Who is a common citizen? Or, perhaps, more pertinently, when is someone a common citizen?
Illustration/Ravi Jadhav
Who is a common citizen? Or, perhaps, more pertinently, when is someone a common citizen? Social media is periodically a stage where people position themselves as "common citizens" or "ordinary people" - in contrast to others, who by implication are designated as uncommon or ab-normal citizens.
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For instance, during festivals, people often complain about loudspeaker music from slums with how "these people play their music unhampered, while us ordinary citizens must suffer (insert suffering of choice)". This is not to ignore civic difficulty - I am no fan of loudspeaker music - but complaining about noise is quite different from making generalisations about identity.
Why does a single disruption take on proportions not of an inconvenience that must be borne because of complex realities of co-existence, but an unbearable oppression? What then is "normal" or "ordinary" time signified by? It is a time in which you carry out your tasks and your difficulties along with your privileges, without having to think much about them, or other people's lack of them.
The visibility of a group of people who serve and preserve this normalcy - clean it, help it run on time, give it a neatly made bed - in some other form, as revelers, and noise-makers becomes "abnormal" - as if they cannot do and be both. Many of us who call ourselves common citizens, are not quite so. In a country where 58 per cent of people live on under R250 a day, one may assume that being educated, owning a car (11 per cent) or even a Twitter account (about two per cent) does not make us common, but uncommon Indians. When you position yourself as common, or, the norm, you are also saying you are the kind of Indian who defines the nation. The nation is about you.
This declaration of 'commonness' has been in full flower over the recent unrest following the attack on a Dalit rally in Pune's Bhima Koregaon by caste-based Hindutva groups leading to the death of a Dalit youth.
Those who talk about Woodstock like it was their chachaji's sangeet and get feels about revolutions in other times and places suddenly assert that it's totally wrong that "they" (yaniki Dalits) hold "common citizens" to ransom with a bandh. People who love homilies about how there are no limits to imagination, ambition, fitness goals vaghera, start to say, caste is dead, "these" people have progressed so much, how much more do they want? When challenged on their willful ignorance about caste realities in India, they brashly own their ignorance as a proof of their ordinariness thus: I'm a common person and this is my common sense response and so it's essentially apolitical and good hearted (yaniki, you are not).
Sometimes, the reason one can afford to be uninformed, unaware of history or current politics, and yet prosper in the world, is because one is in fact not a common person, but a person with general class and caste histories of access, connections, possibilities and opportunities. It doesn't mean you don't have individual difficulties. Just that you have some doors you can at least knock on.
As it is possible for one to have privileges but also have difficulties, it is possible to feel frustrated by a bandh, and still understand why someone protests, to engage in debate with, not dismissal, of their cause. Try it. It's even, you know, somewhat common.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevipictures.com
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