The growing gap between our civic sense & civilisation

Incivility has become the order of the day and if everyday occurrences are anything to go by, we seem to be setting new records at a supersonic pace.

Earlier this year, as the Maha Kumbh frenzy gripped the nation, numerous videos emerged from the event where people were seen pouncing upon puja articles in river waters, even before the items had been properly immersed as part of the visarjan rituals. Around the same time, and from the same state (Uttar Pradesh), a wedding reception in Bijnor transformed into a battlefield when members from the groom’s side expressed dissatisfaction over the delay in food being served from the bride’s side. Food again became a flashpoint when, at the 8th Madhya Pradesh Global Investors Summit held in February, a large number of participants rioted over the free buffet. It did not take much for the limelight to shift from promoting MP as a major financial destination to the unruly conduct of the attendees, who abrasively disrupted the catering service, stealing plates and platters.

The same behaviour had a re-run at two recent events. During the celebrations of the much-touted International Yoga Day on June 21, the gathering at Visakhapatnam’s RK Beach descended into an absurd scramble for yoga mats from stacks reserved for later distribution. Resembling a stampede and a shoplifting situation, the objective of practising yoga for instilling serenity and balance got miserably upended by the tragic, if comical, grabbing match. Then, in early July, sundry men and women attending Lucknow’s Mango Festival were observed snatching and stuffing mangoes from the display counters, undermining all decorum. It’s an event that has been jokingly described by netizens as this year’s ‘mango heist’.

It is difficult to come up with ‘one’ reason behind all of this chaos. The phrase “we are like that only" perhaps comes closest to defining our shared identity as a chaotic people, but it doesn’t quite tell us why we are like this. What it does point to is a certain sense of resignation and an acknowledgment of a ‘naturalness’ that somehow seems smugly contended with itself. It is as if we acknowledge that there is a gaping hole in our individual and social comportment, but also that that is how things are going to stay.

Of course, there lies a grave danger in accepting this line of argument, for it proposes an essentialist attitude, just like the other seemingly positive homilies routinely dished out: “India is going to take over the world soon"; “India is the world leader in such and such sector"; “India has the greatest civilisational history and legacy", etc. This last belief is of particular interest, because civilisational glory is very often used as a buffer to fend off any criticism of the ways in which we behave. At best, the examples cited above are treated as aberrations, random and rare. What’s more, we readily allow ourselves to slip back into the cosiness of our imagined greatness, our splendid sabhyata to feel good collectively.

A telling moment in Ashutosh Gowariker’s cult film Swades (2004) illustrates this point powerfully. Upon returning to his ancestral village in India, when Mohan Bhargava (Shahrukh Khan), an NRI, succinctly appreciates the US standard of living in front of the village council, an elderly member arrogantly retorts. “We have something that no other country has," the old man immediately claims, by which he means “sanskar (values) and parampara (traditions)." He adds that “India is the greatest country of all." To which, a miffed Bhargava cogently replies that whenever we falter as a society, we begin blowing the trumpet of our values and tradition, diverting attention from the issues at hand. Whereas the truth is — Bhargava argues — that many of these age-old customs end up sowing seeds of internal acrimony, making us enemies of one another within the country.

It is this animosity that frequently becomes pronounced in our society. In its latest avatar, it can be seen in the barefaced hooliganism of kanwariyas and Marathi-speaking fundamentalists. Of all the examples demonstrating the falling standards of propriety at a public level, these two issues seem to take the cake. While the self-appointed custodians of the Marathi language have gone on an open rampage to harass random people speaking Hindi in Maharashtra, the saffron-clad kanwariyas have indulged in brazenly damaging public property and attacking common people, including government security men. Any behaviour is permissible in the garbs of regional and religious pride, it seems.

A sense of entitlement and aggressive individualism underlines all of these cases that easily cuts across classes. Anyone wanting to equate incivility with ‘unemployment’ or ‘poverty’ should merely cast an eye on the nouveau and ultra-rich circles, where such incidents thrive in huge measure as well. Whether it is people wrangling over the pettiest of things or treating other classes as scum (while simultaneously maintaining a hypocritical persona elsewhere), incivility remains a constant. The freshest survey on the widespread prevalence of abusive language in India (conducted over a course of 11 years by Maharshi Dayanand University and ‘Selfie with Daughter’ Foundation) further testifies to our rude and coarse nature. Reading the news of Delhi topping this exercise was hardly surprising, as it brought back distressing memories from my university days when I first observed vitriol vitiating the capital’s air on a daily basis. Those angry abuses habitually hurled by rich car-owners on poor rickshaw-wallahs trudging alongside still ring loudly in my head.

Living in the age of social media and manufactured news, the assaults on civility invariably gain greater traction than ever before. As fake identities and alternative digital personas take us further and further away from any semblance of accountability, our ‘right’ to comment and say whatever we want also gets fouler. As social commentator Santosh Desai had pointed out half a decade ago, today, “anyone can be harassed and discredited if one sets out to do so. Nothing is sacred — personal abuse, doctored quotes, photo-shopped pictures, deepfake videos, attacks on family members, false news reports about alleged misdeeds —everything is easy to manufacture and circulate. The new codes of propaganda are so powerful while being invisible that they are almost impossible to counter."

In his century-old lectures, Rabindranath Tagore had exhorted people to think about being civilised not only in terms of politeness or good manners, but also in terms of “dharma," by which he meant “that principle which holds us firm together and leads us to our best welfare."

Ever critical of the colonial baggage that customarily underscored the idea of the “civilising mission", he expanded on the idea of a healthy civilisation as one where “some creative ideal binds its members in a rhythm of relationship."

It is this ‘rhythm’ that seems to have increasingly gone awry today. Unless we work at its revival and restoration, the gap between ‘sabhya‘ and ‘sabhyata‘ will only continue to grow.

Siddharth Pandey is ahistorian, artist & cultural critic based out of Shimla.

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