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They Might Have Been Your Kids

Two open letters, last week, that asked for signatures -- one to the Chief Justice and the other to the President. Another letter came by email, to be sent on to the letters columns of several newspapers. Then there was an appeal to join a peace march and a meeting at Bombay's Hutatma Chowk on January 30th. All these and some more besides floated by in the days after the nauseating barbarity that led up to Republic Day, 1999.

I signed them. I showed up at the march. I found myself remembering a young boy who, by his death, had put a string of disastrous events into perspective for me six years ago. And I felt worried; sick to my stomach.

It is good to know that so many Indians are horrified and outraged by what has been happening in the country of late. But that is a very thin silver lining. It is also frightening, terrifying, to glimpse the depths of hatred we have plumbed. The evil that is loose in our country. My worry is thus quite selfish: when is the darkness going to envelop those I care for? How long can I pretend it will not happen to me?

That fear gets more real every day, not least because for every one of the events that shame us we hear a rationale, an explanation. We are asked to follow fingers that point accusingly overseas, or even at the victims themselves. We get these daily, whether from ministers on their post-barbarity rounds or from citizens talking on the trains. And yet, what might possibly rationalise the slaughter of children in a village in Bihar?

What is the explanation for burning two little boys to death as they slept? What manner of men think up and then commit such horrors? Even worse, what manner of men find ways to justify them? What kind of sickness is out there?

What happened in Bihar stands for possibly India's most ancient scourge: violence between castes. A gang of upper caste men massacred two dozen low caste villagers in Rukhsagar Bigha. At least one media report says that they had fully intended to kill all the dalits in the village, but that particular "task could not be accomplished." Whatever, this is just the latest stop in the roundabout of caste slaughter Bihar is mired in. The last massacre was just over a year ago, when the same gang of upper caste men shot 61 dalits in nearby Laxmanpur-Bathe.

In Bihar, they are busy bandying about the blame. I am sure nobody will actually be punished. In the end, it is convenient for all concerned -- Congress, Laloo and wife, BJP -- that things in Bihar remain unchanged. That aside, there is a more fundamental issue here: caste. As long as we keep that venerable institution flourishing, with all the oppression and poverty it brings in its smelly wake, the hatred and violence will also flourish.

That's why it is worth remembering the kids butchered in Rukhsagar Bigha. Perhaps it is their deaths that cast the light we need on that blackness. For adults have their feuds -- they attack each other often enough for one piffling reason or another. But a six-month-old baby? Teenaged girls? A three-year-old? Have we become so depraved that caste is a sentence of death for some of India's weakest citizens and that's okay? Would it be okay if it was your child? Mine?

A naive view of what happened in Bihar, you think? But look at it this way: if caste ever comes to mean less to us than it does today, we will have less killings like these. Certainly it may be a naive thing to hope for -- that caste feelings will diminish soon, or ever -- but sometimes the naive goals must be repeated. If India is to grow and last, caste must be destroyed. It's that simple. Let those dead kids, who might have been yours and mine, remind us of that.

Look at the Stains' murder in much the same way. It is a good way to find some perspective, and you'll need all that you can get. For we do have a BJP MP from Orissa, one Aira Kharavala Swain, who says Graham Stains was a "social criminal" because of his "role in mass-scale conversions." We do have the BJP president, one Kushabhau Thakre, who finds he cannot avoid making sly insinuations about Stains: "Even if he [was] doing conversions ... it should not be done illegally." There's the convenor of the Bajrang Dal, Surendra Jain, who announces that the violence that destroyed the Stains family "is a very natural reaction of society [to the activities of Christian missionaries]."

For their own not-very-obscure reasons, men like these want you to gain the impression that Stains brought his immolation on himself. It's obscene, but fine, let's accept that there were accusations against Stains that built resentment against him. What about his children? What was their crime? What breed of evil sets an eight-year-old and a ten-year-old on fire? Please think about this, because I simply cannot get it out of my mind: What kind of society is it whose "natural reaction" is to set children on fire? What must we conclude about men who would paint our society that way?

In the form it has taken today, the hatred that killed Stains and his sons may just be India's newest scourge. Yes, I will be careful, as long as the main accused remains free, to avoid blaming the Bajrang Dal and its larger Parivar for this crime. Still, it is hard, very hard, to escape thinking that the divisive hatred the BJP has ridden on for years now nurtured the climate which killed them. It is the BJP that spread the lie of a Hinduism in danger, the very lie that spurs on such outfits as the Bajrang Dal. In its wake, that lie has left thousands dead in rioting and bomb explosions, mosques and temples and churches destroyed, criminals elected to govern us, a country in torment. Now, it has set a man and his two sons on fire.

And in these 1990s, that lie has brought Hinduism this great shame: that thugs and criminals wrap themselves in the religion, claim to be its protectors. To know that shame, ask yourself, as I have been doing, about those kids. What if they had been yours? Mine? What would you have to say, then, to a theory of "natural reaction?"

It was while I was asking myself those questions that I remembered the young boy I mentioned, a boy I learned about after the riots in Bombay in 1992-93. His name was Raju, he was fourteen years old and he worked in a bakery in Dharavi. One night in January 1993, in a city aflame and gone mad, as he returned home from his job at the bakery, a gang of goons sliced him into little bits.

Now until I heard about Raju, I had been caught in all the usual, tedious, endless, arguments about the riots. But as I struggled to come to grips with the death of this boy, a certain dispiriting logic surfaced. I tried to explain that logic here once: "I remember your death. I will always remember. You showed me that the true meaning of all that rubble in Ayodhya is not some reborn national self-respect, not some righting of an ancient wrong, but your death. Your violent, bloody, futile death. There's no self-respect there. Only shame."

That's why I urge you to think about the kids: in Bombay, in Bihar, in Orissa, everywhere in India that darkness spreads. Then perhaps you too will wonder, as I cannot help doing, when the darkness will touch those you love.

Dilip D'Souza