Barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly will commit every conceivable atrocity. The danger does not come merely from habitual hooligans; we are all potential recruits for anarchy. Unremitting effort is needed to keep men living together at peace; there is only a margin of error left over for experiment however beneficent. Once the prisons of the mind have been opened, the orgy is on. … The work of preserving society is sometimes onerous, sometimes almost effortless. The more elaborate the society, the more vulnerable it is to attack, and the more complete its collapse in case of defeat. At a time like the present it is notably precarious. If it falls, we shall see not merely the dissolution of a few joint-stock corporations, but of the spiritual and material achievements of our history.
- Robbery Under Law, Evelyn WaughThere is something unique and beyond imagination going on here... they have unleashed the worse demons of our nature. They have caught the tiger by the tail and I think, it's too late to revert anything back. It is going to be bad, really bad for the world unless... lessons of history and morality are unleashed to demolish these demons. It might sound impossible but it can happen easily. Until then this brutality continues while the mobs of "good" and "decent" humans celebrate this fanatism.
If decent people I grew up with and some, who even raised me as a kid can not only elect and tolerate a monster but celebrate... well as usual, why I am not surprised by this human capacity for barbarism and idiocy? What people don't reflect on is that every time barbarism raises, a new "normal" becomes the norm. The next generation of barbarism naturally tries to "up" this new norm and this becomes a vicious cycle. I am not clairvoyant but any moron could understand this even if they read and understand little into human history.
I have great respect for Arundhati Roy; she has the balls that I never had. For over 25 years she has dedicated her life to something remarkable. People like her is what makes me say the change can happen easily. Please read her new piece and reflect on what your celebrating, Intimations of an Ending: The rise and rise of the Hindu Nation:
In India today, a shadow world is creeping up on us in broad daylight. It is becoming more and more difficult to communicate the scale of the crisis even to ourselves—its size and changing shape, its depth and diversity. An accurate description runs the risk of sounding like hyperbole. And so, for the sake of credibility and good manners, we groom the creature that has sunk its teeth into us—we comb out its hair and wipe its dripping jaw to make it more personable in polite company. India isn’t by any means the worst, or most dangerous, place in the world, at least not yet, but perhaps the divergence between what it could have been and what it has become makes it the most tragic.
[---]
Not all the roaring of the sixty thousand in the Houston stadium could mask the deafening silence from Kashmir. That day, 22 September, marked the forty-eighth day of curfew and communication blockade in the valley.
Once again, Modi has managed to unleash his unique brand of cruelty on a scale unheard of in modern times. And, once again, it has endeared him further to his loyal public. When the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Bill was passed in India’s parliament on 6 August, there were celebrations across the political spectrum. Sweets were distributed in offices, and there was dancing in the streets. A conquest—a colonial annexation, another triumph for the Hindu Nation—was being celebrated. Once again, the conquerors’ eyes fell on the two primaeval trophies of conquest—women and land. Statements by senior BJP politicians, and patriotic pop videos that notched up millions of views, legitimised this indecency. Google Trends showed a surge in searches for the phrases “marry a Kashmiri girl” and “buy land in Kashmir.”
It was not all limited to loutish searches on Google. Within weeks of the siege, the Forest Advisory Committee cleared 125 projects that involve the diversion of forest land for other uses.
[---]
In December 2014, a two-judge bench of the Justices Gogoi and Rohinton Fali Nariman ordered that an updated list of the NRC be produced before the Supreme Court within a year. Nobody had any clue about what could or would be done to the five million “infiltrators” that it was hoped would be detected. There was no question of them being deported to Bangladesh. Could that many people be locked up in detention camps? For how long? Would they be stripped of citizenship? And was India’s highest constitutional court going to oversee and micromanage a colossal bureaucratic exercise involving more than thirty million people, nearly fifty-two thousand bureaucrats and a massive outlay of funds?
In the less fertile chars that I visited early last month, the poverty washes over you like the dark, silt-rich waters of the Brahmaputra. The only signs of modernity were the bright plastic bags containing documents which their owners—who quickly gather around visiting strangers—cannot read but kept looking at anxiously, as though trying to decrypt the faded shapes on the pages and work out whether they would save them and their children from the massive new detention camp they had heard is being constructed deep in the forests of Goalpara. Imagine a whole population of millions of people like this, debilitated, rigid with fear and worry about their documentation. It’s not a military occupation, but it’s an occupation by documentation. These documents are peoples’ most prized possessions, cared for more lovingly than any child or parent. They have survived floods and storms and every kind of emergency. Grizzled, sun-baked farmers, men and women, scholars of the land and the many moods of the river, use English words like “legacy document,” “link paper,” “certified copy,” “re-verification,” “reference case,” “D-voter,” “declared foreigner,” “voter list,” “refugee certificate”—as though they were words in their own language. They are. The NRC has spawned a vocabulary of its own. The saddest phrase in it is “genuine citizen.”
[---]
How do you translate this in modern terms if not as the National Register of Citizens coupled with the Citizenship Amendment Bill? This is the RSS’s version of Germany’s 1935 Nuremberg Laws, by which German citizens were only those who had been granted citizenship papers—legacy papers—by the government of the Third Reich. The amendment against Muslims is the first such amendment. Others will no doubt follow, against Christians, Dalits, Communists—all enemies of the RSS.
The Foreigners Tribunals and detention centres that have already started springing up across India may not, at the moment, be intended to accommodate hundreds of millions of Muslims. But they are meant to remind us that India’s Muslims truly belong there, unless they can produce legacy papers. Because only Hindus are considered India’s real aboriginals, who don’t need those papers. Even the four-century-old Babri Masjid didn’t have the right legacy papers. What chance would a poor farmer or a street vendor have?
This is the wickedness that the sixty thousand people in the Houston stadium were cheering. This is what the president of the United States linked hands with Modi to support. It’s what the Israelis want to partner with, the Germans want to trade with, the French want to sell fighter jets to and the Saudis want to fund.
We can only hope that, someday soon, the streets in India will throng with people who realise that unless they make their move, the end is close.
If that doesn’t happen, consider these words to be intimations of an ending from one who lived through these times.
No comments:
Post a Comment