could not help feeling that the lady was giving free-play to her psychological needs than reacting factually to the given situation.
I too have faced situations similar, if not identical. In each of them, it happened that the conduct of the self-appointed agents of justice was disproportionate to the context. Grievances were imaginary, unfounded on facts. But that did not matter to the actors in the theatre of revenge. To them it sufficed that they felt passionately about the allegations they made. The intensity of their indignation was the only proof needed to establish the guilt of those they targeted. It’s a variant of: ‘Faith is above facts’. Facts, in that case, don’t matter when privileged grievances erupt. Feelings alone matter. Do you feel some injustice has been done to your religion? Then you have every right, indeed a duty, to feel massively aggrieved.
The Psychology of Grievance and Revenge in certain public interventions, like the one in Durg, are not based on facts but are driven by a psychological need for revenge. This is described as an “addiction” similar to drug addiction, where individuals and groups get a “craving” for targeted violence and use manufactured grievances to satisfy this need for a “dopamine fix.”
You see this pattern clearly in the Durg episode. The facts and circumstances of the situation did not warrant the hugely disproportionate response enacted. To a dispassionate observer it is amply clear that the Bajrang Dal hotheads and the hyper-charged lady were clearly working up a grievance. In doing so, they deliberately overlooked all evidence that would have established the normality of the situation. The adivasi girls in question had letters of permission from their parents; though they did not need them, because they were old enough to decide for themselves. They had proper travel documents. They were not to be converted, but had been Christians. In willful neglect of all these, first the false alarm of forced conversion was raised. Then, realizing that something more potent was needed to make the situation as dramatic and grievance-charged as it needed it to be, the charge of human trafficking was added as an after-thought. With that, the hell-broth of communally charged grievance against a suspected perfidy was cooked served to the Bajrang Dal activists.
The intervention in question was doctored to meet the psychological needs of the aggressors. Clearly, it was not for the sake of the adivasi girls that the situation was twisted out of shape. Who, after all, cares for adivasis or their girls? How many tribal and Dalit women and girls are raped and violated? Enthusiasm of the sort enacted on the Durg railway platform is never seen in connection with beti-bachhao-ing these hapless victims of casteist sexual aggression. No atrocity that happens to these lesser mortals activates any indignation in Hindutva affiliates.
“Complaint manufacturing” is a deliberate political tactic used to ensure electoral victory, especially in North India. It is easier to create communal motivation than to implement good governance, and the strategy of inciting anger and revenge is at the heart of that motivation. Clearly, it was not for the sake of the adivasi girls that the situation was twisted out of shape. Who, after all, cares for adivasis or their girls? How many tribal and Dalit women and girls are raped and violated? Enthusiasm of the sort enacted on the Durg railway platform is never seen in connection with beti-bachhao-ing these hapless victims of casteist sexual aggression. No atrocity that happens to these lesser mortals activates any indignation in Hindutva affiliates.
Recent researches regarding the psychology of revenge-addiction -the hypothesis being that individuals and groups get addicted to revenge-seeking as a pleasurable activity that meets a ‘craving’ in them to indulge in revenge- afford many insights into events of this kind. Science today tells us that addiction to violence -especially addiction to revenge- works exactly as drug-addition does. How the human brain looks and functions under revenge-induced conditions is similar to how it does under the influence of hard, addictive drugs.
This means that, once individuals and groups acquire the revenge-addiction, they develop a craving to indulge in targeted violence repeatedly. Such indulgence generates dopamine in the revenge-addiction circuitry of their brain. Having to be in a state of non-indulgence in violence creates in them a brain-biological condition similar to turking -or, withdrawal symptoms characterized by craving- in drug-addicts. They feel restlessly deprived. They remain so, till the next fix of violence-indulgence is improvised.
Improvising such situations may yield electoral dividends to a political party. It is easy to talk about good governance, or chant the idealistic slogan, ‘minimum government, maximum governance’ (for which we are indebted to Henry David Thoreau); but it is hard to deliver. The only thing that would deliver electoral success, as Subramanian Swamy has been saying loudly for long, is communal hype. Grievance-manufacturing is the very engine of that hype. On this point, political calculations and individual-and-group psychology converge.
Specifically how the BJP’s approach in Chhattisgarh (targeting nuns) is at odds with its need to maintain political ground in Kerala (where it has to defend the same nuns). Getting a large portion of the population addicted to grievance-hunting cripples the nation’s soul, inhibits progress, and makes genuine nation-building impossible.
There is, however, a sting in the tale here for the BJP. What is sure to secure a political windfall for the party in almost every North Indian state, undermines the interests of the party in Kerala. To gain politically in Chhattisgarh, the nuns have to be trapped and tormented. To protect its precarious and mendaciously improvised political foothold in Kerala, the state unit of the party has to play-act as the defenders of the nuns who, they say they are convinced, are innocent of the charges. The good thing for them is that the Church leaders in Kerala can be trusted to be endlessly indulgent towards the BJP, at the expense of a couple of nuns or any number of them. So, the BJP bosses in Kerala remain unfazed at the Durg atrocity. They are smug and certain that they ‘can easily convince’ the church leaders. In what direction and to what effect is, however, left tantalizingly vague. Their cocksureness vis-a-vis the church leaders is viscerally intriguing.
In the meanwhile, no one pays any heed to how all these are affecting the country. Getting a large portion of the population addicted to grievance-hunting and revenge-seeking, cripples the soul of India with addictive aberrations. Revenge is a pathologically negative sentiment. Even as it fires volcanic passions and reactions in individuals and groups so conditioned, it inhibits national energies from finding healthy and purposive expressions. A habitual revenge-seeker develops a wonky sense of justice. He or she is paralyzed in respect of contributing to the vitality and progress of the country. As Modi himself stated publicly, the fact that so many gau-rakshaks are on the prowl does not mean that our cows are taken care of; no, not even in our gaushalas. Assuredly, it cannot be otherwise.
So, we cannot have nation-building and citizens-targeting at the same time; sponsored, or countenanced, by the very same centre of the ideological hype that proffers the imminent advent of the New India as Vishwa Guru.
