The New Year incident of a crowd molesting 2 women on Juhu Tara Road hit me like a rock. While the incident itself was enough to cause indignation, what really jolted me was the deeper issue it symptomized.
Over the last few years, I have been reading and hearing about the increasing divide between the haves and the have nots in India. And I have heard people worry that this will cause social unrest and upheaval. But, I have always felt that these concerns were overblown or shallow. There were bigger & deeper issues to deal with such as Infrastructure, Health and Education, which if done well, should take care of these symptoms. And in any case, any mass upheaval was still some decades away, was how I reacted.
Over the past few months however, I'm beginning to see patterns that indicate that the unrest and upheaval is not far. In Mumbai, the great immigrant magnet, you see this more than anywhere else.
The situation is still at a simmering stage but as these two incidents show, it doesn't take much for the lava to burst out:
A college student is driving his Maruti Swift on SV Road, when he accidentally hits a pedestrian who, in typical Mumbai style, is walking through peak traffic using his hand both as a shield and a traffic signal. Where the fault lay was debatable but the response from the crowd was bordering on the maniacal. They pulled out the youngster and proceeded to take out all the frustrations of their unfulfilled life on him.
2 NRI couples make plans to go to J W Marriot for New Year night reveleries which included a performance from Bipasha Basu. Clearly, there are more people who can't get in (the entry ticket was Rs. 11,500) than who could. When the 2 couples leave Marriot and are walking towards Hote Royal, the crowds from Juhu Beach (where else do you get free open space in Mumbai?) start to rile them with lewd comments. In a pure reflex action, one of the lady abuses the crowd. And the 'have-nots' who were smarting from being excluded from the 'high-life' take out their frustration at the women by tearing their clothes & molesting them.
These incidents are repeated in different forms and facets all over Mumbai everyday. Whether it is the laborer peeing at the outer wall of a Bungalow, pedestrians scratching cars while passing them by or the blank stares of a beggar at a traffic junction, deprived India snarls at rich India every second.
And where the underlying frustration doesnt find vent, it simmers as apathy or antipathy. Everyday, poor immigrants disembark from Patna express at VT and start their battle for survival. Everyday, a rich spoilt kid leaves his half-finished breakfast, goes down the lift and orders his driver to take him to a Multiplex in his Toyota. And the poor Bihari and the rich Marwari share the same road and air. If the Bihari's dreams are not realized, the situation is ripe for a nightmare on our streets.
