The wrong direction
by, Naseer Ahmed
I weep to the bits but she doesn’t care
She has made up her mind to love the evil
Saadi Shirazi
A nation mesmerised by an evil ideology designed to hurt and harm its minorities does not pay heed to the cries for reason and conscience. The factors like greed, fear, opportunity, fame and desire become too overpowering to make people reflect upon the nature and consequences of their policies.
Besides, the approval of applauding crowds, the noisy pleasure of megaphones, the maddening speeches, the sense of participating in a collective grandeur, the joy of losing an irritating self in a comfortable lap of something bigger and greater than all selves disappear the critical faculties from the horizons of existence. It is tough to expect a treatise on logic from brawling multitude. Similarly, it is quite difficult for a crowd high on an evil ideology to see the direction their ideology is taking them to.
If somehow some people retain a sense of perspective, the fear of being all alone in the world leads them to a world of excuses and justification. Sometimes, they inflate and magnify the crimes committed by the individuals from the minorities in order to feel good about their heartlessness. The minorities get what they deserve line of thinking.
The minorities exploited our good natures. They had these nefarious designs about subjugating us perpetually. They boil and eat our young ones. They raped our women. They robbed us of our money and honour. The ideologues drum up so many accusations on these lines in order to avoid the responsibilities of reason and conscience.
The next stage is denial of the common human bond. Why should we feel sorry for them? They are not human being like us. This leads to seeing the ghost and monsters of granny stories in the minority people. This distortion of their faces and figures cause a kind of disconnect in order to exile the reason and conscience from the mental world.
The ideologues provide these distortions on the daily basis through media but when indoctrinated, the common people do not really any help from media. They use their own imagination to distort the humanity of the minorities.
Some people go philosophical about the oppression they inflict upon their minorities.They converse in the terms of divine, historical, social, political, primordial or natural destiny which has condemned the minorities to an eternal agony.
Like they say, where there is will there is a way. The will to evil finds all these justifications quite easily because these justifications do not have to be true.Otherwise; it is not tough to find the untruth in these justifications.
However, when Lal Kunwar (a beloved of a Mughal emperor) wants to enjoy the drowning of the innocent, her lover is more into pleasing the woman than reflecting upon the fate of the poor folks who are selected for the spectacle.
The professionals work for ideologues diligently in order to improve their careers. The lawyers mould the ruthless stupidity of the ideologues into law.
The performing artists beautify the stinking ugliness of the hatred cultivated by the ideologues. The poets compose the poems that massage the egos of the ideologues.
The administrators make it sure that the system disappears the minorities from the high streets, stadiums, arenas, theatres, parks and other public places.
At times, it seems that the professional trained into reason and conscience have been especially designed to increase the appetites of the ideologues.
In spite of all this service, it is the nature of every evil ideology to hurt and harm everybody.
When this hurt and harm becomes the reality suffered by a majority, the religious try to locate their God in the sermons of the priests, in the church bells and in the sacred paintings. They don’t find the Almighty anywhere because he has departed from their hearts.
The professionals start to worry about their professional ethics. The ones who sacrifice their careers and lives for their conscience irritate these professionals. But the courage of the honest folks becomes a kind of evidence which refuses to disappear.
The ungodly begin to sing their long forgotten hymns because the gods of ideology they worshiped proved to be an illusion. An illusion that leaves a deep seated self loathing in its wake.
History hurts a few because after reckoning they know they have brought down the nation they claimed to love too much. They talk about the wonderfulness of their theatres, their music, their paintings, their philosophy, their science and their bigger than oceans hearts before the rise of evil. The evil, they ended up loving to the bits.
One talks about the draft his grandfather prepared for the emancipation of the minorities and weeps. Other talks about the teaching school her grandmother for the minorities. That wonderfulness of the ancestors provides a painful contrast to their own black deeds. Then, they blame the tyrant who led them astray but still it is not easy to forget one’s own role and they cry more.
At times, the accountability is done in the courts and in the research books. There you meet a philosopher who denounced the lover girl to the hounds of ideology. You meet a general, proud on ethical side of his profession but he has no answers about why his unit drove the people from the minorities to the killing fields. You also meet an economist who set up a robbery system against the minorities. You meet a doctor who tortured and tormented his minority patients. You meet a bureaucrat who helped the ideologues by making the gas chambers fit for purpose on time. You meet a noble who has betrayed his best friends for greed.
Most people escape the court punishment but they cannot hide the crime. It is necessary for everybody to fight off an evil ideology when it takes off. That is the stage where it could be challenged effectively because it fails to accumulate the necessary support to make it unchallengeable. The fight against it in the later stages is a story of blood and tears.
