Blind rage won’t do

WHEN Gandhiji was asked what he thought of western civilisation, he replied that he thought it would be a good idea. The leader of the western world, US President George W. Bush, tells us that his war on one man is a global war on terrorism being fought on behalf of all of us for Civilisation to prevail over Barbarism. Civilisation is now pounding to smithereens the rubble that was Afghanistan.

Barbarism, meanwhile, has fled to a cave with 300 followers - on horseback, the only means available to barbarism to escape from Civilisation. Civilisation has the technical means to pinpoint even a watch battery. So Barbarism does not wear a watch: it tells the time from a sun-dial. We have this information from the Son of Barbarism, Abdullah bin Laden. It is a remarkable response. For it shows that barbarism has simply to eschew the baubles of Civilisation for Civilisation to blunder around the ring like a punch-drunk American freestyle wrestler.

Indeed, Barbarism needs no weapons of its own, for all it has to do is turn the artefacts of Civilisation on Civilisation itself. After all, it was not crazed Arabs from the Arab countries America most hates — Iraq, Libya or Palestine — who took out the World Trade Center. It was the work of Saudis and Egyptians, citizens in excellent standing with the US who went to the best of Civilisation’s groves of academe to use American airlines on American targets under the very nose of American intelligence and security agencies who appropriate upwards of $ 200 billion a year from the US Congress to keep Barbarism at bay. Why are Afghan children paying with their lives for the derelictions of the FBI and the CIA?

And because Civilisation just does not know how to respond to a cave-man on horse-back, it has mobilised the most massive war machine known to human civilisation. From the Sea of Japan to the Gulf of Aqaba, Civilisation stands at the ready: The good ship Enterprise (last seen in the Bay of Bengal as we tried to liberate East Pakistan from Yahya-Kissinger barbarism) stationed now in the Arabian Sea shoots off its sea-borne air strength to pulverise every standing building in Afghanistan. And as there are not many buildings now left standing in Afghanistan, every cave and bunker they can find. All to take out one man. And as he is not immediately available, Civilisation is carpet-bombing a country it is allegedly saving and hammering an entire people to whose rescue it has so selflessly come. The vocabulary is spot on. This is not a massacre of innocents. Civilisation apparently views it as ‘‘collateral damage.’’

I am afraid Barbarism has won Round One. And Civilisation will lose the remaining rounds unless it comes up with a more intelligent answer than Bush has been able to provide. It is for a millennial leader of human civilisation, like India, to come up with the answers. For if we are a developing country, America is a developing civilisation. They just do not have the intellectual, moral or spiritual depth to take on the task they have appropriated for themselves.

India’s answer to barbarism should be based on Gandhi. Tragically, it is the cohorts of Gandhi’s assassins, the spokespersons of all that is worst in our civilisational heritage, who today rule this country. We have as defence minister a man let off by the courts from charges of terrorism only because the government changed and decided not to prosecute the terrorists behind the Baroda dynamite outrage. We have in our external affairs minister a true representative of a party that did not fight for our Independence - and has therefore not even once since September 11 pronounced the words non-violence or non-align- ment in that ghastly accent of his. And we have an effete prime minister who is playing out from Race Course Road the role he donned at the start of his political career when he proudly informed the district sessions judge at Gwalior on September 1, 1942, that far from fighting the colonial power in the Quit India Movement, ‘‘Maine kuchch nuksan nahin kiya.’

And on the sidelines, we have the home minister of India and the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh discovering in Bush’s war on bin Laden the tailor-made means of reviving the flagging fortunes of the BJP in the only state where it counts for something. So, equate the votaries of the Babri Masjid with the Taliban ki aulad and the Ram Mandir Abhiyan with CNN’s war on terrorism and let the BJP-RSS-Bajrang Dal Taliban do what they are best at doing - minority bashing - and, who knows, Lucknow might yet remain saffron.

So, while Jaswant Singh reminds us of the values of his favourite nation, perhaps we should be reminding his favourite nation of the values of the Father of our Nation. Those values are summed up in words which no patriotic Indian needs to have explained to him: truth, non-violence, tolerance, the celebration of diversity, and above all, secularism. There can be no ‘War on Global Terrorism’ without a firm grounding in global secularism. The western world - and its saffron backers - think this is irrelevant verbiage. Therefore, western civilisation’s response to global terrorism is all about the alarums and trumpets of war. What the world should be doing is what Gandhi always indicated as the first line of defence; introspection, find out what is wrong in yourself and correct yourself as the most effective way of correcting the other. There is no introspection in the West, no reflection on the many, many evil things they have done which have brought this evil upon them.

There is only blind rage and a conviction that the gadgets of war which they have perfected will gift them the painless technological solutions they seek to human problems. It was a response which dramatically failed in Vietnam. It has taken America a quarter century to recover from that licking. But like the Bourbon kings they seem not to have learned anything, nor forgotten anything. So the same technological answer is being sought to bin Laden in the elevating company of Pervez Musharraf.

Someone should loan Bush a library copy of the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi’s two-volume publication, Non-violence in Peace and War
by one Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

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