A Looming Orwellian Summer

There is an eerie silence that follows an explosion. Something that sounds like vacuum, piercing your ears. It lasts for a while, and in that time frame everything becomes sluggish, everything exhibits a similar kind of vacuum silence - rather than emanating sound from itself, everything looks to be sucking it inside. In that moment, if you are a victim, you seek a place where you can hide and save your life, somehow. If you are a perpetrator, you celebrate, perhaps. But if you are an observer, you think, seek justification, & look to find at least some semblance of reason even in insanity.
I am playing the third role.
I try to empathize. With both of them.

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The victims, my heart goes out for them. No one was spared. Not women, not children, not the sick housed in a hospital ward which was bombed.

I stop midway, and abhor whatever I have thought about. Over the years, these are the very people who have been silent spectators to and some even perpetrators of violence, discrimination & exploitation of my community. Their innocence is a myth because both the meek spectator to injustice and the one who commits it – are equally guilty.

Do you think the unborn child or the 10 year old boy who died in the blasts understand even the literal meaning of the words ‘discrimination’ & ‘exploitation’?

In great causes, minor damages should be overlooked. There is always some collateral damage in a war.

A war is a physical act of conflict between military arms of two rival ideologies. The pre condition for any engagement to be termed a war is that the two sides should be armed. In case one of the sides is unarmed, the engagement is termed genocide. And if you call these damages something that can indeed be overlooked, why don’t you overlook the deaths of your kin caused at the hands of the State enforcement agencies during their search and cordon operations? Why do you then term it part of a bigger conspiracy against your community?

You are saying all this because you haven’t had any hardships in your life. You were born into a safe environment, with complete financial & social security. You got a hassle free existence, which you used to get educated, get a job & lead a privileged life. All this time, you least cared about what happened around you. Now, after settling down for a comfortable life to follow, you open the newspaper, get to see a news item about some explosion somewhere, and out you come with an opinion and a twisted logic to back it up!

You have to decide on which count do you hold me guilty (and thereby sentence me to death in a bomb blast) – being an enemy of your community, or having a more privileged background than yourself. If it is the latter, as seems apparent, is it not a similar birth-based discrimination you yourself harbour that you claim to be fighting against?
And what does drudgery brings about in men? For winners, a drive to excel; for others, jealousy. And a violence that brews from jealousy can NEVER be called a crusade. At best, it could be termed a vengeance, a revenge which you take on others for your failures!

It is indeed a crusade, as it is fought with valour by wronged people against the enemies of righteousness and religion. We are fighters of the God, unafraid of any consequences whatsoever, and are ready to sacrifice even our lives for the causes we believe in. If this is not crusade, then what is it? Where else, but from God, can we get such determination and success?

How do you define valour? Is it sheepishly entering a harmless crowded area, benefitting from the basic trust that humans show towards other humans? The trust which isn’t shown towards animals, like stray leopards, which are usually killed when they enter a human locality. Or does valour lie in leaving a scooter laden with explosives in that area, while walking out surreptitiously, carefully avoiding inquisitive glances on your way out? Or does it lie in celebrating your ‘combative action’ holed in a hideout hundreds of miles away from the point of action? Or perhaps in running away and hiding from the law enforcement agencies in a manner similar to what hunted animals adopt while evading entrapment? Or -in the case of being captured- in hiring a lawyer, applying for the Presidential pardon, and in parading your parents, wife & kids in front of the media to display a more ‘humane’ sight of yours to the public?
Isn’t it so with you that the mere possibility of danger or death (to you) in your actions seems to make you a coward? Don’t your actions to evade punishment end up validating the same law and constitution you claim to fight against? And from where does the word ‘sacrifice’ come in your dictionary? Sacrifice may be of two types. One is self-sacrifice, in which man himself dies for a cause, after waging a battle. In the other, man sacrifices a loved one – akin to Abraham’s intention of sacrificing Isaac, as I read in the Bible story. You do neither. What you indeed sacrifice is an unknown human, your compatriot mostly. What ‘loss’ do you refer to while talking about sacrifice?
And for your claims to divine warrior hood, here is something which I once read written somewhere –
“There are two types of warriors-
The first fights injustice, the second creates it.
The first protects the innocent, the second kills them.
The first sacrifices himself for others, the second sacrifices others.
The first is a tree that provides shade, the second is a tree for firewood.”

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And so on goes the conversation.
Meanwhile, people keep dying. Not by old age, not by diseases - which are greatest killers in our country, but by being blown into smithereens by crude bombs in the prime of their lives. What remain are the remnants – a severed head, a torn abdomen etc. of what had once been a vibrant, lively human, with its own set desires, dreams, and its capacity to carry other, much newer, lives on its back.
And meanwhile, India’s electronic media keeps asking for citizen reporters on the blasts. “We want pictures, videos” one popular news portal says, of anything that “you see around you regarding the attack.” Implicitly, it means that if you can spot gore, why reserve it for a private viewing – let’s share it across the world so that the wounds of the unfortunate become the cynosure of the public. Pictures taken hours after a blast are impact-zero ones, and hence don’t sell. So let’s get it straight from the horse’s eye!

Following the Ahmadabad blasts, in an interview with the Gujarat Home Minister, a journalist pops the following points - “There is a perception that such blasts were expected in Gujarat after the 2002 riots. Also, add to that the dimension of most riots victims still not having got legal justice.” and “Some people argue that when riot victims do not get legal justice they feel like taking revenge.” Hats off to the lady, who did exactly the task for which the terrorists planted all those bombs! She, through her ‘insights’, echoed the very ‘logic’ that the terrorists so erringly tried to champion – that in order to make the deaf listen, you need explosions! Only, unlike in Bhagat Singh’s case(if you recognize the dialog in the previous sentence), these explosions killed innocents. Why does a discussion involving mindless, savage acts like bomb blasts needs to seek any explanation/logic for the occurrence of the same, everytime?!!
Lastly, another piece of rattling stupidity – a news portal recently published the name of an anti-national, venom spewing, (and absolutely irrational, if I may add) blog which is written by suspected terrorists, in a speculative article regarding the new names acquired by familiar terror outfits in India. They didn’t publish the link, noble souls, but the esteemed fellows don’t seem to know that naming anything controversial in a public news forum actually incites a lot of readers to seek it out, and read it through, especially in an information friendly world like ours. I’m pretty sure that the morale of the blog writer in question would have soared by quite a few degrees, seeing so many hits all of a sudden, mores so because the blog was almost inconsequential and irrelevant for most of its pre-fame life. Secondly, his ‘message’ may now actually be in a position to spread into some unpolluted but nevertheless fertile minds, thanks to the site in question. And how is the blog, the one and only update of which came almost an year back, still floating in the public domain? What have the scissor-quick honchos of the Department of Telecommunications and Information & Broadcasting ministry been doing, apart from banning television channels & ‘obscene’ films? And the only sane answer to this problem, which will eventually conceive in the minds of these ‘information controllers’ would be - and which I personally fear the most - block all blogs; similar to the traditional strategy that has been employed to get rid of all the world’s evils over the centuries.
The same strategy that seems to make sense in this mad world today - destruction– of people if they differ from you, of information if it doesn’t corroborate what you say. Simple, efficient & with immediate results. At its start you have something, at its end there is nothing. Nothing but thin air. And you don’t need any theorems to prove zilch.
An Orwellian summer somehow doesn’t seem to be so far away now.