(Published in Mumbai Mirror, December 2008)
I saw a terrorist a couple of days ago. He was a clerk manning window number 60-something of the RTO office at Tardeo. Although he had no guns, grenades or RDX, his devices were no less sinister. Armed with the invincibility of bureaucracy and un-fearing of the repercussions of his actions, this clerk had only one explicit demand from all those unfortunate enough to land up at his window: Kai dya. Kuch toh do. Give me some. It didn’t matter if your papers were in order, or whether you’d obeyed the RTO’s arcane and confusing procedures for the simplest of tasks. (I was there for the hypothecation of my car.) That clerk at the RTO office was beyond the methods of the system. He was a system unto himself. The drawer under his desk opened and closed so many times it made my head spin. He was conscientious that way — once he’d received his bribe, there was nothing he wouldn’t do. No car owner’s signature on documents? No problem. Registration card barely legible? Will do. Every flaw in your papers, however grave or inexcusable, could be overlooked for a price. And if your papers were error-free, you could count on the clerk to invent mistakes that didn’t exist. Thanks to the man’s haggling and chicanery, the long line at his window barely moved. I lost my patience and returned home, my task unfinished and my cynicism through the roof.
We’ve got it wrong. The thousands of us who swamped the Gateway of India last Wednesday have got it all wrong. We denounced Pakistan, violence, Islamic terrorism, politicians, political parties and our government. We slapped slippers on our ex-CM’s photographs and we waived our flag, our tiranga, shouting: Inquilab zindabad! Bharat Mata ki Jai! At some point, many of us broke into song — Hum honge kamyaab… We raged, ranted, screeched and hollered. And then we went home. Oh of course things will change. As a society, we’re experts at fulfilling formalities. There will be metal detectors galore and added vigilance in public places. There will be new heads of state and new laws dictating our national security. If we conduct peace marches for a couple of more Wednesdays, we might even manage to get a CEO appointed for Mumbai. In a perverse sort of way, Maharashtra’s ex-Deputy-CM was probably right: the terrorist attack will seem like a small incident compared to the sea-change that is about to occur in the way we citizens demand our nation is governed, ostensibly at least.
And yet, for all our righteous rage and for all the heads that have rolled at Mantralaya, the thousands of us demonstrating at Gateway on Wednesday were clearly barking up the wrong tree. The true bane of our nation — the deserving tree, so to speak — is so vast and all pervading, that we wouldn’t know where to begin, or how loud to bark.
I will earn no points for originality when I state that visible terrorism, the horror of which we witnessed on television last week, has its roots in corruption. It is the culmination of countless acts of dereliction of duty by the countless faceless people who exist around us, among us, and are often one of us. Suddenly, the incurable dishonesty of our babus, netas, havaldars and industrialists is no longer cute. Suddenly, passing a 20-rupee note to the traffic policeman has ceased to be a harmless act of street-smartness. From now on, whenever we encourage the warping of rules for our benefit, we will have added to the store of moral bagginess in the world. Worse, we will have behaved exactly like those 10 monsters who wreaked havoc on our city. They managed to get in, with fake IDs and SIM cards, sailing unhindered into Mumbai’s coast, because enough people along the way chose the convenience of a quick buck over the righteous path of restraint and vigilance. These ordinary abettors and unsuspecting agents of terrorists were no less than terrorists.
Mumbai is special because it provides daily evidence of a job well done. Our trains work! Our buses run! A majority of us get potable water and regular electricity! Lost in a city of 17 million, it would be easy to think of ourselves and our actions —- however reprehensible or dubious — as inconsequential. However, given the unpredictability of terrorism, our every harmless-seeming misstep can mean life and death for someone else. Garbage-free streets are essential because some day we may have to run through them to save our lives. If enough of us follow traffic rules, someday a terrorist’s car will jump the signal and he won’t be mistaken for just another enterprising fellow. I often wonder how many people who died at CST that fateful night had slipped and fallen on the remnants of other people’s paan gunk. Our spitting, littering, thieving, bribing, shirking, polluting, insensitive and illegal ways can, depending on the situation, switch from innocuous to lethal in a second. Those of us gathered at Gateway last Wednesday must’ve observed how dangerously overcrowded the streets had become. One random gunshot, and the ensuing stampede would’ve been nothing short of a massacre. As if enough lives haven’t been lost.
The corny truism of being the change one wants is, unfortunately, truer than ever before. Before we can combat terrorism, we must first abolish every trace of the terrorist in ourselves. The bribe givers and spit-spewers are often the moral ancestors of gun wielders and life takers.
I was exaggerating when I termed that RTO clerk a terrorist. I have no reason to doubt that he is as patriotic and peace loving as the rest of us. But if it ever turns out that he’d illegally okayed the documents of a car that was eventually used for anti-national activities, I would hope that RTO clerk is arrested and tried like the very worst of them.
