How India turned Yakub Memon and democracy into a reality TV show
The origin of reality shows can be attributed to the fact that writers had run out of script ideas. To write a good script one has to be imaginative. Why bother? Why not just put a camera and not just peep but make a spectacle of people's lives, and if required death too.
The tragic drama that was enacted live last night on television about Yakub Memon's hanging was a macabre reality show. Indian news channels last night lost the script. Viewers were left to lick the bits off the canvas of the clichéd truisms they dished out instead.
The fact that Yakub Memon was going to die was, well, unquestionable. Lawyers knocking at the doors of the Supreme Court just hours before the hanging wanted the optics of due process to be followed. After all, the condemned have rights too.
What followed on television news channels was akin to a scene from the movie Gladiator. We were all spectators of the game of death.
But let us get one thing very clear. Last night's show was actually performed as a celebration of Indian democracy. Every news anchor, legal pundit, analyst and patriotic citizen at some point or the other, celebrated the magnanimity of Indian democracy and judiciary. Suddenly it became a pious game. As if it was another task given to the participants of a reality show. Only thing missing was a voice over saying, "Big Boss chaahte hain ke aglay kuch ghantay, sab log Yakub ko bachane ka khel khelengay". (Bigg Boss would now like you to play the game of "Save Yakub" for the next few hours). The imposing doors of the courtroom had been thrown open in the middle of the night. "Unprecedented" was a word that was thrown about as if it was some kind of collective catharsis for a bloodthirsty nation. The media - and indeed India - was writing a shining postcard about Indian democracy to the world - one that would make its way to an Incredible India souvenir shop very soon.
The viewers were given minute-by-minute, ball-by-ball, argument-by-argument account of what transpired in the court and what will be the sequence of events from 4.30am till 7am, when Yakub will be hanged. Meanwhile, the condemned man was gasping for his last breath somewhere in a solitary cell in central India. It was the theatre of the absurd, a tribal ritual, where all the tribals were dancing around a human being on the stake. Only in this case, instead of the Bollywoodesque "jhinga lala", the urban tribals were shouting "democracy". It was a medieval morality play at best. You knew who was going to win and who would lose. But you had to go through the customary, celebratory ritual that made you feel good about yourself even as you went in for the necessary kill.
Yakub could not live beyond 7am. It was an absolute imperative. He had to die. But we had to feel that we had killed him in an honourable way by following the rule of law. In tribal cultures sacrifices have to be made either at sunrise or sunset. And so went the ritual. A reality show cannot go beyond its commissioned number of episodes. The show has to wrap up in time for Yakub to prepare for his endgame. And we all woke up with a self-congratulatory pat.
We worship the holy cow in India. Some of us are told that eating beef is a seditious act. It fits our national narrative template of how non-violent we are as a people. But we rejoice in revenge and in reprisal bloodlust. Yakub Memon was our latest delicacy.