WHEN FAITH SENSITISES UNDULY AND THE MASSES FOLLOW SUIT

WHEN FAITH SENSITISES UNDULY AND THE MASSES FOLLOW SUIT 

Hindu Gods and Goddesses are ridiculed every day. Do we react this way, vandalising property, attacking police personnel, looting, setting things on fire, issuing death threats, hanging effigy from overhead wire, and all this with intellectuals of our community either remaining silent or tacitly supporting all this mayhem while denouncing statement of truth made in the heat of the moment by one?

But it all changes when it is the other way round. Pandemonium orchestrated to destabilise a functioning democracy goes on with unmitigated fury for days before pretence takes over by way of playing the victim card.

How long will this go on? It is not just a national phenomenon. It is a worldwide happening, a dreadful disease that periodically shoots up its symptoms causing one to wonder as to how asymmetric the modernisation of the mind of man has been in the world.

But it is not merely a matter of modernisation. The Hindus have for millenia been open to dialogue, disputation and debates over philosophical principles, never recoursing to settling things by the sword, so to say. Thus, it is the West that has seen modernity accepting and even encouraging criticism of religion and every article of faith which the Middle East has yet not come up to.

The vast mass of Indian Muslims are perverts to Islam from Hinduism and have forgotten their roots. They have not only forgotten but are brainwashed systematically into such amnesia by motivated clerics who in a queer historical development have become the guardians of the faith quite opposed to Qur'anic Islam. From generation to generation the doctrine in selective emphasis is passed on to pupils and the people at homes, mosques and madrassas which make them prone to unthinking behaviour when it comes to dealing with the core concepts of the faith, either in absorption or in defence against perceived adversarial aggression. The inviolability of doctrinaire Islam and its supposed perfection and superiority over all other religions which must be subjugated and destroyed in final analysis make Muslims seeth with uncontrollable passion on behalf of their faith, the emotion playing havoc in the vital sheath (pranamaya kosh) and inducing them unto unrestrained violence whenever they seem to receive the slightest provocation from a deemed hostile environment. This is the classic case of the conditioned brain responding to environmental challenges with programmed perversity.

If a faith justifies its inviolability on the basis of divine articulation and includes commandments of extermination of non-believers of its doctrine or offenders of its founder, then we are treading dangerous terrain with nearly two billions practising it in an overlapping world of multiple cultures. If the mass of believers are daily indoctrinated with exclusive violent tenets, we have a problem at hand. And it shows up every other day. Its latest instance we are witnessing now throughout India. The Moplah Genocide (1922), the Great Calcutta Killing (1946), the Noakhali Genocide (1946), Partition (1947), the Kasmiri Pandit Genocide and Exodus (1990) and, now, the Prophet Outrage Riots (2022) are but a few of the organised acts of aggression by Islamists that may off-hand be cited.

This is a serial happening because an effect is simply the outcome of a cause. The cause being constant, the effect is bound to perpetuate as well. Unless the doctrine be purged of its violent content -- which it cannot be -- and prevented from proliferating among the people, its pernicious effect will be periodically perceived. And this is the latest instance. Which is why madrassas and mosques ought to be monitored by governmental agencies, their transactions kept under surveillance and proselytising outlawed. That is the safe road ahead.

Written by Sugata Bose 

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