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Passion Ploy?

So let's talk about passion. On December 7 1992, 7 years ago as I write this, I did something I have always regretted. A friend related to me that the previous evening, her neighbours had pulled out a bottle of champagne and celebrated. The celebration, of course, was over the demolition of the Babri Masjid that day.

I was already sunk in depression and pessimism when I heard from my friend. Listening to this tale of champagne just incensed me. Without telling her, I looked up her neighbours' number, called and said: You are the traitors in this country. From what I hear, they were terrified for days. I know my friend, to whom I later confessed, has never quite forgiven me, even though she was as revulsed by the champagne celebration as I was.

In the years since, as the divisions have only grown sharper, as we have lived through so many other depressing things that were let loose that December 6th, as I write and try to think clearly about and understand these issues, I return often to that little episode. I think: what could have possessed me to so frighten people I didn't even know? To make such a sweeping, dangerous, remark so easily? Today, I am critical of those who, without a thought, pass judgement on others' patriotism or lack of it. But what drove me to do just the same 7 years ago?

Was it passion? I like passion, but the weird thing is, I myself squirm at explaining it away like that. Of course I felt passion that day: from a profound sadness to a trembling anger, with every shade in between. But would it be OK if I went to my friend, or to her neighbour, and said: "You'll have to forgive that reprehensible call I made, for you see I was full of passion when I made it"? It would not, and that is why I squirm.

Passion is good. We could all use more of it. But when it becomes an excuse for crimes and criminals, that's when it's no good any more.

I'll return to that. But first, let's get one thing out of the way. It is a fool who would deny that there are people, ordinary people, many people, who felt deeply hurt by the existence of the Babri Masjid. Certainly despicable politicians played on that hurt, certainly there were those they egged on into destruction: but what brought that mosque down was more than just simple egging on. It is silly to pretend that hurt did not exist.

But here's the interesting part. To pretend that "secularists" -- if we use that term to mean those who were offended by the destruction of the Babri Masjid -- to pretend that such people deny Hindu hurt over that Masjid is exactly as silly. Because such pretence, coupled with the outrage over this supposed denial, misses the real points the secularists are making.

So when Varsha Bhosle tells us that to her, "the historicity of gods is *not* the issue -- what remains in collective Hindu consciousness, is", I agree, and I am glad to hear it. Because I trust, then, that she will understand this: to secularists, the destruction of the mosque is *not* the issue -- the country's priorities are.

That was what was so fundamentally repulsive about the entire orchestrated campaign to bring down the Babri Masjid. In 1992, half the country was illiterate. Hundreds of millions lived in grinding poverty. 70 per cent of Indians -- close to 600 million people, more than the USA and Europe combined -- could not count on something as simple as sanitation. (In passing, let's note that not much has changed since 1992, either). In such a place, in such a time, a party chose to ride to power on a chariot, on the rubble of a deliberately destroyed mosque. This was more than offensive, it was obscene.

And while I can be dismissed as just another frothing secularist for saying so, there are others who felt similarly who cannot be dismissed that way. For example, there is the Pardhi activist from Latur District in Maharashtra. There is the low-caste man from a village near Varanasi who teaches Hindi at a Bombay college and lives in a filthy chawl in the city. I met them within days of each other about a year ago, and was astonished to hear them use nearly the same words about the Babri Masjid: "They collected bricks and money from all over the world to destroy that mosque and build a temple," they said. "But would they have done the same to build houses for the poor, for the lower castes?"

Indeed, "would they?" Has anyone ever ridden a chariot to drum up passions about what is certainly the greatest cause of Hindu misery, greater even than a dilapidated mosque: poverty? Besides, if we must be sensitive to Hindu hurt in the matter of that mosque, must we not also be sensitive to the hurt felt by people like this Pardhi and this teacher -- for what it's worth, devout Hindus both: that their lives are less important than a mosque?

Does raising such issues qualify as "trivialising Hindu feelings" over the mosque? Or try this related question: does ignoring the plight of Hindus who live so miserably qualify as trivialising their Hindu feelings? Judging from what the Pardhi and the teacher said, it certainly does. So should they not get passionate in turn, perhaps act on those passions in "unpredictable" ways, perhaps cause "dismay, fear, horror and panic"? As it happens, there is at least one lady who has done just that. She justifies her famous murders of high-caste landlords and the like in just the same terms you find Varsha B using: centuries of oppression, waiting and waiting for some justice, the turmoil within that explodes, so on and so forth.

Why is it, then, that Phoolan Devi is the reviled figure she is, most of all by Hindutva-philes? Passion driven by hurt justifies the Babri Masjid disgrace, even "charred evangelists." But it must be despised when felt by Phoolan Devi? Something here stinks.

So where does all this wrangling take us? Back to passion, I imagine. The problem with Phoolan Devi is that she murdered people. Period. We are, or so we would like to think, a society in which murder must be punished. Not rewarded with a MP-ship. This applies regardless of Phoolan's undoubtedly real passions. Which is what I meant, several paragraphs earlier, when I wrote that passion is no good when "it becomes an excuse for crimes and criminals."

That's why I want you to consider the ever-lengthening list of shame we are asked to live with because "there comes a time" when all this hurt "explodes."

There was the Babri Masjid. There was the rioting afterwards that killed thousands of Indians. A sawdust supremo comes to exert power by remote control because he poses as a protector of Hindus, a pose that blinds us to his innumerable excesses and violations of our laws. Priests are burned to death in Orissa, one with two of his children. Bombs go off in Bombay, supposedly fueled by Muslim hurt over the riots (so is Muslim hurt OK?). A rioter becomes my MP twice over, running for election as yet one more protector of Hindus.

With every election, more criminals become law-makers, because many of them have learned the lesson well: feeding off that Hindu hurt is a surefire ticket to victory. Nuns are raped in MP. A report on those deadly riots in Bombay is flung out by labelling it "anti-Hindu", and this egregious lie is simply lapped up. We have arrived at a point where the head of the VHP can announce that some Indians have "extra-territorial loyalties" by virtue of being Muslim or Christian, and this is lapped up too.

Do we live in a world where all this is acceptable only because it is driven by passion? Or centuries of "turmoil within" felt by some people?

Well, I reject that idea. Whether I stand apart or not, I don't know and don't really care. I reject that idea as sick and nauseous. After all, this is my world, my country, too. I have a stake in it that's just as firm and unshakeable as any Hindutva-phile. If they have dreams, so do I. So do a lot of us. We're not about to let go of our dreams. We will fight for them just as passionately as anyone else.

Now let's talk about passion.

Dilip D'Souza