Another super piece!

Suhit

Your mention of war (or revolution, I would add) being a result of people subjected to intolerable situations struck a chord. I’ve been thinking recently about a quote (which I came across in a speech by former CVC N. Vittal) of Alexis de Tocqueville who said, “The evils which are endured with patience as long as they are inevitable, seem intolerable as soon as a hope can be entertained of escaping them”.

You seem to indicate that the evil behaviour in rural areas is a rational response to an intolerable situation for the oppresors, if I have understood you correctly. But looking at it from the other side, the oppressed who are subjected to the evils have tolerated them thus far – do you think there is any reason for the oppressed to now believe that stomaching the evils may be no more inevitable thereby making it intolerable for them? Especially now that there are opportunities through the media for the oppressed to see and hear about how things are different in the urban areas. Once the evils are perceived as intolerable, the oppressed may be willing to take risks, that they may have thought twice about earlier, to eliminate the intolerable. The question is – has the tipping point been reached yet?

Numerous factors are interlinked through a complex web of interconnections. For the sake of analysis and comprehension, we may have to abstract some features from this complex system and try to understand how these limited features exist within the ecosystem. By focusing our attention only on these selected features, we begin to get a sense of the links that bind them. Subsequently, having understood that specific set of links, can we then expand our analysis and understanding to other part of the system.

When I say that the situation is intolerable, I mean that it is so from a macro viewpoint, not from the viewpoint of the oppressors. For the oppressors, the system may be working as well as they can expect. For them, being at the top of an unfair hierarchy is fine. They do not have any particular desire to see the system changed. For the oppressed, being at the bottom is a fact they cannot change easily. They respond in what I call the ‘constrained rational’ way — this only reinforces the dysfunctional forces and they just dig themselves in a deeper hole.

Let’s continue to discuss this in the next few days.