Before a people disappear, their stories do

Not a terrorist. Not a gangster. Not a sinister neighbour, a suspicious citizen, an angry cleric, an anti-national, an infiltrator, an inconvenient exception expected to prove his patriotism before being permitted his humanity.

Just a family.

A mother worrying about dinner. A father returning tired from work. A daughter falling in love with the wrong man. A son failing an examination. A grandmother measuring rice with her hand. Children quarrelling over a bedroom. People laughing, longing, borrowing, breaking, healing. The marvellous monotony of being human.

Her question would not leave me.

Perhaps because erasure rarely begins with disappearance. It begins with distortion. Before a people are pushed out of public sympathy, they are pushed out of ordinary stories. Their many faces are replaced by one face; their million lives compressed into one menace. They cease to be neighbours and become narratives. Once that happens, cruelty no longer feels cruel. It begins to feel like caution.

I know something about being reduced before being understood.

I was a gay boy growing up in a heteronormative world. Long before I possessed the language to explain myself, others possessed the language to diminish me. I was the boy with the softness, the lisp, the walk that invited whispers. I learnt early that ridicule is not harmless. A joke can be a small jail into which a child is placed every day.

Later, in America, I was brown in a society whose default image of belonging was still overwhelmingly white. I was mistaken for Arab and made to absorb the suspicion, jokes, and casual hostility reserved for a people I was not – but whose humiliation I came to understand. At other times I was Indian, exotic, foreign, spicy, strange. I was the single man in a married world, the gay man in a straight room, the immigrant whose right to belong seemed permanently provisional.

I have been “the other” in enough rooms to recognise the architecture.

It begins with naming. Then comes mimicry. Then mockery. Then mistrust. Finally, mistreatment.

Donald Trump understands the political power of ridicule. He has used it against Latinos, Arabs, Indians, immigrants and those whose gender identities do not fit neatly inside a binary. His language does more than insult individuals. It creates an atmosphere in which entire populations become comic, counterfeit or contaminating. People are turned into punchlines before policies turn them into problems.

Humour can be holy. It can puncture pomposity and make power answerable. But ridicule directed downward is not humour. It is hierarchy having a laugh.

When a leader mocks a vulnerable people, he grants millions permission to stop imagining their pain. If the immigrant is an invader, the refugee a fraud, the transgender person an absurdity, the Muslim a menace and the brown citizen somehow permanently foreign, why extend sympathy? Why protect dignity? Why pause before punishment?

This is how language prepares the land for injustice. It does not always arrive wearing boots. Sometimes it arrives wearing a smirk.

The danger is not confined to America. Across the world, democracies old and young are being drawn into tribal theatre. Leaders – men and women alike – have discovered that governing is difficult, but grievance is easy. Hospitals take years. Hatred takes a hashtag. Education requires investment. Enemies require only invention.

So, a minority is selected. A migrant is magnified. A dissenter is declared dangerous. A journalist becomes a traitor. A university becomes a conspiracy. An artist becomes an offender. Complexity is cancelled because complexity cannot chant.

Strongmen need frightened citizens, but they also need reckless opponents.

Here, those of us who call ourselves liberal must look into an unforgiving mirror. A liberalism that refuses conversation, humiliates uncertainty, polices every imperfect word and banishes rather than persuades is not liberalism at its most enlightened. It is orthodoxy with better branding. When every mistake becomes malice, every question violence and every disagreement proof of moral depravity, we abandon the very spaciousness we claim to defend.

This does not make progressive intolerance equivalent to state persecution. Being criticised online is not the same as being imprisoned, deported or stripped of rights. Cancellation and incarceration do not carry equal consequences. We must not flatten them into false equivalence.

But one can feed the other.

The excesses of self-righteous liberalism become oxygen for authoritarian politics. The demagogue points to the shrillest voice on the opposite side and says: “See? They despise you. Only I will protect you.” Outrage recruits outrage. Contempt creates its counter-contempt. Soon democracy becomes two locked rooms, each convinced that only monsters live next door.

What, then, is an ordinary citizen supposed to do?

Remain silent?

History has shown us the terrible cost of respectable silence. The darkest chapters of the last century were not written only by fanatics. They were enabled by neighbours who lowered their curtains, professionals who protected their positions, intellectuals who found elegant reasons to wait, and decent people who decided that someone else’s danger was not yet their duty.

Evil seldom asks an entire population to become evil at once. It asks only that enough people become careful, comfortable and quiet.

And yet speaking carries a price. One may be mocked, marginalised, misunderstood, investigated, cancelled, threatened, imprisoned or made professionally inconvenient. Not every person can pay every price. Courage cannot become another privilege demanded most loudly from those with the least protection. A daily-wage worker, a single mother, a young student and a celebrated public figure do not stand before risk with equal armour.

But everyone can pay something.

The question is not whether we are brave enough to become martyrs. It is whether we are willing to become mildly uncomfortable before someone else is made completely unsafe.

Can we refuse to forward the lie?

Can we interrupt the joke that turns a community into vermin?

Can we defend a colleague when the room has decided to misunderstand her?

Can we buy the book that has been quietly banished, watch the film that restores complexity, read the journalist who asks difficult questions, and listen to the citizen whose grief does not arrive in our preferred political vocabulary?

Can we criticise our own side?

That may be the rarest courage of all. It is easy to condemn the cruelty of the opposing tribe. Character begins when we confront cruelty committed in our name. Democracy survives not when citizens are loyal to their camp, but when they are loyal to conscience even when conscience embarrasses the camp.

The Bhagavad Gita does not permit Arjuna the luxury of calling paralysis peace. Krishna asks him to see clearly and act without being consumed by hatred or reward. Duty is not noise. It is action cleansed of vanity. One need not despise another human being in order to resist what that person does.

And Faiz, with gentleness stronger than gunfire, reminds us: “Bol, ke lab azaad hain tere (Speak, for your lips are free).”

 

Speak, yes – but speak so that language does not reproduce the violence it opposes. Speak to illuminate, not incinerate. Speak firmly enough to disturb power and tenderly enough to leave a door open for another human being to change.

We also need to restore ordinary stories.

Show us the Muslim mother annoyed that her children are late. Show us the Arab accountant, the Latino schoolteacher, the brown scientist, the transgender gardener, the migrant nurse, the gay shopkeeper who is terrible at romance and excellent at remembering birthdays. Give people back their pettiness, playfulness, vanity, vulnerability and virtue.

Representation is not cosmetic. It is civic infrastructure.

A democracy is strengthened whenever a citizen encounters another not as a category but as a character. Stories train the moral imagination. They allow us to enter homes where propaganda has placed only shadows. They remind us that no community wakes each morning as an issue. People wake thirsty, hurried, hopeful, hungover, heartbroken. They look for misplaced spectacles. They pack lunches. They worry about school fees. They burn the toast.

Ordinariness is one of the first rights prejudice steals.

Perhaps that is why the woman in the reel moved me. She was not asking for saints, symbols or sanitised heroes. She was asking for the right to be unremarkable. To exist without explaining. To be visible without being made exemplary or evil.

Democracy is not preserved only in courts, constitutions and elections. It is preserved in the imagination – in whose tears we instinctively trust, whose children we picture when danger comes, whose innocence we consider possible.

Before rights are removed, recognition is removed. Before neighbours are abandoned, their stories are narrowed. Before people disappear, their humanity is edited out of the frame.

Our duty is to keep widening that frame.

To tell the stories power finds inconvenient. To defend complexity when tribes demand caricature. To speak before silence becomes safety for the cruel. To remain kind without becoming cowardly, and courageous without becoming cruel.

We may pay a price for speaking.

But history has already shown us the price of saying nothing.