ON a scalding day in May, red dust everywhere, hot wind blowing, I stood at the edge of a devastated ashram in Dantewada. A week earlier, on May 17, the day after results for the 14th general elections were announced and India was being applauded around the world for its admirable rituals of democracy, five bulldozers and 500 policemen had surrounded this distant outpost of the nation. Dispensaries, dormitories, classrooms, a child’s swing, even a hand pump – the only source of water for miles around – was yanked out of the earth with a kind of obscene violence. There were lessons the state wanted to teach the ashram’s owner Himanshu Kumar, a Gandhian human rights activist from Meerut. So as he sat under a tree and watched with his wife and two young daughters – the elder one in tears – the state ravaged his home and 17 years of work. In the end, only a tiny pink crocus remained, drooping in the sun. And a few scattered pages, rustling in the wind, urging Gond tribals to cast their vote and claim their rights as Indian citizens.

Dantewada is a remote tribal district in the south Bastar region of Chhattisgarh – rich in minerals, poor in amenities. Nothing connects it with the notion of the Indian state except posses of roving policemen and broad creamy roads spiriting away the resources. There is little here to seduce the outsider. But for 17 years, Himanshu and his wife, Veena – unusual daughter of a garment exporter from Raja Garden, an enclave of conservative Punjabi traders in Delhi – had worked among the Gond tribals, learning Gondi themselves, teaching, healing, integrating the forgotten of India with India. The state welcomed them – the Vanvasi Chetna ashram was an ICU on the fringes of a wounded society; the Kumars were a convenient outsourcing of national duty.

But in 2005, everything changed. Fifty years of neglect and police oppression had seeded a deep anger: the Naxals moved in where the state should have been. To counter this, instead of ramping up its development programme, the government launched its notorious Salwa Judum campaign, creating an armed civilian militia to fight the Naxals. Kitted with money and guns, tribals were set on tribals, triggering a cataclysmic civil war. Six hundred villages were forcibly evacuated – ostensibly a detox programme to cleanse the forests of local support for the Naxals. Thousands of tribals were coerced into relief camps – nightmare worlds of corrugated tin and concertina. (Human rights activists in the area assert the war against Naxals is just a cynical alibi; the real game is to move the tribals out and clear the mineral-rich land for corporate takeover.)

 

As the violence spiralled, inevitably Himanshu and Veena were drawn in. Early in 2005, a young anganwadi worker called Sonia was brutally beaten by the police on the pretext that she was a Naxal sympathizer. They hit her with poles then tied her hair with ropes and dragged her through the mud. Broken, she came to the ashram seeking recourse. Himanshu hesitated. For the first time, fear prickled beneath his skin. He had two young daughters himself. If he took up the case he knew there would be no return. But Veena urged him on. You call yourself a human rights activist, she challenged, and at the first sign of danger you quail?

Since then, Himanshu has borne relentless witness. He sent more than a hundred cases to the Human Rights Commission – they sent a committee led by policemen to investigate the police. He sent over a 1,000 complaints to the Dantewada Superintendent of Police – the SP refused to file any FIRs. In February this year, 19 tribals were shot dead in cold blood in Singaram village. Himanshu filed a petition in the Bilaspur High Court. If he hadn’t been so damned dogged, no one would have known. The government was embarrassed. The reprisal was bound to come. When Himanshu got a notice about the impending demolition, he called the Chhattisgarh Chief Secretary. He was assured it was a false alarm and nothing would happen. The next morning at 8 am, the bulldozers moved in.

As I stand with Himanshu in his silent, crushed ashram – so completely rubbled, a kind of after-image of what had once been still hovers in the air – a mute circle of tribals gather around us. They stare stoically at the debris stretching before them. Their gaze has a dignity, a quality of resignation, a complete vacancy of expectation that constricts your breath. This ashram had been a crucial lifeline for them. No one speaks, but the air pulses with the untold stories spooling in their heads. Among the crowd, there are those whose homes have been burnt eight or nine times by the state, there are those whose sisters have been raped before they were shot through the mouth, there are those who have been jailed when they came to complain. They don’t rage. They don’t ask Himanshu questions. They understand the nature of power; they understand what has happened.

 

Chhattisgarh is a storyteller’s paradise. But take a straw poll at any dinner conversation in the salons of Delhi or Bombay, or any of India’s metropolises. Chances are no one would have heard of Himanshu Kumar. Or, indeed, of Dantewada. The telling of stories in India is no longer a function of language and gifts and capacity to evoke empathy. It is merely a function of class. You can only tell the stories that people want to hear. How Shahid built his body. How Shahrukh was held up at an airport. How black the Monday was on the stockmarket. How malls are not getting enough footfalls. How one tony girl died of asthma in a school (a subject not of private grief but national outrage); how another chose a husband on TV. And, of course, what did L.N. Mittal feel when he came to India?

Of all the faultlines that have traditionally marred India, there is none so insidious today as the imaginative divide that separates the English speaking middle class from the rest of the country. As the cruel joke goes, if you are Arundhati Roy, every silver lining has a cloud. To speak of the disenfranchised – lakhs of people uprooted from homes, lakhs of people sick from the contaminations of corporate refuse, lakhs of people unfairly beaten and jailed, lakhs of people fighting to preserve rivers and forests from being robbed to dim our lights and pipe our music – is no longer the shared concerns of a nation, it is the voice of a nag. Why indeed would those coasting on the silver lining think of the cloud?

(Working at a public interest magazine, in fact, is replete with its own peculiar social hazards. Life is a constant gladiatorial battle against the glazed eye, the polite interruption, the aborted conversation. And sudden, debilitating, moments of self-doubt. As a swish Mumbai lawyer said succinctly at a dinner party, ‘Get a life you guys! Stop being a bore!’)

 

There was a time when the middle class – educated, enlightened – led these conversations about a just and sustainable society. The giants who wrested our freedom for us may have argued over the course, but they rarely disagreed over the destination. The gift of instant and universal adult suffrage at the midnight hour was a promissory note: India was to be structured as a nation where every citizen would have a chance at a better life. And Himanshu, the tribals of Chhattisgarh and the sea of heaving stories behind them would not lie below the line of who we considered Indian. If you talked about striving for a more equal world – not just in material terms but one in which everyone had equal access to the state – you might have been a hypocrite but you weren’t a bore. Human greed was a factor in public life, it wasn’t the altar.

Now, anything that impedes the pleasure of People Like Us is deemed anti-national. Or the rant of a nag. Or the archaic rhetoric of doctrinaire liberals. Or plain anti-progress. At the heart of this short circuit in contemporary middle class imagination is a cynical sabotage: the birth of a new idea of aspiration. This aspiration is no longer the product – in itself fierce, competitive, often unequal – of natural and differing human want. It is a homogenous dream manufactured by the massive engines of massive money. India’s middle class is not only being programmed into a certain kind of aspiration; it is imprisoned in it. Like some giant Truman Show that stretches across the globe, without knowing it, we have been herded into a sound-proof, stimuli-proof set, and our arteries to the world outside the studio have slowly been choked off.

 

How is one to empathise with what happens outside this shiny bubble? There is no news of it. A generation more, and soon there will almost be no memory of it. Siphoned into the plush comfort of multiplexes – its viewers cleverly homogenised by their ability to pay Rs 200 for a ticket – our cinema no longer needs to speak to or reflect a diverse society. All literature must be a viable market proposition. Television content is controlled by 6,000 cleverly planted TRP machines and the fluctuating profits of its owners. And print is a just a big glossy advertisement. Pretty people on People covers, pretty products on nationwide brochures. The men who make our jam design our bread today. If you can’t buy what Spice recommended (or Brunch dictated), you are consumed by middle class rage and despair. You no longer know what injustice is, so you protest a breakdown in your plumbing.

As Barack Obama said in his famous speech on faith and the absence of public morality in a consumerist society, we might feel a hole in our hearts as we go about buying the twentieth upgrade of our ipods, but we cannot cure it because we no longer know how to name it.

 

Through the proliferating malls and luxury outlets across India, like some bad Orwellian dream, you see the middle class this civilizational sabotage has manufactured. Human beings not made more sentient and thoughtful by opportunity and privilege but creatures zipped inside a bloated, inviolate sense of selfhood. Not enlightened human capital, but vacuous receptacles of consumption fully backward integrated by the manufacturers: slip a discount scheme into their ear, or the promise of a cheaper car, or a tax rebate and the world can be destituted without a murmur.

As a journalist, each time one comes back to the metropolis from a trip to that cliché – the ‘Other India’ – one is seized by a terrifying social dysfunction. Once you can see the contours of the set – once you recognize it to be a set – you can no longer inhabit it. Yet, you have nowhere else to go either. You try to warn the people strutting around you that their well-being is finite. That an angry and iniquitous world is seething outside, that there is an unsustainable cost to all this fine living, but the bars are too beautiful and the music too soft, and your image in the mirror looks too dreary even to yourself.

Nothing can pierce the sense of well-being that has flowered in India. In the general election this year, high octane campaigns were run to get the urban middle class vote out. Superstars pleaded with their fans to go to the booth; big consumer labels offered 40 per cent discount to those who would come in with their forefingers inked. (After all, if the middle class would vote, governments would have to pay even less heed to the demands of the poor, those fatal drags on the GDP.)

In contrast, in the hell-holes of Kalahandi and Sheopur and Kashipur – places so desolate death is as common as the sunrise – no one had to woo the vote. The sick and the hungry lined up in front of the electronic voting machines. So what if the electoral convoys had passed them by for the nth time, so what if none of the state’s largesse ever reached them, this vote was all they had: it was their illusion of a bargaining chip. It is not fatigued cynicism, then, that keeps the middle class away from the vote; it is complacency. In a world order where your capacity to buy dictates the kind of world you will live in, the monied can never be in jeopardy. Political parties can come and go; you will eternally be looked after.

Those of us who still know how to slip out of the set, therefore, can only tell our stories to an empty room. And fight the temptation to grow silent ourselves.

 

Pleasure is a powerful principle. Those of us who criticize the bubble forget to mention how seductive it is. Without argument, consumerism has given birth to immense beauty: new sensations, new tastes, new designs, new creativity. Even its most strident detractors must struggle against its attractions. (You only have to visit a charmless Marxist office or home to sense what a poor alternative that austere world presents, how little incentive it provides to dismantle the luxury studio.)

What makes all this more complicated is that the rich and the middle class are swaddled in an unassailable sense of righteousness. Because they are the beneficiaries of power, they are blind to how complicit they are in the malevolent misuse of power. What was wrong with the Tata factory in Singur? they ask. What’s wrong with the Vedanta project in Niyamgiri? Or the Reliance project in Raigad? What went down in Nandigram? Why shouldn’t Jaypee get untold swathes of land in exchange for the selfless task of building a multi-thousand crore road through Uttar Pradesh? Why shouldn’t rivers be damned and forests be chopped and the earth be mined? Why are Naxals mushrooming everywhere? Why shouldn’t Narendra Modi be prime minister?

 

Innocence can be a fatal affliction. The rich and the middle class fail to see that the resources for the consumerist beauty and efficiencies they are surrounded with have been wrested with great and unfair violence from others. They fail to see that money and power are inextricable bed-fellows, and if they ever stray from the script themselves and ask what’s going on outside, they will be as brutally silenced.

Just societies are not sui generis. They have to be fought for and nurtured and defended. And you can never take those defenders for granted. Two years ago, like Himanshu, a gentle doctor was punished in Chhattisgarh for asking uncomfortable questions. He was one of those who had made the leap. The son of an army officer and a gold medalist from Christian Medical College in Vellore, Binayak Sen could have set up a vending machine: an urban clinic manufacturing money rather than dispensing health. Instead, he wandered into the deepest recesses of the country and was irrevocably changed. Children born with chronic malnutrition. People dying of malaria. People with no access to food or medicine or education. Such systemic and criminal neglect, it made you question the algorithm of your own existence.

Every time the good doctor went back to Vellore, he challenged his compatriots. How were they going to live with their conscience, he asked, while millions died silently in the countryside? He had joined the dots. He knew that health and a just society are inextricably linked: the same as power and money.

 

In 2007, like Himanshu, Binayak was presented with a conundrum. How far would he take his engagement with justice? At what personal cost? The brother of an old Naxal leader jailed in Raipur had asked Binayak to help get him a surgery. Binayak knew he was walking into a lion’s den. Since the Salwa Judum had begun, like Himanshu, he had been raising difficult questions. The state was waiting to bait him. Like standing up for the bruised Sonia, visiting a Naxal leader was bound to become a red flag to a bull. But as Binayak said, where do you begin to draw the line and say thus far and no more? If you draw lines, you will always be imprisoned in spirit.

It took two years, but the arrest of Binayak Sen slowly became a global story. In May this year, one week after Himanshu’s ashram was demolished, prodded by the moral pressure of a high-profile campaign, Binayak finally walked out of jail, a free man. His story had become resonant of thousands of anonymous men and women fighting to keep civil values alive, routinely punished by the state for questioning it. His freedom, therefore, was a powerful talisman. It was proof that in a society weighed against the selfless act, you can be a good man and still win.

But even talismans have emotions. Two years of unfair incarceration had made his brain ‘soggy’, Binayak said. It is not easy to withstand the might of the state and like those of us fighting the temptation to fall silent, Binayak must fight his own internal battle not to cave in and lower the pitch of his moral voice.

 

As journalists, we at Tehelka may never have strayed from the comforts of the set ourselves. The truth is, it is difficult really to fight for something you have never lost. But we were wrested out of our cocoon by an extraordinary incident. Eight years ago, as a small media organisation – neither rich nor powerful – we undertook an investigation which sucked us under the grand face of official India into its dark sewers below. The investigation established that if the inducements were correct, both defence equipment and ‘national security’ – that holy grail – could be sold by official India for a song. Jets, tanks, ammunition, coffins for dead soldiers: nothing was sacrosanct. Naturally, official India did not like its sewers spilled out onto the street: in a fit of self-righteous rage, instead of cleaning its muck, it began a vengeful enquiry on who had dug out all this dirt.

That enquiry took us even further into the dark heart of official India. We found ourselves trapped in lies and propaganda and arrests and legalities. We found ourselves turned into pariahs. It was, to put it mildly, the most educative experience anyone could have asked for. As privileged Indians, we live dangerously innocent lives. We believe the world is a straight place. We believe we are good and people like us are largely good. We know politicians can be corrupt, but we never really experience that corruption. Liberty, Democracy – these are just empty theoretical ideals we inherit and claim to cherish. We never experience their loss first-hand. We never wander into that dark place where none of the rules apply. We never fall foul of the centrist view. We never experience the sewer.

That first investigation – and its long bitter aftermath – changed us both as people and journalists. It booted us out of the luxury studio. It taught us how easily our certitudes could fray, how easily our privileges could be lost. Most of all, it taught us to seek and tell the real stories – even at personal cost. This is a door of perception middle class India cannot easily walk through for it is difficult to speak for something you have never lost.

Today, all those struggling to speak against the wind know that one cannot easily win against global programming. But you have to remind yourself that consumerist societies, as we now know it, are created by clever and macro design. Contrary to what their promoters tell us, there is nothing natural or inevitable about them.

To alter the script even slightly, first of all, we have to start letting the stories through. We have to bridge the great imaginative divide. We have to confront the ugly imbalance on which our society is being constructed. It is impossible to create an equal world: that would be a hubris in itself. What we must seek instead is a greater balance, a better baseline of common good. If that will yield lesser beauties and comforts than the luxury studio we now inhabit, so be it. We must learn to make do with that.

As America – that fabled land of milk and honey – has learned, all bubbles do burst. If we do not start heeding the stories of the India we have left behind, the wilful ellipses will catch up with us one day. The dots will join themselves. And the violence of that would probably envelop us all.