‘Poor often struggle against each other’

It is a deeply puzzling question that confronts unequal societies: Why don’t they implode into uprisings or revolutions by the dispossessed? That’s because the

poor

are often locked into a struggle against each other, says

Katherine Boo

, author of ‘Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a

Mumbai Undercity

’ which won the National Book award.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist said poor communities were often turned against each other by the very forces responsible for their status. “How easy it is to turn people against each other for decisions made in fancy boardrooms and blame each other for what they lack,” she said.

Boo was in conversation with Karan Mahajan, author of the ‘Association of Small Bombs’, at the

Times Litfest

in an engaging session titled ‘The Republic of Oblivion—How the Rich Manage to Ignore the Poor’.

Writing on marginalized communities meant being subjected to sharper scrutiny, Boo said, reflecting on her own reportage on the death of the mentally disabled, which appeared in the Washington Post.

“I had to work doubly hard. If I got a single detail wrong, it would result in every story on the issue being discredited.” Referring to

Howard Becker

’s “hierarchies of credibility” she said that people often choose not to engage with writings on poor communities or try to discredit it.

Karan Mahajan’s book is a nuanced story about a smaller terrorist attack in a Delhi market. When asked about his attempt to try and replace a single image of terrorism with a complexity of images, he said, “Beyond the big attack there are a series of smaller attacks which may have had shoddy planning, where the ideology may be suspect and the perpetrators may not be religious.”

In response to an audience question on the threats faced by journalists and writers, Mahajan candidly talked about writers confronting a moment of self-censorship, especially in the light of the demand by Hindutva groups to ban Tamil writer Perumal Murugan’s book. “Writers do wonder whether they will face a similar problem,” he said.