Are human systems repressive?

Salma

I had never heard of Salma until she was sent to the Rajya Sabha as a Member of the Parliament by Tamil Nadu a couple of weeks back and a Malayalam weekly featured her on the cover with an interview. Salma’s story made me think on the nature of certain human systems and organisations including religion.

Salma was born Rajathi Samsudeen. Marriage made her Rukiya, because her husband’s family didn’t think of Rajathi as a Muslim name. Salma is the pseudonym she chose as a writer.

Salma’s life was always controlled by one system or another. Her religion and its ruthlessly patriarchal conventions determined the crests and troughs of her life’s waves. Her schooling ended the day she chose to watch a movie with a friend, another girl whose education was stopped too. They were in class 9. When Rajathi protested that her cousin, a boy, was also watching the same movie at the same time in the same cinema hall, her mother’s answer was, “He’s a boy; boys can do anything.”

Rajathi wasn’t even allowed to go out of her house after that until a man, chosen as her husband by her father, took her to his house and imposed a new name on her and more restrictions. Her husband was a DMK politician of some reputation. One of the ironies is that the DMK is a revolutionary party that fought against dominations by systems such as Brahminism and defended individual rights and equality. He didn’t believe in putting his party’s ideology into practice at home.

Rajathi-turned-Rukiya wasn’t even allowed to write anything. Her ‘revolutionary’ husband came home one evening with a bottle of acid and told her, “If you write a single word anymore, I’ll empty this bottle on your face.” That’s when Salma was born. Her husband and his family didn’t know that the writer Salma, who soon achieved a lot of fame among Tamil readers, was their own Rukiya. Salma was one of her favourite characters in a Kahlil Gibran novel.

When the local government (Panchayat) seat was reserved for women, her husband asked her to contest simply because he didn’t want the power to go from the family. Thus Salma entered politics. Once she obtained certain political prominence, her husband stopped controlling her. He couldn’t; her reputation had grown beyond him. 

I’m bringing Salma’s story here for us to reflect on the oppressiveness of human systems.

First of all, systems demand obedience and discourage questioning. Free thinking and innovation are not encouraged by systems generally. When Galileo’s truths were suppressed, the world was primitive. The question is: have we come any far from that primitiveness? Look at the number of intellectuals and academics in India’s prisons today. What the Modi regime has imprisoned is not some individuals but their thinking, questions, hopes and dreams for a better world. The very principle of individual liberty is incarcerated in Modi’s India.

Control and surveillance are used by most human systems. Political regimes now are worse than the primitive Church with its Inquisitions. They monitor, censor, and punish dissent. They stifle intellectual and creative freedom.

When Salma was asked in above-mentioned interview whether Modi’s attempts to reform Islam with certain measures like the Waqf bill, her instinctive answer was that it was all mere sham, populist claptrap, meant for winning votes. It is also a way of imposing one individual’s or system’s restrictive choices on a community of people. That is how systems generally are: repressive. That’s my point here.