Modi has done a great service to Hinduism by speaking against gau rakshaks
A Swiss lady, who wanted to terminate her pregnancy from an illicit relationship, called on Dr Paul Tournier, a psychiatrist-turned counsellor. She kept referring, Tournier recalls, to the foetus in her womb as "the thing", as though that precious life was no more than a certain mass of cells and tissues.
"If this child were to be born to you," Tournier asked her, “what name would you give it?”
The question had a stunning impact on her. She sat speechless for a long moment.
"Doctor," she said, "I want to have this baby."
All that Tournier had to do to bring about a complete change of heart in this woman was to bring her to the point of naming the baby. By doing so, he humanised the foetus, which became, all of a sudden, a person and ceased to be just a mass of tissues.
He reversed the lady’s logic. She projected the foetus in non-specific impersonality to be able to get rid of it, without any pang of conscience.
This brings us to the politics of naming.
Dalits are branded as much by their names as by their colour or the despised low trades they pursue. Even now, in many parts of our country, Dalits are not free to take any name they please.
In my childhood days, Dalits had to choose their names not only from a presumably a vulgar set, but also to be further degraded by the addition of pejorative suffixes to their already corrupted names.
Eli, would be the lower caste version of the Syrian Christian (read, upper caste) Eliamma. That’s not all. Eli used to be called Elikalli. Kalli is, in Malayalam, a female thief. Upper caste Christian Eliamma would call low caste Eli, Elikalli (or, Eli, the thief) even if Eli is more honest than her. She would, otherwise, be referred as pulakalli or pulaya woman thief. Kerala is today mercifully exorcised of the demon of Dalit degradation.
All this passed through my mind, like in a flashback, as I watched, in utter horror, the four Dalit youths in Una, stripped waist upwards, being beaten and brutalised in full public view.
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| Were the gau rakshaks free to, or capable of, seeing their Dalit victims as human beings? |
I wondered, did the gau rakshaks I saw have names? Did they, at the time of indulging in this inhuman act, act as individual human beings who were aware of their humanity?
Were they free to, or capable of, seeing their Dalit victims as human beings? Were they like the Swiss lady, who could think of her child-to-be-born as only a mass of tissues? What is the quality of their spirituality? In what sense are they Hindus?
More importantly, did any one of them know the victims by name? Or, did they see the victims only as "cattle thieves" and "cow slayers"?
The plight of the gau rakshaks struck me as a worse tragedy than that of the Dalit youths. Here is the reason for it.
Even human being needs to reveal himself. We come into this world as aliens and strangers. A new born babe is a beautiful thing, but an alien thing, nonetheless. Parents wait eagerly for the babe to grow into childhood and attain the felicity of speech and action.
Now think of a child saying or doing something significant, alone in a room. It has no value because his words or deeds are not in a social context. They reveal nothing. Human togetherness is a pre-condition for our self-revelation, much like our needing a mirror to see ourselves.
This togetherness is not a matter of merely being physically near each other or even acting in concert. In warfare, soldiers are close to each other. They also act in coordination. But their actions reveal nothing of themselves as persons. That is because they are not in a state of togetherness.
The important thing is that togetherness excludes acting in hate or in violence. A murderer and his victim are near each other at the time of the crime; but they are not together. The deed reveals nothing about the murderer as a person, except that he has committed an act of crime. But a murder is much more than a criminal deed.
Hence, it is that all spiritual traditions urge us to abjure violence. Freedom is important and meaningful for us because it is only in freedom, and togetherness born of freedom, that we reveal ourselves.
The riddle of our predicament is that we know ourselves only as we reveal ourselves to others; just as we can see ourselves only as reflected in a mirror.
Hate and violence crack that mirror of self-revelation. What is reflected in the mirror of violence is a grotesque caricature of oneself. Shakespeare and Dostoevsky (Macbeth and Raskolnikov), among others, take us to the dark abyss of the self-alienation that killing fellow human beings brings about.
The disappointing thing is that Hinduism, the spiritual home of nearly a billion people, is sought to be represented and protected by agents of crude violence. A greater insult to this spiritual tradition there cannot be. More often than not, the self-appointed defenders of a religion are a greater danger to its integrity than its external enemies.
It is not unlikely that this concern echoes through the anguished outspokenness of Modi, who in this instance has spoken both as prime minister and as one who values the greatness of his religious heritage. It might turn about that the PM has done a greater service to Hinduism by speaking up against gau rakshak gangs than the religious bigwigs of Hinduism, who sit tongue-tied, in incomprehension or indifference.
It is not certain how many cows the gau rakshaks will end up saving; but this much is certain: the way they go about saving cows seriously imperils Hinduism. It does not stand to reason that an animal is valued higher than the spiritual tradition which lends it the sanctity it has.
The PM’s point is simple and laudable. If you revere the cow, you will take care of it. Caring for the cow is a far greater spiritual act than killing Dalits, presumably on behalf of the cow.
The cow is a symbol of non-violence. Story is reported of a pig complaining to God. "This is not fair," the pig began. "I give all I have. My meat is eaten, my lard is used for cooking, even my tail is pickled. But no one has a kind word for me. They are partial to the cow. What does the cow give? Just a little milk?"
God smiled and said, "I tell you why the cow is universally liked and you, disliked. The cow gives whatever it does while it is still alive; whereas people can get something out of you only after you die."
The goodness of the cow, the story implies, is linked to life; not death.
What a monstrous contradiction, then, that the same cow is turned into an alibi for murder and mayhem!