Vision

One Deep Breath’s prompt is vision and over in Uttar Pradesh a couple hundred dalit call themselves Pink Vigilantes, and are enacting a new vision of ground rules that they will enforce so misuse of aid and abuse of women are checked.
When you have a system of majority thinking, it takes a critical unified mass to oppose it. What a group says and the boundaries they enforce non-equivocally is given more weight that what an individual says in thin voice. When that individual is a woman and dalit, getting the weight shouldered behind the message can be harder. Even after this aspect of the caste system was made illegal on books, the habit of perception takes longer to replace. The state of women in rural India is inequal so much that the male to female ratio of population is shifting. Women have equal rights legally but have to act to claim them.
To return to vision. As is, when someone cries foul and goes to authorities to say that they were not treated decently, were abused or raped they are not always heard. When met with a go-home-and-sort-yourself-out-and-don’t-make-trouble there is getting to be a channel of recourse. When the proper channels are used and not effective, the PInk Vigilantes step forward to talk to the perpetrator and if the person is closed to hearing how he has crossed a line, they step up the message. They beat someone so the message of incorrect behavior comes through the soft tissues. In private or if that does not work, by public shaming exhibition until it registers bodily and cognitively that this behavior will not be unnoticed, will not be tolerated and will not go without repercussions.

group intervention –
Pink Vigilantes
sticks with them
If touch and distance is a language and if communication is abuse, must the reply be in the same dialect? Would a smack change behavior leaving the mind and heart to catch up at its own speed, understanding coming after months or years but in the meantime the iterations of violence are curtailed on account o fear? A leap to curtail behavior from a contrite heart can’t happen as quickly as quickly as behavior can change. People can learn to go thru the motions of making nice even if they don’t understand why they should have to. There can be civility. To make people go the long course of being met with kindness and non-violence is asking for a lot more.
When the mind is full of anger and sadness and confusion and hormones of fight or flight, can only violence in reply be “heard” and any words are only sounds to dismiss? If the violence is off-handed, meting a beating as some people would kill a fly without thinking there is weight to it, would response in kind get the message thru?
Interesting that this collective should happen in Uttar Pradesh where women have higher literacy rates. (Aside: It’s a popular self-congratulatory western bias to link alphabet-knowledge with compassion and illiteracy with brute brutality. It seems to devalue oral cultures as backward when they can be as forward as any. It isn’t the media of knowledge but the will of how people implement the culture. Somehow I’m skeptical that print self-access can empower more than similarly persistent oral tapping into the people-knowledge base.)
The capacity for escalation and retribution is there, as the Pink Vigilantes know. They, being dalit, have nothing to lose which is a great strategic card in their favor. The women could be “put back in their place”, singly or en masse, and being a minority, the act could be swift. This is to to say I think their act is wrong, or right, but taking guts.
They are full of will to make change, and go forward willingly to change their present. They are not unnumbered in some senses. The percentage of population who are vocal against the dalit and who abused women are minorities as well. They seek to reset the boundaries of norms, the cut-off point of what is acceptable.
The intimidation tactics of a minority can cow the majority to change. Some people are wired to go to where ever the excitement is just as the majority are wired to be selective of fights and to stay well away from conflict. If the ladies are to succeed, they have a lot of challenges. The basis must remain defense, compassionate protection, correcting wrong, as they have done, set up watches on relief aid that corrupt officials decided to sell on the open market instead of distribute.
look at own hands
past them small figures
inwards another count

Individual to individual, there is no anonymity that can shrug off the idea that no one is hurt, and that’s just the way the world works. Individuals step forward in a group and say, no more with this nonsense. You’ll behave decently or we will personally make you behave. It shouldn’t be necessary. Minimum force and talk isn’t always respected, is a dialect where people talk thru cinderblock.
A couple years ago I talked about the nature of people, as violent, compassionate or indifferent. I mentioned John Mueller’s study on why isn’t there more violence? A majority can be ruled by a very small number of people. For example, “Viˇsegrad, a Bosnian city of 50,000, was substantially controlled for years by a returned hometown boy, Milan Luki, and some fifteen well-armed companions.” And by the silence of the majority.
dilate pupils
paged vision to change,
narrowed on streets?

The capacity for the group to get heady with their power of speech and become small tyrants and unjust themselves or not careful to make sure stories are true is there. Once blood heats up, cycles of getting even can engage. What if the Pinks make an example of someone not guilty as accused? Their reputation grows and weakens both if engage themselves in punishing men who are the subject of squabbles and lies. Everyone involved must remain honest. We must keep the issues the same and not end up with the mob rule that Martin Luther King Jr. felt we must not employ. If the system falls to chaos instead of being rejigged to be more just, then all sides have lost.

I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea.
[…] You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations […]underlying causes […]
In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine
whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action.

MLK in Letter from a Birmingham Jail via F/K/A
It’s a delicate walk, especially once we leave the habit of talk and it is face to face with members of the community and all the real complexities of losing face, hurt feelings, anger and embarrassment. Private or public confrontation with a different sure reality must be done to shift the base presumptions, if not of what it right, then of what is going to happen.
Shame is a potent weapon to engage and wave around, far more than sticks, more volatile than silence yet may be the only path to lasting change.