Peace on Earth: Haunting Images Of Innocence Lost

By SWAMI AGNIVESH & REV. VALSON THAMPU

Gujarat today abounds in the victims of a demonic religiosity. Among them, two faces from a camp in Godhra refuse to fade out of our memory.

The first is that of a four-year-old boy, Abdul (name changed), who had seen his siblings as well as parents being butchered. Drawn to him instinctively, we wanted to be with him and, if possible, listen to him. Abdul would not speak. "The boy has lost his speech", explained an elderly woman who stood near him. The sight of the unspeakable has robbed Abdul of the ability to speak.

The second face is that of Aiyesha (name changed), a 22-year-old mother. She is the lone survivor of an extended family of 17 members, including her parents, brothers, sisters, husband and a two-year-old son. She had to see 16 of her kin, including her own son, being killed one after the other. She was the last to be set upon: she was good-looking, and was gang-raped.

The beastly feast being over, her predators attacked her with lathis, breaking her legs and one of her hands. In the process she fainted and was left for dead. She was picked up by the police the next day and reached to a hospital.

Meeting with Abdul and Aiyesha, and scores of others like them, made our stomachs churn at the heartlessness of statistics. Each one of the 100,000 refugees in the relief camps is a wounded human being, burdened with memories too harrowing for words. "The death of a million people", said Lenin, "is statistics but the death of a single human being is tragedy".

Narendra Modi conjured up the unfeeling ambience of science and coined the heartless explanation of "action provoking reaction". We do not know if Modi learned his physics at the feet of Murli Manohar Joshi. But we wonder why this one-time professor of physics has not told his fellow swayamsevak that the reaction must be equal and opposite.

That can never be ensured through mob fury, even if it is presided over by a chief minister, aided and abetted by a spineless police force and an abject bureaucracy. It is the duty of the state to ensure that action and reaction are equal and opposite.

But civilised societies entrust this delicate task to the sagacity of judges and not to the bloodthirstiness of lumpens.

Jonathan Swift'swords resounded in our ears: "We have just enough religion to make us hate each other; but not enough religion to make us love each other". Religion has two essential roles. First, to foster in us a sense of universal kinship, which is the authentic spiritual element in all religions.

Hinduism, for example, sees the whole of mankind as one family. Christianity and Islam teach that humankind has a common origin: that we are all members of an extended family. Beneath the skin, we are kin. On this plank of kinship rest all spiritual values: love, compassion, justice, and so on.

Sadly, as religions get institutionalised, the spiritual element of kinship is wilfully degraded into herd instinct which is the driving force of communalism. Kinship then applies only to the members of one'sown religious community.

The second function of religion is to enable us to imbibe the nature of God. It is this that enables us to move from our mean self to our noble self ( alpatman to mahatman ). God is love. And divine love expresses itself as compassion and concern for justice. All partisan sentiments and advocacies are anathema to God; for God'slove is universal.

A significant fall-out of the Gujarat carnage is the escalation of cynicism especially among children. Our visit to the various refugee camps (to call them relief camps would be an insult to the inmates) has convinced us of the need to reach out to school children.

We have, since then, visited scores of schools in Delhi and addressed thousands of children as well as listened to hundreds of them. We have seen so many of them painfully baffled about the nature of religion and cynical of its usefulness. Unlike adults, children have inordinate difficulties in understanding how a religion that presumably preaches ahimsa and compassion can inspire bloodshed and barbarity.

It leaves them gasping that those who profess vegetarianism resulting from the resolute refusal to inflict cruelty to animals and birds, can kill their fellow human beings and exult over it.

Children cannot understand how the prime minister can show compassion in the refugee camps commiserating with the victims but, at the same time, support and legitimise the perpetrators of these atrocities. None of them understands why innocent children should be burned alive just because some unknown and seemingly unidentifiable criminals attacked the Sabarmati Express. But who cares for the anguish and the perplexities that secretly torment these children? Is anyone listening?

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See also: Peace of Mind, Peace on Earth, Life and Beyond, Love and Happiness, Body Mind and Soul)