By Namrata Chaturvedi for TwoCircles.net
A man was killed and his family tortured in a village in Uttar Pradesh last week. In a news report, the dead man’s aged mother was recounting how the mob molested her and beat her. She was pointing to her sagging breasts and wailing. There may have been a personal vendetta behind this barbarity. There have been local reasons, the building up to the local elections and so on. Maybe Mohammad Akhlaq was hated by many. These possibilities notwithstanding, the fact that the catalyst to the gruesome violence was the rhetoric of beef eating and ‘otherness’ that Hindutva is fomenting cannot be overlooked. This incident has implications for exposing the insurmountable gap that has emerged between what one is made to believe in and the source of one’s theology.
In Valmiki’s Ramayana, in the ‘kishkindha kanda’, Ram argues for his right to kill Bali for he is a Kshatriya, a ruler and most importantly, a human (as against Bali being merely a Vanara). Ram privileges human species over others and justifies the killing of animals for their meat. When the theology of Ram and its selective interpretation and dissemination are upheld as the source of justifying violence, it is hardly surprising that such incidents should happen. There are many positive aspects to Ram’s story too, but it is a story, not theology. The moment one misinterprets a fictional story for theology and begins to derive the meaning of one’s acts from it, this misinterpretation is unavoidable.
The four goals of life as laid out in the Upanishads-dharma, artha, kama, moksha do not justify such violence. The idea of dharma is interpreted by Badrinath Chaturvedi as one of balance. When there is balance between one’s self in its relationship with itself and with others, dharma prevails.
The dharma of a Hindu should be in achieving inner balance, something that is possible only through ‘ahimsa’. In one’s relationship with others, one has to be careful to not disturb the balance of the cosmos by engaging in greed, lust, violence or any other excess. The terms ‘tyag’, ‘tapasya’, ‘moksha’ and many others are used loosely by half-baked and extremely dangerous individuals and passed on to similar half-baked and excitable individuals.
A BJP representative has recently said that the misunderstanding in such an incident led to exciting children-like young men. That is the issue. Why are the young men so excitable? It is because of ignorance that one begins to excitedly absorb any idea, and it is because of the same ignorance that one jumps to action. The young man does not know what his gods have been teaching him, he does not know the spiritual consequences of his actions. This is the purpose of any theology- to guide you in your actions by clarifying your beliefs about the world. It is not a muddled mumbo jumbo of some technical terms, some fantasy stories and some Sanskrit flavouring. And anyone who professes to do this is innocent till you start applying your own brains.
How does a man bring himself to inflicting such violence on fellow human beings? There is surely an internalized conviction that the ‘other’ people are not humans like him. Since the nineteenth century, Hindutva apologists have been busy criticizing Muslims and Christians for stepping up to their own community members only, for considering all nonbelievers as less deserving of their respect and love. These muddled thinkers are trying to change the very nature of Hinduism by making it institutionalized like the Judo-Christian religions. The theology in Islam or Christianity insists on belief in a particular manifestation and representation of god and holds one’s dharma around the community of believers.
In Hindu philosophy, there is no space for the question of believing or community, rather there is a vibrant tradition of debate and argument. The Hindu, unmindful of this tradition, is busy whining that he doesn’t have a community of mosque or church goers and in this whining he finds his excuse for inaction. While you are complaining of a central scripture or a unifying institution, the average Muslim is extending his charity to his fellow believers. That is his theology and he is acting in its principle. Is the Hindu acting on the principle of his own theology? If you are fascinated by the idea of a singular god and an institutionalized religion, why don’t you start following such a theology? There is no point in trying to change the texture of your religion to make it suit a shape that fascinates you. A Christian may extend her charity to her fellow believers, but what about you? Who are you extending your charity to?
This reactionary rhetoric is an excuse to escape from the moral demands of one’s own religion. The theological basis for Hindu philosophy is not the protection of the cow. It is a brilliant story concocted to condone lack of morality, something that is a big failure of Hinduism as we find it now. The theologies of Islam or Christianity make it a moral imperative for the believers to extend charity and to show compassion. It is an unnecessary argument who the compassion is extended to. If you think you are capable of extending it to all of humanity, unlike ‘them’, do so by all means. When there is no system of discriminating between those who believe and those who don’t, is it right to keep waiting for such a system to emerge overnight following which you would start thinking about the recipients of your compassion? And in the meanwhile, you can keep identifying those who think differently from you and mourn your lack of such systems by shaming humanity.
This is an attempt to understand the morbid psyche of such criminals like the ones who killed Mohammad Akhlaq in the name of the cow two days ago. When the loudspeaker announced that this family has stored beef in their house, the Hindu excitable young man was outraged. He was angry that there is a man who thinks about the cow in a way that is different from his. In his free time, he jumps in the mob and secure in the comfort of numbers, he molests an old woman, maims a young man. If he believes that this a-dharma is justifiable in any bizarre way through a skewed version of his theology, he should be attacked by the so called religious heads. He is failing his gods.
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Namrata Chaturvedi teaches in the Department of English, Zakir Husain Delhi College. Her area of research is comparative aesthetics and theology.