I don't know what kind of books Binayak Sen reads. But I am certain he has never picked up a Nabarun Bhattacharjee novella.
Iu00a0 don't know what kind of books Binayak Sen reads. But I am certain he has never picked up a Nabarun Bhattacharjee novella.
u00a0
If he had, Binayak wouldn't have crossed swords and long beard with the State.
Taking on the might of the Chhattisgarh government has cost Binayak two years, a few kilos and a little bit of credibility among Big People. All that could have been easily avoided.
|
|
At the state's fate: "And when Binayak (Sen) chose to take a walk on the wild side, he forgot one simple fact. That in the fight between the Big People and the Small People, the former almost always wins," feels the writer |
The good doctor was doing some good work in the back lanes of the backward state, tending to the medical needs of poor tribals, before he was picked up by the cops for being close to Naxals.
Their charge: he had hand-delivered a letter from a detained Naxal leader whom he had been treating medically in the Raipur jail to another Naxal. Sen says this charge has no basis since his meetings with prisoners were undertaken openly, under the close supervision of jail authorities.
But what might have compelled the state government to put Binayak away for two years was not so much the fact that he knew Naxals, but his very public statements against the Salwa Judum, wherein the state arms locals to take on naxals.
u00a0
The Salwa Judum, by all accounts, has created more problems in the state with tribals killing tribals in the name of justice.
But when Binayak chose to take a walk on the wild side, he forgot one simple fact. That in the fight between the Big People and the Small People, the former almost always wins.
Unless of course you transport yourself to the world of comic books and nonsense novels where poetic justice prevails.
Also, the oppression of the marginalised is not a phenomenon unique to Chhattisgarh. Take the Marxist-ruled state of West Bengal.
On the face of it, the state government has waged a class war for decades to improve the lot of the dispossessed, but dig deeper and you will hear stories of state oppression, of party cadres being hand-in-glove with the Big People to keep the Small People where they are. Bengal had its Binayaks too. But they were put away.
Nabarun Bhattacharjee, son of crusader Mahashweta Devi and a renowned novelist himself, brought about some difference in the state of things.
u00a0
In his books, the bad commies were put in their place by fatarus. For the uninitiated, faturus are a bunch of subalterns who have the power to fly.
u00a0
They use it to attack the bourgeoisies. How? They crap and piss on them, beat them up, give gaalis. They also smoke up, drink and ogle.
u00a0
They hate the corporates, the corrupt and the commies, but desire their mistresses. They despise ostentatious behaviour, but won't mind the foreign liquor that the rich drink.
u00a0
Irreverent, irrational, interesting, fatarus are a big hit among those who desire change in Bengal.
In the world of the fatarus, there's justice eventually and the stories are curiously uplifting. The West Bengal government had tried to ban Nabarun's books.
u00a0
In vain. Fatarus are a cult and maybe someday they will leap out of the pages of the thin books that Nabarun writes and bring about a change. Till then, Binayak should catch up on his reading.
