A BJP leader tortures a domestic help, a security guard is abused in Noida, another thrashed in Gurugram
JJharkhand police has arrested the suspended Bharatiya Janata Party leader Seema Patra, wife of a retired IAS officer, on the charge that she tortured her 29-year-old tribal help Sunita for several years. Patra has been accused of treating the maid in a ghastly manner, breaking her teeth with an iron rod and scalding and starving her. Whether Patra is guilty will be known only after a thorough investigation and trial, but the incident does highlight the deplorable manner in which a section of the middle class treats the underclass—domestic helps, security guards, drivers, et al. A few weeks ago, a woman showered profanities at the security guards of a housing society in Noida. Bhavya Rai, 32, is not an unlettered woman; she is a lawyer, but the way she abused and misbehaved with the guards was egregious. All this not because they had misbehaved with her; they were just late for a few seconds in opening the gate for her car to pass. The video of her screaming went viral, resulting in widespread outrage and police action. She eventually got bail after some time. And there was another incident on Thursday, at The Close North Society of Nirvana Country in Gurugram. The CCTV camera showed a man coming out of the lift of the society and beating the guard, Ashok Kumar, who had helped open the lift in which he had got stranded because of a technical malfunction. In this case too, the accused, a man called Varun Nath, was arrested and bailed out soon after, even though the incident involved violence.
It didn’t occur to Nath that it was because of Kumar’s alacrity that he could get out of the life in just five minutes. The guard informed the technician at once, and in three or four minutes, Nath was out—to thrash the guard. Is this how we express our gratitude? Would he have slapped a cop too if he (the cop) had been there in place of the private guard? Very unlikely, for Nath people like think that they can treat their less fortunate brethren like trash; and they do that. The disturbing aspect of the Noida and Gurugram cases is that the perpetrators in both cases are people like us; they are not like, say, Shrikant Tyagi, a politically connected thug terrorising his neighbours. You don’t expect better from the likes of Tyagi, but you do expect middle class folks like Roy and Nath to behave civilly. The middle class may not have the resources to help the underclass, but the least they can do is treat the poor in a humane manner. As Kumar told a newspaper reporter, “Hum gareeb hain to hamari koi izzat nahi hai kya? Naukri sirf pet paalne ke liye nahi, izzat ke liye bhi karte hein. (Don’t we have respect just because we’re poor? I work not just to feed my family, but also for respect).” A thought for today.
