Even before the full scope of a tragedy strikes us in India, we begin the game of apportioning, deflecting, and dodging blame. Alas, the stampede at Elphinstone Station on September 29 that resulted in the deaths of 23 people, has elicited the same reaction. While there is no doubt that the civic authorities and the state bear responsibility for the creaking bridges, shabby stairwells, and general crumbling infrastructure at the city’s local train stations – -and so, for the heart-breaking loss of life in this incident — the political parties have descended into a tasteless game of mud-slinging, presumably with the goal of generating political capital from the event. Railway Minister Piyush Goyal blamed nature, the Congress blamed Piyush Goyal, Raj Thackeray blamed Modi, and, in an act of bizarre ingenuity, Republic TV, the television channel widely seen as a mouthpiece for the Narendra Modi government, blamed Prithiviraj Chavan, the Chief Minister of the previous Congress-NCP government of Maharashtra.

In a tweet remarkable for its tone-deafness and callousness, Amrita Bhinder, a person followed by Modi on Twitter and (by some accounts) a BJP spokesperson, wondered why the crowds at Elphinstone could not get their act together and, well, not cause a stampede and die. Why not, indeed? Bhinder’s clueless and odious remark rightly deserves censure, but in a thousand different ways, we, in India and elsewhere, do the same thing: engaging in acts and practices of sanctioned indifference to the suffering and lives of others. We, including those of us who may be marginalised and subject to indifference ourselves in various ways, enact it towards others by refusing to recognise or acknowledge the very fact of their existence and the challenges that they face. Outraging on social media is simply another, albeit more sophisticated, form of indifference.

The fact that public space in India presents a harsher challenge to women than to men does not stop right-wing Hindu women from seeking to exclude minorities from the same space. The experience of exile did not seem to make Kashmiri Pandits one bit more sensitive to the plight of the Rohingya. Sunni Muslims, whose claim to being Indian is itself under suspicion, seek to deny Indian Ahmadis the right to call themselves Muslim. And, of course, the historical fact of the Holocaust does not seem to have translated into any empathy among large swathes of Jewish Israelis for Palestinians. And so it goes.

In a reflection on the violence committed by powerful states like the US and Israel, the scholar Judith Butler has articulated the concept of a “grievable life,” asking us to consider whose lives we consider worthy of grieving for. Grief, a fundamental and basic emotion, is one of the marks of humanness itself. Those who we consider — implicitly if not overtly, through our actions if not our words — as unworthy of grief, we effectively consider less than human.

The extreme vulnerability of poor Indian children to violence, illness, and death. The at-risk lives of labourers perched on the rickety scaffolding of construction work in India. The abject existence of scavengers who clean our excreta. Ungrievable lives all of them, because we expect them to suffer and die, as they indeed routinely do. All of those who take the local train from may not have shared this state of constant and deep vulnerability but in those moments when they crossed that bridge, they shared something of the “precarious” nature of existence, to draw on another argument from Butler. Those of us who are far, far more privileged — and what is privilege but making one’s life eminently grievable and insuring it against the risk to the fullest extent possible? –never completely escape it either, despite our illusions of control and security.

I know Elphinstone station well and the bridge connecting Parel and Elphinstone from the many years I spent in Mumbai in the 1990s. Perhaps it was the same bridge or another one at another station, but I have a memory of looking down to my right and seeing two men in the slums below fight over a bucket of water. I turned my eyes away from the ugly sight, as I have done countless times. On two occasions in life, I made the choice to turn away from helping others because I did not want to get involved — decisions I am haunted by till today because I did not even try or give the possibility of doing something a chance.

Once we consider grievable the lives of all those to whom we are indifferent, once we think about the pain of all those who we turn away from, as we would the lives of those we love, we may demand for them rights, justice, decency, basic dignity and accountability as we would for ourselves and our loved ones. It may be too much to expect our city municipal corporations, state governments, and national government to govern on the basis of an ethics of shared vulnerability and collective responsibility. But there is no reason why we, starting in small ways, cannot do that. From choosing who we vote for, to attempting to imagine the pain of others, to choosing not to do harm if we are unable to do good, to fighting for the rights of fellow citizens — all of these actions are worthy and possess intrinsic value whatever the outcome. And if our representatives have any vestigial decency left in them, we may just find that we can shame them into doing their jobs of serving and protecting Indian citizens.