10th Anniversary Issue
August - September 2003 

Year 10    No.90-91
POLITY


 


‘An antidote to the venom in an intolerant society’

Cyrus Guzder

"And there is another, vaster shame, the shame of the world… that ‘no man is an island’, and that every bell tolls for everyone. And yet, there are those who faced by the crime of others or their own, turn their backs so as not to see it, and not feel touched by it."

Primo Levi:
The Drowned and the Saved

Ironically, history repeats itself… in one society after another, generation after generation. Never has the world seen a greater number of people better fed and better read than at any other time in its history. Yet, if one looks back at the 20th century for what characterised it best, the answers are gut-wrenching.

Eric Hobsbawm begins his classic account of the 20th century with quotations from twelve of its most outstanding people. Here are just three of them:

Ø Isiah Berlin (philosopher, Britain): "I remember it only as the most terrible century in Western history."

Ø Rene Dumont (agronomist, France): "I see it only as a century of massacres and wars."

Ø Yehudi Menuhin (musician, Britain): "I would say it has raised the greatest hopes ever conceived by humanity, and destroyed all illusions and ideals."

The winds of war between nations are once again whirling around the Middle East. They have been whirling with terrifying consequences within nations in Africa. And they have stormed through and ravaged smaller societies; as in Gujarat last year and Bombay in ’92 and ’93. The actions of bigoted people sow the wind and the hapless that follow them reap the whirlwind. Old myths are replaced by contemporary prejudices; old wounds are barely healed before they spill their blood again.

Yet, as Primo Levi said, we turn our backs so as not to see, or be touched by it. Worse still, some of us stare these horrors in the eye and see no shame. My generation — (I am a "midnight’s child") — has long forgotten the butchery of Partition; indeed, it is easy to forget what one has not seen. But many who saw the carnage last year in Ahmedabad have also forgotten what, to others — the victims — was unforgettable.

As sickening as the behaviour of the mobs who rampaged through those streets with blood on their hands, was the behaviour of their relatives in England who, just yesterday (August 19) gave a frenzied welcome to Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi, whose visit to London was billed as the first step to crafting his reputation as a leader of international stature!

Why, we ask, do the Jews in Europe expend so much energy to keep alive the memory of the Nazi concentration camps? Why, we may also ask, do Teesta Setalvad and Javed Anand devote so great a part of their lives to placing before us, month after month, the evidence of what communal attitudes of intolerance are doing to our society? Do we need to be reminded of that priest in the time of the Inquisition:

"And when religious sects ran mad,
He held, in spite of all his learning;
That if a man’s belief is bad,
Might it be improved by burning?"

Sceptics might argue the line of Oliver Wendell Holmes that "the mind of the bigot is like the pupil of an eye; the more light you pour on it, the more it will contract." That is precisely what Teesta and Javed and Communalism Combat are about. We need to pour so much light, that it must scorch the pupils of those intolerant eyes. Mild mannered liberalism is what we’d all like to see — but it doesn’t stand up well against fire-breathing communal monsters.

In our country today, we would have hoped that dialogue and negotiation between conflicting interests in civil society could take place through the political systems and the media. The former has failed us to the point where only an upright Election Commission stands between the voters and a brazenly cynical and increasingly criminalised political class. And the media, the mainstream media, has been all but captured by powerful groups whose first interests are to defend themselves rather than, as Rousseau suggested, to underpin that general will of a modern society, which through an ongoing dialogue, establishes "its civilised and collective existence."

We have seen the record of the U.S. press in the recent invasion of Iraq; their silence over the genocide in Guatemala, East Timor and elsewhere, whenever client states or allies of the U.S.A. were involved. And we have seen the partisan actions of the vernacular press in Gujarat with its horrific consequences. This "guided media" system (guided by the ruling political elite, corporate leaders, media owners and support interest groups of theirs supported by a heavy hand), works towards a "manufactured consent". Society is increasingly influenced by a belief in one viewpoint, and the space for contrary argument and dissent narrows daily. Montesquieu correctly said, "the highest tyranny is that which acts under the protection of legality and the banner of justice."

However, all is not lost. Alternative media to the mainstream are emerging all over the world. Ten years of Communalism Combat give us hope. This courageous journal has now joined those few surviving institutions in our society that underpin the sanity and values of our civilisation — ready to take up the cause of tolerance in civil society, robust enough to unshackle the chains that totalitarian chief ministers would seek to lock them in, defending human rights without fear and without favour.

At a time when our nation is bereft of political leadership, when leaders of industry have proved spineless in times of social crisis, when the police in every state have been partisan in upholding the law and when bureaucrats have betrayed their oath to the Constitution in support of venal executives, Communalism Combat keeps reminding us of how close many sections of society are to slipping into the tribalisation that Yeats deplored (in his "Meditations in time of Civil War").

"We have fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare;
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love…"

Communalism Combat has emerged as a bulwark against the viciousness of communal behaviour. It has shown remarkable courage in taking issue with many state governments and the Centre to seek justice for victims who are defenceless before a faceless and heartless administration. It remains a source of courage and inspiration for those who want to uphold the values of tolerance in a pluralistic society, indeed for those who would like to celebrate the pluralism that makes our country so rich in every respect.

It has needed focus, determination, guts, empathy for the weak, and much stoicism to resist the wounding and insulting reactions from those who have felt threatened by the journal’s strong endorsement of human rights and non–communal values.

Socrates said, "Societies are not made of sticks and stones, but of people whose individual characters, by turning the scale one way or another, determine the direction of the whole." Teesta and Javed are just such individual characters, who may not have imagined, when they started their modest tabloid 10 years ago, that they would represent to a large national audience not only a voice of dissent, but a voice of sanity, trust and courage.

May they continue to push us (in the words of Auden in "the Shield of Achilles") to:

"a world where promises are kept;
And one could weep because another wept."

(Cyrus Guzder is CMD, AFL Private Ltd.).


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