3 minutes reading time
I am a sick mammal. A neurotic peasant with a Wi-Fi connection and an internet window looking into the past, and it makes my teeth itch.
I’ve been staring at a memorial website. A clean, sanitized tribute to a great man. Honesty. Integrity. Administrative efficiency. K.S. Parthasarathy Iyengar. Former Commissioner of Police for Madras City, founder of the Railway Protection Force. He died in 1983, probably in a comfortable bed, surrounded by the quiet respect of a society that worships order.
But in October 1946, this upright civil servant was the Diwan’s instrument. The Diwan, Sir C. P. Ramaswamy Iyer, sidelined the military because he wanted a police official who wouldn't hesitate. Iyengar didn't. He sent police with machine guns to mow down striking peasants armed with nothing but sharpened bamboo poles in Punnapra and Vayalar. Hundreds of them. Mowed down like weeds in the mud. And then independence came, Travancore collapsed, and what happened to the butcher? Did he face a tribunal? Did he swing from a rope? No. The newly formed Indian state needed experienced enforcers. They welcomed him with open arms. Madras City Police Commissioner in 1953. IG of the RPF in 1958. A long, respected career.
Hannah Arendt wrote about the banality of evil. The idea that the desk killers (the Eichmanns, the bureaucrats) are just boring, gray little men doing their jobs without thinking.
I think Arendt was wrong. Or maybe she was just fooled by the paperwork.
The state wants you to believe evil is boring. It wants you to look at a police station or a government office and see only files, procedures, and tired officers in khaki uniforms. If it’s boring, you don't look too closely. You turn the page. You accept the sanitization.
But there is nothing banal about a cunt killing people. How is it boring? When the police in Sathankulam locked the door and beat Jeyaraj and Benniks for hours, it wasn't a bureaucratic exercise. It was loud. It was wet. It was screaming, skin tearing, blood pooling on the concrete floor, pants soaked in blood. That is not boring. It is intense, personal, monstrous sadism.
To call it "banal" is to give them a shield. It lets the bureaucrat pretend he is just a cog, and it lets the cop pretend he is just enforcing the rules. It turns a massacre into "the maintenance of law and order."
Hopefully the cunts in the Jeyaraj and Benniks case will be hung. I hope they choke on the rope. But the system is designed to protect them. Section 197 of the CrPC. You can't even try a police officer for what they did on "official duty" unless the government gives you permission. And why would the state permit it? The state needs its rabid dogs. It needs them to keep the rest of us in line. The cunts who shot thirteen people dead in Thoothukudi during the Sterlite protests, will they ever see a cell? Of course not. They were just "restoring order."
We are expected to quiet down, to let the anger fade, to accept the sanitized history. We are supposed to look at websites like parthapolicing.com and nod along with the tributes.
I won't. If the courts won't hang them, the least we can do is refuse to let their names be cleaned. Let their legacies remain dirty, smelling of blood and locked rooms.