In a larger framework, as historians like Eric Hobsbawm have never tired of saying, the 20th and now the 21st century have demonstrated themselves as among the most violent periods in human history. We have had two world wars, there is a war in our own continent in Iraq and Afghanistan swallowing many lives. Not to mention the Holocaust, apartheid, the Palestinian tragedy and other instances of social violence closer home. In each of these instances, meeting victims, those who escaped by the skin of their teeth and those who were witnesses to the violence or were brought up on stories of what befell their forefathers, it is the same story of seeking “justice” and, mostly, a bitterness that is hard to let go of. The tragedies that men and women go through seem to get a new lease of life as they mould the thinking of survivors. The century gone by has been generous in handing out causes to virtually all of us, who then think we have reason to harbour grievances, and our own personal and very dark shadows.

There are, as a consequence, groups whose political mobilisation is all about nursing shadows and making them grow longer. Whether it is about “injury” to Hindu pride at temples smashed hundreds of years ago, “alienation” that some Muslims groups trumpet, or of “purification” as a desperate leader invokes soap ads to ensure that not a single Dalit family dares look out of its burrow for alternative ways of seeing.

... contd.