EDITORIALS
Why We Will Forget Kathua, and Why We Should Not
Does Kathua have a place in the larger narrative of our national identity?
H
ow does an atrocity endure in public memory? When we
think about Kathua, where a group of men—including a
policeman—abducted, raped, brutalised and murdered
an eight-year-old girl, one would think that it would be burned
into public memory as a moment commemorating our utter failure
as a society. The perpetrators were communally motivated
against a mere child, whom they reduced to an embodiment of
two kinds of otherness—that of being tribal and being Muslim.
And, then, as if the offences were not grave enough, as if to fulfil
the invocation of tragedy as farce, the Hindu Ekta Manch took
out a march to defend the perpetrators.
Consequently, the events leading up to and following the
crime raised some uncomfortable questions about the kind of
nation and the kind of society we are heading towards. For
those who read the police charge sheet that detailed the chillingly
barbaric acts, the readily available visual of the girl’s earnest face
added a texture to the story which ensured that the magnitude of
what had happened would not be lost to abstraction. Indeed, so
ubiquitous was the girl’s face that it could be seen on streets
across the country, and of course on social media. Her face became a
symbol around which the demand for justice galvanised.
Despite such widespread outrage only a few months ago, Kathua
is now fading from public memory. And, this is perhaps the
farce—that tragedies that shake us, are also prone to our forget-
fulness. Public memory is the primary material based on which
national or regional identities are constructed. Consequently, it
is closely tied to the narrative of nationhood. Remembrance plays
an important role in shaping identity and polity. But, in the nar-
rative of the nation, what is remembered and what is forgotten?
There is no denying that what is remembered, and remembered
prominently in public memory, is what best serves the narrative
of the ruling political dispensation. Remembering Kathua is
certainly not to the advantage of the ruling party, but it also
does not help the opposition actively. It is not easy for either
party to convert Kathua into votes.
However, public memory is not solely determined by those in
power. It is a dialogue that is negotiated between the government,
the media, and the citizens. The dialogic operates as functions
of remembering and forgetting between the three authors of pub-
lic memory. What the government may want forgotten and exclud-
ed from the narrative of nationhood may be in the interests of
Economic & Political Weekly EPW octoBER 20, 2018 vol lIii no 42
the media and the citizens to remember. In the case of Kathua,
for instance, the act of remembrance can propel the movement
for justice, so it would be in the interests of civil society to
remember Kathua with a specific outcome in mind. But, the act
of remembrance is also guided by a number of concerns. Whether
a certain event will be re-invoked in public memory can depend
on whether new information has come to light regarding the
event, or if its historical significance has been reassessed. So, on
whom does the task of remembrance fall?
One could argue that the job of drawing Kathua back to public
memory would fall on the media. And, the media has not failed
in this. There were reports about how the Supreme Court denied
a plea for a second Central Bureau of Investigation probe that one
of the accused had asked for as recent as 5 October. Yet, as tem-
poral distance with the event increases, Kathua does not occupy
our collective imagination with the same kind of intensity. Kathua
does not fit easily into the narrative that can be used to construct
our national identity. It marks a moment of shame, and thus
does not sit well with the proud symbology that is so commonly
associated with nation-building.
Compared to Jyoti Singh’s case from 16 December 2012 in
Delhi, why does Kathua not occupy a similar place in institu-
tional memory? Like Delhi, the events at Kathua represent a
rupture in our larger narrative of nationhood. It forced us to
look inward, and introspect.
Why is one failure revisited and accepted into the larger narrative,
while the other is allowed to fade? Is it because the former received
more institutional attention and the latter did not? Was it because
one occurred in an urban space, and the other in a rural setting?
Or, was it because of the differing sociopolitical locations of the
victims? Perhaps, in the case of Kathua, the narrative of sexual
violence gets subsumed under the narrative of communalism,
which does not serve any political dispensation well.
However, it is imperative that we do not entomb our collec-
tive failures in oblivion, if our collective narrative is to be mean-
ingful and instructive. It is important that the introspection
that events like Kathua force on us, as a society, be sustained.
Because, if we forget, we are offering no resistance to the narrative
of the nation that is being constructed on our behalf. If we
forget, we are complicit in normalising this sort of violence.
Remembrance is, therefore, our collective responsibility.
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