I’ve been getting a bit hassled by the police this week, as has Deepak because of his association with me which I feel slightly bad about but I can’t do much to change that situation.
On our way back from MGIS last week we got off the bus on the main highway about 7 km from our house. It was 1am and at that time there is no transport so we decided to walk. Much to our bad luck we ran into some police. It wouldn’t be such a problem ordinarily but the combination of my being white and us saying we intended to walk 7 km through a couple of ‘tribal’ villages (which many a bigoted, idiotic, narrow-minded and racist police or town person consider u:ber dangerous) was too much for them to cope with.
Our exchange lasted about 15 minutes with them interchangeably threatening to put us in jail for the night/make us sleep on the street in the town/send us to our friends house/let us go, and likewise talking in a reasonable way before every so often going off on one barking and garbling nonsense when all I wanted to do was get going and go to bed. That meeting finished with a car arriving that was going our way which they waved down and chucked us in the back and we got home a little earlier than if we had walked anyway. It was unfortunate that none of the policemen had ever seen me before, despite the fact my being associated with that town for over two years. If it had been the middle of the day I could have taken them on a walking tour of shop keepers and chai wallas who could vouch that I’d been there for quite some time.
That was Thursday night. On Sunday the police from our village turned up asking for my passport and visa ( which I’d already given to them several months ago). These police are more civil, and we popped over to the police station later that day with all the bits of bureaucracy they were after. We were lightly interrogated by a policeman claiming to know nothing about me and what we were doing, despite us having explained it to him all before. He then said I couldn’t live there without permission from the District Collector. I pointed out that that is true, but said we’d go and get the permission. To this he responded that actually, I couldn’t live here anyway. He doesn’t care where I live, so long as it isn’t on his beat. As it happens Deepak and I were thinking of moving to Mandwa which is a town right by the village where Hunar Ghar is as there will soon be mobile connection there. It will save two hours a day on the motorbike which will be great. But we don’t want to be ‘blacklisted’ from where we are now, as that has it’s uses too.
The main problem is, I think, that if something happens to me they seriously get it in the neck from their superiors who’d face bit pressure from the UK authorities. As far as they are concerned the villagers are all pretty much blood-thirsty murderers, so in their eyes I’m in danger. I explained that I understood that (not the bit about them being a bunch of killers) and that I would probably have even greater preference to my staying safe than he does, but that didn’t swing it and I was order to leave the next morning. I was coming to Udaipur the next morning anyway so no problems there, and I’ve now got the wheels of contacts going to try and get the situation sorted.
Dogmatic views of people that result in a generic racism is a disasterous problem, and not just in India. As a British middle-class white man I’m in the section of society that is probably least likely to ever be on the receiving end of exclusion. In some ways then I’m lucky to experience what it feels like to be continuously segregated. Whether it is the stares that follow me down the street, the children shouting out at me on a daily basis, the people that walk into my house and question me, the very occasional stone thrown or the police hassling me, I can know to some small degree what it feels like for too many non-whites in the UK, and the endemic racism faced by nationals worldwide. It is remarkable what a little novelty and lack of knowledge about another can create. It’s even more remarkable how widely acceptable negative values are. All it takes is the ability to have autonomous thought, but sadly that is greatly lacking so populations just go with thinking what other people thinks, doing what other people do and blindly following the suggestions of the media as to what they should think.
Where that leaves me now I’m not sure. I wanted to go back and stay in the village tonight, but I’ve spent too much time on the computer this morning to be able to reach there today, and am slightly wary about staying in Rohida. It is an extra complication that I would rather not have to think about at the moment.
