Dictum & Diaspora: Are you going to fiddle while India burns?

Some might say there were reasons for it: revenge, hate or even caste hate, anger, lust or above all, the animal instinct, and many others. At some point, though, excuses no longer wash, the explanations no longer explain, the purported reasons no longer stack up. Assigning blame is no longer sufficient. The avalanche of violence, hate and the sheer brutality of Indian against Indian is far beyond what the idea of India can withstand.

While India burns, the politicians, the rulers, and the opposition alike, go on in their merry ways without skipping a beat. They worry about their grip on power. India worries about whether they have a grip on its reality.

The opposition worries about navigating through legal and political mine fields to wrest power again while people worry whether there will be an India left to call home; the kind of India the framers of the constitution and the freedom fighters imagined there should be. India seems to be sliding into anarchy, slipping away, from civility into barbarity.

Bheem Tank was was alive when he was found, limbs chopped at a farm house in Abohar. He died on the way to the hospital.  Express Photo by Gurmeet Singh

If it was one murder or rape or as many as there usually are based on crime rate and the population – one may say statistically there is nothing to worry about. But what is happening in India is beyond statistics. It is beyond proportionality. Indians who think and reflect upon the truth of what India is experiencing are shaken by it; they are either moved to do something about it or are numbed in response to the need for sheer survival in the dog eat dog world of Indian polity and economy.

India will survive, you say. It has survived through the ages, you argue. India is nothing if not resilient, you reason. And all that happens to be true. But the soul of India asks what are you going to do about the barbarism and the butchery happening in the country? Are you going to be part of the millions of battles being waged in the country for the India of the future? Or are you going to fiddle while India burns?