[Urbanstudy] The (Auto) Rakshasa and the citizen

[Kabir Khan]

http://kafila.org/2012/06/14/the-autorakshasa-and-the-citizen/
The (Auto)Rakshasa and the Citizen
June 14, 2012
 tags: aesthetics <http://kafila.org/tag/aesthetics/>,
autos<http://kafila.org/tag/autos/>,
inequality <http://kafila.org/tag/inequality/>,
movements<http://kafila.org/tag/movements-2/>,
Politics <http://kafila.org/tag/politics/>, urban<http://kafila.org/tag/urban/>
 by Gautam Bhan <http://kafila.org/author/woodenboxes/>

A petition from an organization called Change India invaded my Facebook
wall today right before – rather ironically, it turns out— my morning auto
ride. The petition is filed under a category on the site called “petitions
for economic justice.” When you open it, the image pasted below opens. A
sharp fanged, dark skinned “auto-rakshasa” demands one-and-a-half fare. The
commuter is “harassed.” The petition that accompanies this image urges the
ACP of police to create “an efficient system” so that complaints made to
report auto-drivers who overcharge or refuse to ply can be tracked. How, it
asks, can “concerned Bangalorean citizens” expect “justice” if their
complaints are not tracked?  We all must, it urges, “join the fight.”

[image: Image]<http://kafilabackup.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/untitled2.png>

Let me first say quite clearly that I do not mean to undermine the
intentions and frustrations of those who launched this campaign and, yes,
when the meter goes on without asking, it eases a morning commute
significantly. The question is: if this does not happen at times (and
indeed it doesn’t) then why is this so and what does one do about it? There
is a lot to be said about the economics of the issue itself and I welcome
others reading who know more to write about it more extensively. But this
piece is not about that. It is about the campaign itself and how we
articulate political questions in our cities. It is fundamentally about the
easy, unremarked way in which a working urban resident and citizen – who is
also, after all, a “fellow Bangalorean” and concerned with “economic
justice”– can be termed and portrayed a “rakshasa” as if it were a banal
utterance.

Our urban institutions don’t, in many ways, work. We know this, the poor
have always known it and it seems to be the newly discovered ire of elite
politics. We complain, the petition says, and “no action” is taken. This
complaint is not unique to this campaign or to the elite. The narrative
commonly told about our cities today is in terms of “failure” and
“illegality” whether it is dysfunctional institutions, corruption, broken
infrastructure or slums. I am not contesting these failures or the anger of
the petition writers at it. There is, however, a “but.” It is, put bluntly,
this: not all institutional failures are the same, not all crimes are equal
and not all illegalities lead to the same consequences. Protesting against
them without taking this into account is not just ineffective, it is deeply
unjust. Let me take an example from housing. Rich people who build illegal
houses make “farmhouses” and “unauthorized colonies.” Poor people who do
the same make “slums.” In a campaign against “illegality,” only one of them
gets demolished. Only one is called an “encroacher” and a “pickpocket.”
Only one of them can be a “rakshasa,” the other gets to be a “citizen.”

But, the campaign writers may rightly say: “We are not against autodrivers
– it is about complaining against those that overcharge.” Does then a
campaign’s representation, these words, this cartoon (ahem) really matter
that much? It does. These imaginations, names, words and aesthetics alter,
narrow and limit urban politics. You cannot see a rakshasa as another
citizen who lives in your city. There was an alternate way to run this
campaign: to sit with associations and unions of auto-drivers and come to
an agreement. To find out if auto fares are reasonable, high or low. To
figure out community mechanisms to prevent non-metred travel. To, if that’s
what came out of the engagement, support campaigns for metre fare increases
as inflation, prices and petrol/gas increase. To work out a periodic
shock-absorption surcharge for periods with very high gas prices. To find
out why it costs four times as much to own and register an auto than a Tata
Nano. To find out what the daily rental of the auto-driver is that he is
trying to make in his twelve hour shift. To figure out why his fares are
regulated though the rental he pays isn’t. To consider, quite simply, the
auto-driver as a person and a citizen rather than a criminal or a rakshasa.
To find out how the institutions the petition is angry at have failed him
just as much and, most likely, with much deeper consequences.

Instead this campaign pits “concerned citizens” *against* “autodrivers”
that are, as the image suggests, always already criminal. It repeats the
mistake of multiple recent middle-class campaigns for “economic justice”
and “social change.” These campaigns increasingly target a particular set
of issues –for example, corruption or security – that should concern all of
us but because of the way they are defined and articulated instead exclude
what is a majority of our urban citizens.

Where do such images come from? Let me trace just one possible thread. In
another context, Leela Fernandes has argued that Indian cities are defined
by a “new urban aesthetic of class purity.” She was referring to new forms
of elite built environments from streets cleared of the poor, gated
communities and enclosed malls, and parks where one can walk and play but
not sleep and work. Yet this aesthetic doesn’t just manifest itself in the
built environment – it is part of an elite urban politics that cannot
imagine the poor as fellow citizens. Elite and middle-class campaigns thus
become something altered– they are reduced to the protection of what
Fernandes calls a “lifestyle.” Not the Right to Life, but the Right to
Lifestyle. In the protection of this lifestyle, the working poor cannot
exist as fellow citizens with rights and dignities. Their concerns cannot
be part of the conversation. They are “rakshasas” that take resources from
the state, are the sole reason for public debt, encroach on public land,
burden athe government for “handouts,” and pollute and dirty the city just
as they take hard-earned tax money taken away from its rightful heirs.

The responses that these campaigns seek can understand “economic justice”
only in the form of punitive and disciplinary punishment for the always
already criminal poor. In this particular campaign, the only possible
result is a deeper surveillance and harassment of auto-drivers by law
enforcement – no other interaction is possible, no other solution is
conceived. Herein lies the tragedy. What is this campaign fundamentally
meant to be about? It is about what happens to a complaint made to a public
institution about a service. It could relate then to other, larger
campaigns about getting public institutions to work and be accountable to
all parts of what makes our urban public. The autodriver is as interested
in this question as you or I yet he is excluded, in this frame, from asking
it. Worse, he is held responsible for it.

Make no mistake: many campaigns of and by the poor often make the same
mistake. They often demonise, for example, all things shorthanded as
“private” or anyone that touches it with a ten-foot pole. All things
“private” are often the rakshasa in the room so that possibilities where
private provision could be more egalitarian than public provision become
foreclosed even before they are considered. They forget that “private” also
means small scale enterprises, informal associations, and even unions – not
just mega-conglomerates. That’s what raksahas of all kinds, colours and
shapes do: they draw lines of fire that we cannot cross either in our minds
or our politics.

At stake then are our increasingly polarized urban polities and the
movements and campaigns that emerge from them and abound with rakshasas.
Yet what other forms, discourses and aesthetics of politics is possible? I
have no easy answers for this. It cannot just be a new set of semantics and
images – structures of tremendous power maintain and reproduce the
inequality that makes this image possible and tragically ordinary. Finding
a political space and language that can cross entrenched inequalities is
perhaps an impossible end that we are doomed to nevertheless chase. The
challenge before us is to understand how the possibility of asking
interconnected, larger questions that truly reflect the complexity of our
“public” can emerge even if they take, at first, simply an act of protest
like these words against the reduction of a fellow citizen to a rakshasa.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
With deep regards

कबीर/کبیر

Phone: 00-91-85-68-084-079

email: kabi <kabir_khan1989 at hotmail.com>rkhan1989 at gmail.com

email: kabirmasiha at facebook.com <kabir at iycn.in>

http://www.facebook.com/KaafirMasiha

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