Elite Imitation & Thoothukodi incident
Looking at the lenses with which we look at our social-problems
I grew up in a middle-class Brahmin family in South of India. Right from my infancy, it was mandated to me that success is defined as an engineering degree with a career in the States. Yes, they used to call it The States. Not US or USA, but the States. Anyone in my family who stays back in India was automatically assumed to have failed somewhere. “He was not good enough to get a MS in USA”, they said. Weddings and other family functions were peppered with old uncles and aunties discussing the distance between New Jersey and Chicago. It is easy to see what is happening here – We can call it Indian-Inferiority-Complex (or IIC, along the lines of IIT and IIMs) or West-superiority-complex or whatever name you would prefer, but you get the message right? These guys were not completely at fault either. West offered more money, a better standard of living and not everyone could get there. So settling in USA and getting a green-card was, for them, a good barometer of success. However, the second-order effects of such thinking amongst the Indian elite is what I want to talk about today. There was a beautiful concept that I learnt in one of my favorite podcasts – Seen and the Unseen by Amit Varma where he talks about Elite Imitation. The podcast interviews Shruti & Alex who talk about their latest paper on Elite Imitation & virtue-signaling. Would highly recommend listening to the podcast. You can find the link to the episode here.
But what is Elite Imitation? To put simply, it is Indian elites aping the West. Solving problems that the West solves with solutions that West implements but sponsored by Indian resources. This does not mean that the problems faced in West are any less important than ours or not worth solving. But what it essentially means is we have India specific problems which demands our attention and resources. In a country like India, where our resources are a fraction of what USA or UK have, we need to be doubly if not triply careful about problems we pick to solve. Before we allocate our mind-space, attention to LGBTQ or maternity leave, we must solve for basic women security. Before we fuss about using paper-bags, we must solve for clean-water in villages. LGBTQ and Plastic use are important issues that the world faces today. Let us not make any mistake about that. But for India, we have far basic issues that needs to be addressed. We simply cannot afford to leap to the West problem while completely ignoring the fundamental issues plaguing our society. To put it another way, we think we are a step ahead in Maslow’s hierarchy, than we actually are. And by we, I refer to Indian elites who set, drive the social-narrative and policy-making.
An interesting way this internal bias manifests is how we perceive, interpret problems that we as a society face and that is precisely what happened in the horrific murders of shop-owners in Thoothukodi (Tutucorin).
For those who don’t know what happened in Thoothukodi, here is a TL;DR version – Two shop-owners, a father son duo, had kept their mobile-recharge shops open much later than lockdown stipulated hours. They were brutally tortured in the police station and died there. The case was closed as death due to natural causes. As facts stand, this is all we know, excepting the countless vapid statements from politicians and emotionally-charged outbursts.
What is interesting is how quickly the incident was interpreted and the narrative was set by the elites. Within hours of the incident being reported, a popular radio-jockey, Suchi went on Instagram with a post on how this was a case of systemic police-brutality, celebrities started to tweet and there were protests that soon followed. It didn’t take long for the narrative to spread like wildfire. In that video, Suchi quotes “Won’t stop till these guys get the same justice as George Floyd does”. The Hindu ran an op-ed with a brazen claim that this incident must be looked from a system-lens, that is the need for change must come from stricter regulations, new laws holding police-officers accountable. Here is a line from the article
“The worst thing we can do now is to think of the incidents at the Sattankulam police station in Tamil Nadu as being perpetrated by a few errant police personnel.” – Police Violence and how some lives do not matter, The Hindu on 04th July. Link to the article
The double-murder was now a case of police-oppression where cops have a free hand in doling out brutal punishments without fair trial. We are calling for regulatory changes, review of National Human Rights commission. Every article quoting numbers on the previous such cases that India has seen. Not to mention the similarity of headlines “How some lives do not matter” on the same theme of Black Lives Matter protests.
I am in no way condoning what happened or trivializing this incident as a freak one-off case. What I am arguing is at this point, we simply do not have enough facts. We do not know any thing about the perpetrators of the crime. We do not know if there was a motive to this gruesome murder. But most importantly, and I cannot stress this enough, we are demanding justice when we should be demanding an investigation and more facts. This incident could be a case of systemic police brutality or it could be a premeditated murder. We just do not know at this point. Neither does the elite take cognizance of the fact the conditions, history of black-oppression in USA is very different from what India faces. We simply cannot equate the two. Say, the double-murder in Thoothukodi was motivated by money. What the narrative ensures is the real perpetrators of the crime have gone free simply because we have perceived and interpreted this incident as systemic police-brutality or the measures taken to prevent such future incidents have little to no effect.
And who really sets the narrative? The people of Thoothukodi? The local news? No. This is set by elites with Instagram accounts, twitter handles – basically Indian media’s hunting grounds. What media picks up gets regurgitated back into the same social media, creating a vicious feedback loop. And before you know it, every article, post carries the exact same message, the exact same narrative. The problem here is we are only exposed in detail to what is happening in the West and we bring the same lens to view the problems in our country. It is no one’s fault that we do this. However, it is important we are aware of this sub-conscious bias because they have real-world consequences. And with real world consequences comes real world responsibilities.
Shruti and Alex mention how this bias plays out in policy-making very succinctly:
“The Indian elites are more likely, because of their background, to engage with global experts in policy dialogues that have little relevance to the commoner in India.” - Premature Imitation & India’s Flailing state
Such biases are only annoying during my family weddings, but when it comes policies and horrendous murders, we have to be cautious in which frame we are looking at. With current social-media, any narrative gets free-steroid shots to bulk up. And when everyone is stressed dealing with the pandemic, riots, Kobe Bryant, literally any thing can set of a dominoes and we would end up where we did not want to be.
As always, in these trying times, please wear masks and sanitize.