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RELIGIOUS extremism, particularly the militant kind, is akin to the Hindu demon Raktabeej. He had a divine boon whereby each drop of his blood that fell on the ground would create another Raktabeej even as goddess Durga moved to slay him. Every falling drop sowed one more Raktabeej.
And it took Durga some skill and effort to get even with her quarry. She had to feverishly lick clean each drop of his blood before it fell on the ground, which otherwise threatened to give life to another demon. That’s how Durga got a blood-caked red tongue in her avatar as Kali. Is there a workable human strategy that could succeed to check or eliminate religious variants of Raktabeej? Can we really defeat the demons militarily?
Many who held his victim Salmaan Taseer in high esteem will welcome Monday’s hanging of Mumtaz Qadri. Taseer’s liberal friends would find themselves in a moral quandary though, for some of them oppose the death penalty as inhuman. On the other hand, they may not be offering a sound strategy to deal with the enormity of the problem that Qadri embodied or of which he was a bit part.
What do we do about the lawyers, the so-called protectors of justice, who showered the murderer with rose petals and how should we approach the odd judge that harboured a soft corner for the killer’s worldview? Can we hope to weed out the essential Qadri-Taseer conflict from its roots? If there is a workable way it has to be spelt out.
From the Bible Belt in America to the cow belt in India, religiously driven atavism is routinely whipped up.
Not unlike Indira Gandhi, who waded into a fraught religious strife and got killed by men whose charge it was to protect her, Taseer was shot by his own bodyguard for a perceived religious offence, in his case for sympathising with victims of Pakistan’s anachronistic blasphemy laws.
The West suffered from a similar disease for centuries — from the lynching of Joan of Arc to the incarceration of Galileo. Now it seems that very region of the planet is keen to clone a Raktabeej in other religions, which is ironical, after they eradicated him from their own shores. They financed and armed the Mujahideen. They cut deals with the Afghan Taliban. And now they are sanctimoniously supporting different shades of extremists in the Middle East. Qadri was a pawn in a larger game.
In the global unleashing of such demons, powerful nations have sown countless shades of them in distant parts of the world not without a reason. The mighty ones have found in faith a decoy to gain a leg over their opponents in a shared hunt for the world’s shrinking resources. Who cares if in the process they set off parochial discord as the main trick?
From the Bible Belt in America to the cow belt in India, religiously driven atavism is routinely whipped into froth to capture votes and target people by ‘othering’ the weaker ones in the lot. Democracies are now finding it easier to split people into spurious and mutually hostile corners.
India presents an example of the nexus between the spread of zealotry through the unabated use of mob violence. From 1984 in Delhi, 1992 in Ayodhya and Mumbai to 2002 in Gujarat, religious majoritarianism has consolidated. If a group of US Congressmen objects the government offers a familiar explanation. These were stray incidents and not a pattern, it tells foreign governments. That’s a falsehood, and the world knows it. Lynch mobs have hardly had respite since the arrival of the current government in India.
There are many in Pakistan who believe that their army chief is doing what the doctor ordered to get rid of the Mumtaz Qadri syndrome from society, hopefully for good. Is such a solution possible? Can we stop the drops of blood growing more and more clones of the menace?
Let us pose the question another way. How was it that the Bamiyan Buddhas were safely ensconced in Afghanistan for centuries until a military operation to hunt down the Taliban was set into motion? Afghanistan has been spiritually Muslim for as long as one can remember, but it had women in Western dress going to university and college. Foreigners from Europe, the Americas and Asia would converge there, not infrequently to roll a harmless joint.
All was going smoothly before president Carter’s national security adviser eyed his chance of turning the poor country into Moscow’s Vietnam. Is Qadri not a by-product of the big game being played out from foreign shores? He was not a lone wolf as you can tell from the protests his execution launched.
How then shall we deal with the lawyers who showered rose petals on Mumtaz Qadri in Pakistan’s court precincts? How were the black-robed gentlemen different from their Indian colleagues? Rose petals were showered there too after a mob of black-robed protectors of justice kicked and slapped journalists and teachers who accompanied student leader Kanhaiya Kumar on his bail hearing.
True, for every Asma Jehangir in Pakistan there is a Prashant Bhushan in India but they are struggling to preserve the slipping fair name of their tribe. After all, what Akbar Ilahabadi probably said in jest may be coming true in a mutated reference to new worshippers of Raktabeej.
Paida hua vakeel to shaitaan ne kaha/ Lo aaj hum bhi sahib e aulaad ho gae. (When the lawyer was born, as the story goes/ The devil became a father and mocked his pious foes.
American writer Harper Lee died the other day decades after creating the gritty, upright lawyer named Atticus Finch. His resistance in a racially riven young United States suggested that Akbar Ilahabadi may have overstated his case. How then shall we explain the recent events in South Asia that give cause for worry? And what can any poor army do about it?
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, March 1st, 2016
