Pulwama Attack and an Angry Nation
When
was the last time we were so angry as a nation? The anger is raw, palpable and visceral
ready to burst out.
We
were hardly angry after the nineteen eighty four riots. We were not very angry either
after the Gujarat riots. We as a nation were not angry after the terrorist
attack on Parliament or in Mumbai but looked tense and worried. We were angry
after the Nirbhaya case but it was limited to students. But today I see and
read an anger that I have never witnessed before in Indians. And I see that in everyone,
in every age group, from every strata of society.
A
Professor of history wants to pick up a gun and go to the border to kill the
bastards as he calls them instead of picking up his pen and says he can’t
concentrate. A man writes saying he is willing to eat half a meal but wants to go
and fight at the border and kill atleast one enemy. My taxi driver told me while
going home that he almost caused an accident when he heard it on the radio. He
said he wants to contribute towards the martyr fund and asked me how to do it.
In
the 1971 war, in the Kargil war we were detached and indifferent towards our
soldiers. We discussed the war but more in technical and analytical terms and not
like a personal loss. Not anymore. This time we are not. The Nation has changed.
There
is an emerging awareness of who we are as a Nation and that someone is trying
to destroy us. It is as if by murdering 42 soldiers, the suicide bomber tried
to kill us as a Nation. This feeling to me was absent, not seen before. It is as
if the Pulwama attack is not just a murder of our soldiers but an affront on our
nationality and who we are. It is a moment where we have begun to identify with
the martyrdom of our soldiers like never before. Is this also our break from
the concept of ‘ahimsa’ and ‘non-violence’ drilled into us as the identity of
our Nation?
How
deep is this rage? It seems as if it is under a lid ready to burst forth any
moment and cannot be contained any longer. This is the anger and of the stuff
of which revolutions are created. So are we heading towards one? I believe we
are and it might stare at us sooner than later in the face in the coming times.
I
sat and analyzed hundreds of responses that came from all over the globe about
the Pulwama attack. The most common response almost three fourth, is of renunciation,
the desire to leave everything and immerse oneself in a movement by taking up
arms. Many Indians today want to leave their comfort zones, the safety of their
homes and do something for the Nation, for the glory of their civilization. I
pray we don’t lose it this time.
There
is another feeling that I notice is rising. Many people are saying that the
partition was a betrayal on Hindus and there is a need for a closure for the unfinished
task. That it still continues in the dreams of those who did a vivisection of India
to do it once again and must be stopped. At the same time there is a dream for
building a new India that was lost and is not based on Gandhian concepts but
moving away from it.
There
is a desire for the annihilation of Pakistan and an awareness that is it is a nation
with whom we cannot live in peace, now or ever. That it was a part of us, snatched
and created from us through betrayal and which is now trying to devour the very
source from which it was carved out.
I
was talking about some of the responses at my dinner table. My mother, a woman of
almost ninety years, herself an acute observer slowly said on listening to me
that the last time she saw Indians talk in that language and anything close to this
emotion was during the INA trial in Delhi.
“Not
even during independence?” I asked.
“No,”
she said vehemently and added, “perhaps it was the realization that it was
blood that was giving them independence, that it was the price of freedom and
had to be somewhere not lost from memory.”
“Did
you not see it during 15th August 1947?” I asked.
“No,
very little of that. Maybe that feeling had died by then,” she added and said, “it
was replaced again by a passivity.”
So,
as we realize once again it is blood and renunciation that keeps the flame of
freedom alive for a Nation, should we not see that this flame doesn’t get doused
one more time?
A
note on the video of the ‘suicide bomber’.
He
is not a confused soul as evident from a well articulated and thought out speech
but has a determination, clarity and indoctrination that is frightening. From
his language it seems there are now many like him and who represent the face of
the new terrorist on our soil telling us that the movement has now entered a
new phase, marked by young men ready to blow themselves up for the sake of eternal
heaven surrounded with seventy two virgins. To me this is also the most dangerous
phase of this movement, perhaps the last one depending on who wins. It can only
be crushed through a ruthless political will and not ambivalence, shown by
countries like Israel, Russia and USA realizing it is either us or them who survive
in this war, not both.
When
the protagonist, Aditya, of my book ‘The Infidel Next Door’ is asked to come
back and rebuild his temple a second time after the carnage of 1990, he says he
can’t because he realizes his biggest enemy is his passivity, a passivity characterizing
many of us for not realizing that it is blood that is the price of freedom with
dignity when one lives surrounded by wolves. As Aditya discovers a rage within
him when his temple is destroyed, it forever changes his belief that Hinduism can
coexist with Islam in Kashmir.
Like
him today, there is the new Indian who is trying to emerge from his shell and whose
beliefs are rudely shaken. I pray it changes him this time forever.
Rajat
Mitra
Author
of ‘The Infidel Next Door’
