There is a great uneasiness with this urge to clean-up. And these last 5-6 years India seems to be in its grip. It is not easy to see its dangers, because it is being done in the name of good. It even has cross-party appeal. PM Modi's cleanliness campaign is in fact preceeded by the AAP's broom. The most recent expressions are Yogi Adityanand's efforts.
There seems to be a visual, aesthetic dimension to this. And so removing dirt for AAP, includes not just garbage but leaves and dust too! The removal of corruption, seems to end up meaning that an informal economy that is not in the radar of banks be brought in line. Surely there is some wisdom in this. In India only 2-3% of or economy was in the radar of banks, and the rest was cash economy. In a first world nation like US, it is the other way round. So the biggest power - both positive and negative - is this new rationalisation through banks in India. The removal of corruption, this clean-up, is basically about what we can map. Of course new forms of power will be born with this, and some old ones snuffed.
Yogi A's steps. Protecting girls, removing pan and gutka and closing slaughter houses. So many kinds of clean-up. Protecting girls is hard to separate from preventing couples from meeting and of course - the real and the imagined zones of love-jihad. So clean-up can also be about putting things in their place. Of course we all would like it if government offices did not have pan stains in their walls, right? Most government officers would themselves agree to stop it, admiring the new chain of command. For in India ministers hardly make anything happen. So when someone is decisive that itself feels so refreshing! But what unwitting shifts come with this?
This is the problem to be worked through. What value is superior to what value? For instance in the demand to have separate hostels for vegetarians and non-vegetarians in some institutions... One valid value is the comfort of vegetarians. [Of course it is interesting to ask how people survived quite happily all these years with it]. But the other value is of togetherness. What is the price we pay? I recall a story i heard from my mother. Her family lived in Daryaganj when they were young. There were a group of homes in a sort of enclosed area with a central area. A Bengali couple lived on the ground floor. The husband used to dispense homeopathic medicines as a hobby and also made homemade anar-firecrackers on diwali for the kids! The day his wife cooked fish, she would step out in the courtyard and yell - Main machhi bana rahi hoon, khidki band kar lo!! A great lesson for me here, was a pathway, an idea, that even if discomfort is valid, can it be allowed to defeat a larger value of togetherness. What do we want to clean-up and what 'dirt' do we find beauty in? What are the costs we are willing to pay?
