Our obsession with self-interest

Kashmir brims with protests . Recently there were widespread protests against the sex scandal that hit the state. They broke the house of the woman who ran the racket and they are rightly demanding to know the names of those who are involved. This is a positive development.

The medicos and the people at other premier institutions all of a sudden want equality in the country and have been protesting against the government’s intransigent reservation policy . It’s heartening to know when people stand up for their rights. But there is a small problem.

Take for instance the protests in Kashmir. We never see Kashmiri rage against terrorism. When people in Kashmir villages are selectively killed, there are no protest rallies, there are no ransacks and we don’t see any furore upon the streets of the valley. I’m not saying a sex scandal is not worth protesting against, but anything that is anti-social should be protested against.

The same goes for people who are protesting against the quota-politics of the government. Where does their sense of justice go when gruesome acts are committed against dalits and the scheduled castes? Why aren’t their hunger strikes and mass protests and candle-light marches at India Gate when the Thakurs gang-rape a dalit woman?

This is a very big problem in our country: this attitude of only waking up when your own house is affected. Some may say that people hit the streets during the Jessica Lal controversy. But that too was self-motivated. The middle-class got humiliated by the gross misjustice/injustice. They all thought, “OK, this could happen to us too.”

Unless we learn to stand up for our fellow citizens nothing much can be achieved in terms of social justice and equality. A dalit family being harassed in Rajasthan or Andhra Pradesh is as much a representation of gross injustice as job deprivations due to the quota system. Just as the people of Kashmir are protesting on the street against the violation of their daughters, they should also come out and protest against the things like the henious Doda killings . And this obsession with self-interest has been evident for a long time. Big and small kingdoms on the Indian subcontinent were always vulnerable to invasions because they never stood up for each other. Now such invasions happen amidst us and it’s high time we took a collective stand against them.