On September 11, 1993, a bomb went off in New Delhi’s Raisina Road. Nine people were killed and another 20 injured. The date, 9/11, was already cursed. He had missed his target, but Devinder Pal Singh Bhullar, it is said, had left too many crumbs for intelligence officers to pick.
When arrested in 1995, Bhullar reportedly confessed to having it in for Maninderjeet Singh Bitta, a Congress functionary. On August 25, 2001, a trial court decreed that he be hanged. The Khalistani sympathiser was prone to taking justice into his own hands. He made repeated attempts to take his life in Tihar jail. Since mental health afflictions are notoriously indistinguishable, news reports described him as both a depressive and a schizophrenic.
The Supreme Court, however, was more specific. Commuting his sentence to life imprisonment in 2014, Chief Justice P. Sathasivam said, “Mental illness, schizophrenia and insanity are grounds for commuting the death penalty.” Bhullar, the judge seemed to suggest, was not fit for justice.
Punishment, legal philosophy argues, is effective only when it elicits guilt. Suffering delusions and often megalomaniacal, the mad, it is assumed, cannot feel punitive remorse.
Diagnosed bipolar in 2007, I have, in this last decade, been capable of a violence that isn’t as calamitous as Bhullar’s, but it is comparably heedless. I have verbally assaulted family and friends. I have invaded their space without permission, and worse still, I have considered the subjectivity of others dispensable.
Thinking I was an irresistible Krishna, I confessed an undying love to scores of women. Someone somewhere was bound to get hurt. Madness, in my experience, left no place for another. It made me an impatient and selfish brat.
Though a diagnosis like schizophrenia is retrospective, it is unclear if Bhullar was following orders of real or invented voices when he left some RDX in a car. Reality and sanity are both consensual. Bhullar, sadly, was a rebel. Much like my internment in hospitals and mental health institutions, his imprisonment is justified and pragmatic. We, Bhullar and I, can be impervious to the pain we feel, but more dangerously, to the pain we inflict.
Our madness corrodes, and if the mental health ethos of India is internalised, it contaminates too. In the end, though, it is the same madness that affords us temperance and forgiveness. The murder of journalist Gauri Lankesh — too clinical to be dubbed ‘mad’ — revived the ‘I Am’ movement.
With tragedy now ripe for appropriation, let it be said #IAmDevinderPalSinghBhullar.
***
Times more lucid
Without access to any definitive narratives of sanity, I yearned for madness as a teenager. The books I read made insanity seem torrid, yet glamorous. It seemed to offer more keys to the universe. I wanted to find an out from the chaos of the world with a chaos of my own. Manic for the first time, I felt language grow felicitous.
I discovered what I felt was the essence of Sufi thought. Rather than say, ‘Allah hu’, I claimed it was better to ask, ‘Allah, who?’ I never did have the patience to find an answer.
The intelligence I had suddenly acquired was manipulative. I wanted to establish a clear hierarchy. I wanted to be supreme. In times more lucid, that intelligence is replaced by reason. Others aren’t spectators any more. They are participants. They matter. Empathy sadly comes with very few real world precedents.
Madness is something I suffer, but sanity is something I crave. It is only the intervention of my support system that makes me nostalgic for days when I was functional and taken more seriously. “Is he mad?” is a bit of an obvious question. I am saved by the fact that my parents, friends and doctors now ask, “What was he like when he was sane?”
Life when I am mad doesn’t work. I need sanity to enjoy it. Paranoid about my ravings being taken too literally, I look after myself, but I am invariably irked by those who promote a strict commitment to self-care. Their prescriptions — “Get a grip!” — hark back to an individualism that’s callous and also dangerous. Restitution is an enterprise that must be cooperative. It is, by no means, an individual matter. It is often the structure of family and society that drives one crazy.
Sigmund Freud and a majority of the psychoanalysts who succeeded him believed that madness is a process of creative correction. Even in incoherence, they argued, the brain was making sense of a strangeness that plagues the mind and the world we inhabit. For Freud, the insane were not patients he had to look at. They had to be heard.
During my eight years of psychoanalysis, my therapist has listened to me speak. She has never made me feel like a faulty aberration that needed to be treated. Madness is miserable, yes, but it makes sanity an ideal. Dialogue, I then learnt, is more effective a cure than discourse. Though I behave badly when I am manic, I find more relief in conversation than in detention.
***
Marked by excess
Given our love for structure, we prefer looking at madness and sanity as opposites. When I go insane, for instance, I lose sight of the distinction between the decorous and the outlandish, between the sacred and the profane. I think I am Shiva, and my blasphemy lands me in rehab.
In the world outside, however, his sons and servants are free to lynch Mohammad Akhlaq Saifi in Dadri and stab 15-year-old Junaid Khan on a train . Neither they nor their violence is ‘sane’, but these bigots are not typically ‘mad’. Their place is in prison, not in an asylum.
And if bigotry can today pass off as sanity, then the label of insanity and the meaning of ‘mad’ need an urgent revision. The recent refrain — “The world has gone mad!” — is ample proof we employ the word ‘mad’ too lightly, and ‘sanity’, it is apparent, resists its many definitions too.
Though sanity may be hard to pin down, its lack is clearly marked by excess. Hitler and Hamlet both felt too much passion, but unlike Shakespeare’s prince, no one in Germany came in Hitler’s way. When manic, I take to Twitter as often as Donald Trump, but he has not been censured by a psychiatrist yet. His office lets him get away with it.
In his book The Sane Society , German social psychologist Erich Fromm writes, “The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane.” Trump had proven himself to be a lecherous misogynist before he got elected, and Yogi Adityanath was derided as a communal partisan. Since sanity requires consensus, these victories confirm a truth. We’re all in trouble.
***
A day after the #MeToo campaign had taken Twitter and Facebook by storm, a friend called to ask, “Why haven’t you joined in?” I had, after all, dedicated a chapter of my memoir to my sexual abuse. The agony had dragged itself over four years of my childhood. I was a candidate. It was time for me to raise my hand and be counted. “This feels too much like coercion,” I said.
The onus of confession, I felt, had again been transferred onto the oppressed. Sitting down to list the events that added up to my ordeal, I had bawled like an infant. My therapist calmed me down. “This was the catharsis you needed,” she said. As I saw women being drawn into a frenzy of revelation, I feared only few would have her wise counsel.
A lynching
Days later, I woke up to news that a “list” was doing the rounds. Women in the world of academia were being asked to name their male colleagues who had groped, harassed or molested them. Social media was all afire. Because the content of these public confessions was sexual, the resulting gossip was salacious — “I’d never put something like this past him. He was always a bit disgusting.”
Contemporary feminists demanded more specifics. It was time for women to own their narrative, to come out of the woods. Everyone, it suddenly seemed, loved a good lynching. Closed doors, a symbol of sexual predation, were quickly deemed unnecessary for accusations too. With vengeance being touted as the substitute for a restorative catharsis, one had to enact and parade one’s humiliation for entertainment.
Sanity cannot be the domain of aggressors, but defenders of their victims often lose sight of measure themselves. According to a group of mental health practitioners and theorists, the cause of my madness could have well been my abuse. I was only able to come to terms with its horror because I did so in the quiet of my analyst’s dimly lit chamber.
Without the slightest concern for the well-being and sanity of the aggrieved and without any acknowledgement of their very real fears of backlash, activists find in their orgiastic sanctimony a delight that precludes the possibility of responsible redress.
Many on the left like to spell the word ‘other’ with a capital ‘O’, but it’s unfortunate that despite this exaggeration, their concern and care still remains hostile. War, they fail to realise, needs as many nurses as it does soldiers.
***
Colleges, of course, make a perfect theatre for excess. Rohith Vemula, a 25-year-old Ph.D scholar, was found hanging in a fellow student’s room on January 17, 2016.
Quantum of solace
Vemula’s Dalit heritage gave him access to an identity he prized, but it also led to a further ostracisation on campus. His suicide letter, however, absolved his bullies.
A week after Vemula’s suicide, writer Manu Joseph wrote, “Suicide bombers are a depression story, not a radical-Islam story. Rohith Vemula, from all evidence in plain sight, is a depression story, not a Dalit story.”
If it takes a village to raise a child, it also takes one to make her or him abjure reason
A contrarian of considerable repute, Joseph argued that thousands of clinically depressed young Indian men and women were likely to end their own lives if one made the obvious argument that Vemula killed himself because of discrimination.
For Joseph, it would be prudent to assume that depression or mental health afflictions are determined by biology, not by one’s environment. Vemula, he seems to suggest, should have really gotten a grip on himself.
It is precisely this separation of the personal and the political that further exacerbates the despair of those afflicted by mental health disorders. By reducing internal turmoil to a set of physical symptoms, commentators like Joseph make it harder for patients to exceed their suffering.
However incoherent, the mad find a quantum of solace in thought. Their ideas and specificity must find some validity, not blanket dismissal. If it takes a village to raise a child, it also takes one to make her or him abjure reason.
Only sanity can help one transform the terror of madness into delight, but sanity, I would argue, can only be found in an embrace of the other. Confinement, when solitary, does not afford levity or reconciliation.
In April 2016, Bhullar was granted parole on medical grounds. P.D. Garg, head of the psychiatry department at Government Medical College, Amritsar, had suggested in a report that the convicted terrorist’s mental health would improve in a “homely environment”.
Little is known about what Bhullar got up to in his in-laws’ home, but one can only hope that for three weeks, he too was kind to the relatives who had fawned over him. Dr. Garg, it is possible, got it right.
For Bhullar and me, sanity will only be a fantasy, but it is a utopia worth the chase. In the end, it is again thought that brings us comfort. Psychoanalytic theorist Jacqueline Rose, for instance, reminds us, “More people are killed by drunks than the insane.” Losing sensibility, one then infers, makes very little sense.
The author is Editor, National Geographic Traveller India . His memoir How to Travel Light has just been published.
