Roop Rekha Verma on our abnormality

Roop Rekha Verma, the former acting vice-chancellor of Lucknow University, speaks at a meeting

It was undoubtedly impolite of me to ask Roop Rekha Verma, the 80-year-old former acting vice-chancellor of Lucknow University, what she thought of our society serenading her for as ordinary a gesture as filing a petition in the Bilkis Bano case. She was similarly celebrated, in 2022, for a quotidian act of standing surety for journalist Siddique Kappan at the time he was granted bail in an alleged terror case. In scenarios such as Kappan's, sureties have to be provided. What's the big deal, I asked with trepidation.

All the adulation of Verma has not turned her delusional, for she charmingly, and sagaciously, said, "In a normal society sensitive to the misery of others, sensitive to securing justice for them, my acts would have been considered small gestures. But our society is increasingly growing abnormal."

The feisty fighter of unpopular causes took to listing the symptoms of our abnormality as methodically as she would have to her class of philosophy students. The consequence of the lack of sensitivity is the rising tide of violence in our society. Verma recalled the newspaper story of a girl splashed with acid knocking on the doors in a neighbourhood for help, but finding them slammed on her - and onlookers making videos of her. This has also been the case with just about every incident of mob lynching.

"These types of violence would have, in the past, snatched our sleep for days," she said. It is not so any longer, for the process of othering marginalised social groups has normalised violence. Those othered are looked upon as enemies whose brutalisation is justified as revenge. People are perpetually in the mode of battling perceived foes, without even thinking whether they are indeed inimical to society.

A tell-tale symptom of our abnormality is the participation of women in mass violence. "Women were earlier considered as peacemakers," she said, "a restraining influence on men" spoiling to spill blood.

She remembered reading about women in Surat tossing burning tyres on Muslims fleeing the riots that broke out following the Babri Masjid demolition. In the 2002 Gujarat riots, they were on the frontline, looting shops and houses. In Manipur, today, women egg men on to rape women, Verma pointed out, her voice laced with disbelief.

It is also a symptom of abnormality that the culture of impunity has become pervasive. Earlier, too, political patronage enabled criminals to go scot-free. But the State now tacitly encourages hate crimes, holding out the promise to their perpetrators a rise in social status, a career in politics.

The most telling of the symptoms of our abnormality is the growing tendency of people to conflate the State with the nation. "Criticise a policy, you are branded as a traitor. Ask for better healthcare, you are deemed treacherous. Speak for the marginalised, you become the nation's enemy," Verma said in a voice rippling with dismay.

She took me down memory lane, to those years when the police seldom denied activists such as her permission to organise protest marches and dharnas. They never feared a blowback from the State. Dissent was not only considered a fundamental right; it was also thought of as a duty of citizens. People were unafraid to speak their mind as they were sure the State would not book them for imagined crimes.

Verma recalled the day during her one-year tenure as the acting vice-chancellor when she was invited to unveil the busts of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev, the three revolutionaries whom the British hanged. In her speech on the occasion, she spoke of the hypocrisies of the changing India, of the "killers of Gandhi" adulating him and hanging his photos in their offices. A student outfit - no prizes for guessing the name - ransacked her office. "But the support of the public for me was incredible," Verma said.

And now? Even functions organised for social harmony goad the State into disrupting them. Come on, I said. So, Verma narrated to me the happenings of three-four years ago. The date: January 13, commemorated for being the first day of the last fast Mahatma Gandhi took to stop the post-Partition riots. Barely had 20 of them - some in their sixties and seventies - sat down at Gandhi Park, in Lucknow's bustling Hazratganj area, the police arrived. The men were pushed around and dispersed. Verma was compelled to sit in a three-wheeler and packed off home.

Now, applications for organising protests seldom elicit a police response, she said. Or they are told Section 144 is in operation, prohibiting the assembly of four or more people. Or they are granted permission when the site of protest is relatively invisible to the public.

An abnormal society feigning normalcy.

She still protests, but feels watched, with the police taking down the names of protesters and taking their photographs. They could come for her, couldn't they, or jail her or freeze her bank account? Such apprehensions are swept away as her conscience reproaches her for her silence. "I speak, therefore I am," wrote poet Pablo Neruda, who, before his death, was raided in Pinochet's abnormal Chile. Ah, the fear and charm of being yourself!

The writer is a senior journalist.
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