A young girl in a hoodie stopping a police van carrying protestors with her arm has been the enduring image of the recent Gen Z protests. In fact, the protests at Jantar Mantar in Delhi and the protests in support in other cities, notably in Mumbai and Patna, brought in a new dimension seldom seen or captured before in the history of political protests in India-, the banter of protestors with the police, sometimes teasing, and sometimes taunting.
A girl got herself shot (I mean videographed) with a police officer in background to the trending song, “I am a good girl”. And there was a viral video of the same officer blushing when it was shown to him later. At the same time, the police excesses in Jantar Mantar including the use of pellet guns and inappropriate pushing and shoving had us enraged.
I saw a beautiful endearing Reel of a father and son leaving home together, the son to protest and the father, a police officer, to be on the other side. It’s not just political leaders, but many of these police officers on duty would have had children, siblings, friends on the other side protesting.
I have many friends in the police force, and I was wondering what my friends would have done, if they had been in positions of responsibility during the protests. I was trying to think from the perspective of the individuals in uniform, people like my friends. Would they have justified it? What would be going through them? What kind of conflicts were going through them? Therefore, I loved the poem shared by Atul Kulkarni on social media, in which he asked “Oh Police, Oh Police Wale, Kya Ghar Jaake tu Soya Kal?”
As I was reflecting on this question, I remembered George Orwell’s essay, “Shooting an Elephant”, written in 1936 that gives us an interesting perspective though he wrote in a completely different context.
In the essay, Orwell discusses a personal experience as a police officer in British Burma. He is called on to do something about an elephant that was ravaging the bazaar. He takes his rifle along, not to shoot the elephant, but to scare it and to defend himself, if necessary. In fact, he repeatedly asserts that he “had no intention of shooting the elephant”.
When the natives see him with the rifle, they start shouting excitedly that he is going to shoot the elephant. Seeing the look on their faces, he realised that he would have to shoot the elephant after all. He says, “The people expected it of me and I had got to do it… I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A Sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and to do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing- no that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.”
The tension reaches its climax when he shoots the elephant dead. He confesses at the end, “I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.” At the same time, he is relieved that legally he “had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed” and finds it comforting that the elephant had killed a coolie for that gave him a “sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant.”
It is the incident of the shooting of the elephant, which illuminated for him the ‘futility of the white man’s dominion in the East’. In that moment, he perceived that “when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalised figure of a sahib.”
And when I read the essay, I started wondering if this was in some ways similar?
(Views expressed by the columnist are personal and do not necessarily reflect the opinion or policy of the news portal)
