Metodología de evaluación de ofertas

The rewards and recognition also take another significant form: that of higher status in the neighbourhood. This status is reflected in power over, and the assured loyalty of, boys/men in the neighbourhood. The following excerpts from an interview with Pradeep (UC) and his younger brother, Vikram, at their home, suggests that this status came largely from their fighting prowess and the strength (numbers) of the groups one belonged to, or, led:

Pradeep: My group, if I break away then all fifty guys will come to this side.

53 _{The BJP is the ruling party at both the state (Madhya Pradesh) and central}

Vikram: And for us, it’s like, if [someone] hits one of us then everyone will come and beat them up.

Pradeep: Like, if someone touches me or him (indicating Vikram)… Reva: How do you decide who is right and who is wrong?

Pradeep: Like if he is in the group…

Vikram: Our…we don’t see [right or wrong]. If the two of us fight (indicating himself and Pradeep), and these guys are from my team, they start beating up him (indicating Pradeep), right, then the guys who come to support [Pradeep], right …won’t listen to my guys… they will listen to Pradeep. Even if they also know my guys.

[…]

Pradeep (confidently): [All the guys] who support me, where I live, in that place no one can lay a finger on me.

Reva (half-seriously): Nor Vikram.

Pradeep: He is my brother. If someone touches him, my,…I go mad! (indicating Dilshad and Dilip who were also present), I don’t allow anyone to lay a finger on these two either! These [guys] don’t tell me. Keep things hidden.

Dilip (more quietly): I’ve not had any fights so far.

While Dilip systematically avoided conflicts in and outside school Namit who was also from a SC community, was very active in his group and offered me detailed accounts of various violent incidents he had been involved in. This could, again, be because Namit’s family was financially better off than Dilip and he had spent almost all his life in Indore. His specific circumstances could have enabled a different set of networks and possibilities of horizontal mobility for Namit. Based on earlier discussions in this chapter I suggest that caste hierarchies interact in complex ways with a family’s economic and cultural resources to produce a range of cultural and economic possibilities for adults and children as well as a range of practices in terms of negotiating social institutions and genderclaste relations.

The kind of local power that Pradeep and Vikram seemed to be able to exercise feeds on, and drives, local tendencies toward ‘vigilantism’. This vigilantism targets a range of behaviours from tobacco use and drinking to (alleged) cow-slaughter. For example, Mahesh (OBC) explained in an interview, how Namit’s (SC) group indulges in violence over trivial things:

Mahesh: You know how it is, now all people are not the same… [If] someone bumps into them a bit on the street, things get to name calling and abuse.

Then these people from Namit’s group start fighting (physically). So then things start getting worse. Then they, they…all start beating [the guy] up. / Like, now, one day a drunk guy was walking down the road…so he was walking like this (indicated a wobbly walk). So they na, beat him up and tied [him] up and left him in a car. This is wrong na, he was going on his way, what’s it to do with us? Namit says ‘[that guy] ruined the atmosphere of our colony’!

Namit insisted in, at least, two of our conversations that their leader, Babloo bhaiya (caste not known), had clear guidelines about not beating up an “innocent” person. But as Vikram says above, in the heat of the moment no one worries about who is in the right and who is not. Thus there are two related problems here: one, that violence becomes normalised as boys organise themselves into neighbourhood groups negotiating power and status. Two, rigid binaries of “good” and “bad” are developed and legitimated which derive their meaning from religious or gender differences and conflicts as well as shaping these differences and conflicts. In Indore, religious difference and communalisation of social groups and relations has been a particularly worrying trend. My data shows that: 1) boys in these groups as well as residents who are not members have been involved in lynching Muslim men accused of stealing and/or killing cows, and 2) that these groups have a relationship with the ruling BJP and its affiliates like the Bajrang Dal whose political and social capital has traditionally derived from their militant, right-wing Hindutva stance54 _{(Menon and} Nigam 2007). Sundar (2010: 114) has also noted such ‘localized’ and ‘spontaneous’ vigilantism on the part of ‘ordinary people’ in India. Following excerpts from an interview with Rajesh (SC), Aman (OBC) and Aalok (UC) offer an example:

Reva: Hey, have you heard of these [stories of] cow-slaughter? Seen videos and stuff? WhatsApp…do you use WhatsApp and all that?

Rajesh: Yes, [we] have seen [the videos]. Aman: I’ve also seen [those].

Reva: Okay, so these people….have there been fights because of that in your colony?

Aalok: Once we caught a guy who had stolen a cow. Beat up him badly, we did!

54 _{There is no clear evidence in my data of direct relationship of the BJP or the BD}

While these local, IWC boys’ groups are not the only people involved in violence against Muslims in India I suggest that such groups serve two purposes: link communities with political parties and enable mobilisation around “communal” (Hindu-Muslim) conflicts and two, help normalise violence. Although these boys have begun to participate in mitra-mandals and vigilantism in a historically specific context, Sundar (2010: 114) cautions against seeing vigilantism itself as a novel phenomenon because such a view ‘conceals the way in which states have long had porous boundaries with powerful elements in society. In addition, in postcolonial countries like India, with an inherited colonial tradition of divide and rule, governments often escape their own responsibility for conflict by externalizing it as a contradiction within civil society.’

Boys’ participation in these groups and episodes of violence also helps establish certain ideal masculinities which include, inter alia, a particular understanding of communal difference, of a specifically masculine capacity for aggression and specific views around gender roles and relations. Following excerpts from an interview with Bunty (OBC), Dilip (SC), Dilshad (OBC), Pradeep (UC) and Vikram (UC) bring out some of the boys’ views around gender images and roles:

Reva: So, now tell me, whether according to you girls should be allowed to work outside or not. And whether you say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ give me reasons. Bunty, Dilshad (together): According to us, [one] shouldn’t send [girls out for work].

Pradeep: Shouldn’t send.

Dilip: According to us, [families] should send. Reva: Speak in turns, one by one!

Bunty: These days the environment is not nice [for girls].

In the following conversation with Pradeep, Vikram and Bunty at Pradeep’s houseI discussed girls’ inclusion in their mitra-mandals. During that conversation two or three of Pradeep’s neighbours came to see him and standing at the former’s doorstep, joined in our conversation:

Pradeep: We just slap the girls and send them back! / Our guys are not nice. (Bunty and Vikram agreed with Pradeep.)

[…]

Bunty: We cannot.

Vikram: [They] are all older than us. Pradeep: We do but not that much.

Another boy standing with us: [The other boys] argue with us. […]

Pradeep: Won’t do anything in our presence [but will misbehave behind our backs].

Pradeep did not mean that they actually hit girls trying to join their group, but I find the symbolic expression significant as it implies force. Clearly, girls, not boys will be asked to act differently; specifically, this ‘difference’ entails a certain kind of gendered exclusion of girls from the public realm. There were also boys like Dilshad who participated neither in such groups, nor in any kind of violence in or beyond the classroom, but had similar opinions to Pradeep’s and Bunty’s. Yet, conversations excerpted above suggest that alongside discourses within families and classrooms, local political and cultural discourses also impinge upon students’ understandings of gender relations and roles in contemporary urban contexts. As such, boys’ political and cultural experience bears closer scrutiny. I also consider this an important aspect of boys’ lives because of the significance they attached to it; those leading the group, like Pradeep, also seemed to have more important roles in this arena than they did in other institutions, like the school.

4.3.3.2 Negotiating life in the neighbourhood: gender, class and