The One That Got Away

There’s something to be said about the way the public conscious works. As a generation, each seems to remember some events more vividly than the rest. Some memories are just plain hazy, and then there are those that disappear. Like forgetting a dream when you wake up. Or rather, remembering only parts of it in flashes and wondering where those images belong. Where, in the labyrinthine recesses of your mind, they fit.

The timeline of my political/historical consciousness, or rather the memory of it, suffers huge lapses. There are extended periods for which I have no recollection at all. This timeline goes something like this. 1962 – War with China, 1971 – War with Pakistan, 1991 – Babri Masjid, 1993 – Bombay riots, 2002 – Gujarat riots, and somewhere between the last two, there’s that faint memory of the Kargil war.

What we do remember is, more often than not, because we’ve heard them mentioned. Or they’ve been shoved in our faces by the media, as was the case especially with the riots in Gujarat post-Godhra. Because by then (2002), visual media had come to India in a big way. And what better way to get their TRPs than a human tragedy of the scale of the Gujarat riots (or shall we say genocide?) There was politics, intrigue and action – wild, vivid and brutal – and no matter which news channel you tuned in to, there they were – those images of merciless, organised violence. Once again, one community pitted against another. An action-replay of the Mumbai riots of 1993; a shadow of another such episode buried some twenty years in the past; except that this time around news channels aired every last gory detail and a nation watched in horror. (Though sometimes I wonder, and I shudder to think of it, that it wasn’t just horror that made the nation watch on. That somewhere, mingled within that horror was indifference.)

How do you forget such vivid visuals of violence? The gruesome images stay burned inside the mind for a long, long time after. And yet there’s the one that got wiped from our memories. Our collective memory. The only ones that remember are the ones that fought and lost. Fought for their dignity and right to live. Lost not only dignity, but also fathers, mothers, sons and daughters to an inflamed and single minded assault on all that was theirs – in mind and body, and in hindsight, also their souls.

The one that got away. The 1984 Sikh massacre in and around Delhi. Operation Blue Star did more than just kill innocent bystanders within the holy grounds of the Golden Temple. The ‘operation’ that started as an attempt to wipe out a bunch of terrorists in hiding ended up erasing the memory of itself and its grotesque after effects in the minds of Indians for years to come. Some hybrid, evolved version of Operation Blue Star is still functioning in our midst, and it is erasing forever from our minds the memory of the brutal, unwarranted killings of hundreds of Sikh families in and around Delhi in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination.

Of the thousands of films that have released in mainstream cinema in the twenty odd years since, Amu is probably the only movie to have thrown some light on the magnitude of the 1984 riots, or even focus on the existence of such a nightmare in the complex history of India. The film explores the politics behind the massacre while at the same time, exposing our ignorance of our own past. A past that hides as many things as it reveals. A history that is as much a narrative of things unsaid, unwritten, unrecorded, as it is of those events that are there for all to see. Histories are known to be bloody. Except that some of that blood congeals unseen, unremembered. Some stories never get told. Some never get told enough. Some stories remain only in the eyes of those that witnessed them. Some wars are remembered only by those that were directly affected, because as a nation, we Indians are forgetful. Our perception is selective, as is our recollection. And the downside of that is that some wars we just forget to remember.

The casualties of war aren’t just the number of bodies found, or the numbers gone missing. Every war, no matter how small brings with it weapons that destroy not only the lives that could have been, but also the lives left behind. War, ironically, takes the fight out of us. And we stand aside, huddled in a corner, watching our dignity and the spirit to fight, to live, get butchered with every hatchet that comes down. Wars both big and small sever lives, but that’s not all. They sever the spirit to fight from those that, by sheer chance, live to tell the tale. They make unfeeling zombies of us all.

When Lines Blur

I saw a man ask for his son's name to be inscribed on a missile. His son had died in the attack on the world trade centre. He asked for his son to be remembered on a bomb. A bomb that went on to kill hundreds, if not thousands, of other innocents.

I saw the man who dropped the first bomb on Iraq. He was smiling. He thought it wasn't everyday one got the opportunity to be the one to carry out an act of such grave importance.

I saw the men whose minds conceived and nurtured the ideas behind the wars the world is, even now, engaged in. They were all smiling. They were proud of their accomplishment. Each one of them.

Power does that. It changes how one sees the world. Like a smoke-screen. Everything seems insignificant in the face of power. Especially to those who are under the illusion of being the ones that wield it.

That is what happens when the lines between freedom and tyranny become hazy. When the lines between democracy and imperialism blur. When the difference between nightmare and reality becomes a mere shadow, and you can't tell one from the other.

At War

My country is in a constant state of war and none of us seem aware of the fact. One terrorist attack after another, we continue to be sitting ducks. There for anyone who chooses to make religious/political statements at our expense.

Wars aren't fought only at borders. There's a war going on in the myriad aspects of our lives. Some are fighting for caste, some for region, some are martyrs for religion, while others are sacrificial lambs at the altar of politics.

Bomb blasts are becoming a monthly affair. But in a country as vast as India where indifference scales newer heights everyday, a lot of people (too many, if you ask me) earn their livelihood off of some tragedy or other while countless sit and discuss it like rabid gossip mongers. The reaction to every such tragedy is local. Rarely, if ever, does it permeate into the national public conscious. Nobody cares about the why. Or about how to stop these mindless massacres. They only wonder about the who. Pinning blame is a favourite sport in my country, second only to cricket.

So what can we do? In truth, I don't know. There is no single answer to the problems that breed the kinds of violence we witness as part of the reality of 'being Indian'.

Our history is written more in blood than ink. Every portion of our nation stands united in that one grave human flaw - division. Never mind which way across the map you draw lines, you will find fueds of old superimposing themselves on newer ones, each concerning some or the other kind of division. Every war, whether big or small, is a result of division. Of "us" versus "them"

The demolition of the Babri Masjid did something that no other issue had done. It broke the spirit of a minority. It made them rebel. It was an attack not just on a place of worship. It was a premeditated attack on the psyche of one tenth the population of the country. It was a message by Hindutva fanatics. A message that said that no religion could stand in the way of Hindutva. Not Hinduism. Hindutva. The religion created by the Thackerays and Advanis of the world. A religion that approves, no... mandates, violence.

Almost forty five years after they had made the choice to stay on in India - for love and honour, for better or worse - despite the atrocities that partition had wrought, these same people were made to feel unwelcome. Again. We forced them out of the world we inhabit. We all but pushed each terrorist into becoming one. We gave them nowhere to go. We left them no one to turn to. Each one of us is responsible. Because in staying silent, we colluded in the oppression of so many. We shoved them into a corner, and left them no alternative but to fight their way out. You treat someone like an outsider long enough and that's what they'll become. Outsiders. There are a lot of things one can bring himself to doing once he is convinced of being unwanted. Taking innocent lives is just one of them.

More than fifteen years later we are still paying for Babri Masjid. And it will not stop. Unless we find a way to undo the violence perpetrated in Ayodhya, in Gujarat, in Bombay... Or simply, find in our hearts the tolerance to believe, really believe, that we can all live together. Not as Hindus, or Muslims, or Christians, or what-have-you. But just as Indians. Just as human beings.