Guest Post by Harsh mander

Indifference is primarily born out of the failure and the fatigue of empathy. Empathy requires both a leap of imagination—to imaginehow the other feels—and solidarities of feeling—to feel the sufferingand humiliation of the other as though they were one’s own. In otherwords, empathy has both a cognitive and affective element: it engagesboth the mind and the heart. Empathy tends to flow more naturallywhen the suffering person is someone I can relate to and understand,someone whom I feel is similar to me in some essential, relatable way,because I can then better imagine what the other person is feeling.

Empathy breaks down when I can persuade myself that the ‘other’ is, in some ways, not like me, not fully human in the way Iand the people of my family, my community, my caste, my gender,my race and, indeed, my sexual preferences are. I can do so when Irefuse to see or acknowledge that people who are of a differentgender, caste, class, religion, sexuality or culture from me are essentiallyhuman in the same way as I am, when I am in the sway of normativeframeworks and politics which cultivate difference and fosterindifference.

 Some scientists and philosophers believe that empathy is a uniquelyhuman trait, inborn in human beings but also one which can betaught and nurtured. Equally, as we can learn empathy, we find thatbarriers can be constructed against the natural surge of empathywhich would otherwise have arisen had it not been actively blocked.

Hierarchies and the politics of difference are two of the most significantwalls which can block out empathy from our minds and hearts.I often worry about the ways we are raising our children—teaching them by our actions if not our words to be disrespectful ofpeople who are different and less advantaged, and being uncaringabout suffering and deprivation.

To a much larger project of striving for a just and humane society,the first contribution which the cultivation and nurturing of empathycan make is by helping build social solidarities. Battles for justicemust be fought by people who live with that injustice. To remind usof this, the slogan of many disabled peoples’ organizations is salutary:‘Nothing about us without us.’ Development scholar RobertChambers also reminds us how ‘poverty experts’ often fail to consultthe greatest experts of all: people themselves living in penury.

And yet, I would think that a society would be much poorer if itleft sufferers to deal with their problems alone. In a society builtaround social solidarities, when women are battered, men fight in theforefront for equality with women; when violence decimates theminorities, people from the majority speak out and fight for justice;upper-caste men and women protest and resist caste discrimination;heterosexual men and women join battle against the criminalizationof consensual same-sex relations, and so on.

In the aftermath of the Gujarat carnage, I spoke in many gatherings of Muslim people in Gujarat and other parts of India who weredevastated by the brutality, of the complicit role of the state and,above all, the fact that Dalits and adivasis were the foot soldiers inmuch of the violence that was unleashed on them. ‘We have lived inpeace with our Dalits and adivasi neighbours for generations,’ theywould recall to me in great sadness. ‘How then did they turn against us?’

I would say to them, ‘I understand your anguish. But I too have aquestion for you. When Dalits and adivasis were being oppressed for generations, when did you speak out in their support?’ For instance,across Gujarat, Dalits are prohibited from drawing water from thecommon village well. I asked, ‘Is there any village in Gujarat where the Muslims invited their deprived Dalit neighbours to share the well which was used by the Muslim community instead?’ And I would explain, ‘If the Muslims never reached out in solidarity when Dalits and adivasis were being persecuted, how did you expect that they would stand in your defence when you were under attack?’ They could never find a village in which Muslims shared their water sources with Dalits and each time, this set off a great deal of collective introspection.

My conversation with them would continue. I would ask: why do Muslims tend to get agitated mainly when Muslims are attacked? It isexactly the same with Sikhs, Hindus, Christians and people ofvarious identities. Why do we not feel equally aggrieved when peopleof any faith live with hunger, homelessness, disease and persecution?

The Prophet, I am told, said that if one places one’s hand on the headof an orphan child, the blessings of Allah would number as many asthe hair on the child’s head. I point out that he never said ‘the head of a Muslim orphan child’. Then why is it that Muslim charity contributes to building Muslim orphanages for Muslim children, but not for all children in need?

This applies equally to many charitable interventions by people of all other faiths and persuasions as well—Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Parsi,Christian and Buddhist. I therefore speak of the need for all peoplewho live with injustice and suffering, and all people who share theirsuffering, to build a new bond between themselves—ek dard ka rishta: a bond of shared pain, born from empathy, solidarity andfraternity. It is this bond which will drive us in the direction ofgreater justice and caring in our world.

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In drafting India’s Constitution, Ambedkar laid great stress, not juston liberty and equality, but also on fraternity. He said, ‘Fraternitymeans a sense of common brotherhood (and sisterhood) of allIndians—if Indians are seen as being one people. It is the principlewhich gives unity and solidarity to social life. It is a difficult thing toachieve.’ He was convinced that ‘without fraternity, equality andliberty will be no deeper than a coat of paint’. Ambedkar dreamedof an India in which divisions of caste and religion would graduallyfade away.

However, it is fraternity which has been most forgotten in ourConstitution. It is forgotten not just by those chosen to uphold our Constitution, it is lost even in our public and social life, in which theaggressive use of oppositional identities remains for most political parties the most reliable instrument to harvest votes with, and prejudice and inequality are produced and reproduced in our hearts andhomes. The idea of fraternity is closely linked to that of social solidarity, which is impossible to accomplish without public empathy;the daily, lived realization that human beings who look different,wear different clothes, worship different gods, speak different languages, have different political persuasions, actually have exactly the same intrinsic human dignity, and experience the same emotions—dreams, hopes, despair, pain, happiness, anger, love, triumphs anddefeats—that we do.

( Exceprt from the forthcoming book by Harsh mander: Looking Away: Inequality, Prejudice and Indifference in New India,Publisher: Speaking Tiger)