Читать книгу Multiracism - Alastair Bonnett - Страница 13

As the old car grinds up some of gentlest slopes of the Himalayas, I’m hearing plenty about what the Indian army is doing in Indian-occupied Kashmir and the plight of Muslims across India. My guide and driver are both Muslim Kashmiris and have had to come down to Himachal Pradesh to find work. I recall that at the Indian Institute for Advanced Studies, where I’m staying and which sprawls across a vast British colonial mansion in the state capital of Shimla, there is a decided political chill in the air. Many of the young scholars talk about how academic appointments are increasingly in tune with the Hindutva worldview of India’s right-wing ruling party and that they will have to pursue their careers abroad. The car judders to a halt next to a tiny farmstead and a dark pond, in which a fat buffalo slumbers. An old woman wearing a colourful shawl sits cross-legged on the farm porch, a naked child tugging at her knees. My guide and driver jump out and proceed to empty all the rubbish that has accumulated in the car, which turns out to be a lot, in front of her home. Seeing my worried expression they laugh, ‘do not worry, they do not care’. It’s obvious neither man has a high opinion of these farmers. ‘Who are they?’ I ask. ‘No idea!’ my guide says and laughs harder. I make a guess that they are ‘tribal’ people but my guide’s resolute ‘no idea’ lingers with me. Discrimination isn’t based on knowledge but on indifference. But I too am indifferent: I just let it happen, leave the rubbish on the baked mud. Every day, something similar happens. Over one quarter of the population of Himachal Pradesh are Dalits (once called ‘Untouchables’), a group of such low social standing that they are outside of, or rather beneath, India’s caste system. Time and again, when I encounter abject poverty, here or back in the UK, I look away, my pace quickens, my footsteps echoing a familiar refrain, ‘no idea’.