Becoming irrelevant?

“A friend once told me that what she fears most about growing old is becoming irrelevant, turning into a nostalgic old woman who cannot understand the world around her, or contribute much to it”, writes Yuval Noah Harari in Homo Deus, A Brief History of Tomorrow (p57). Harari says this in the context of the massive changes that are expected in the twenty-first century and beyond. He believes a mix of technological progress and human ambition will lead to a situation when humans will turn into gods, like the ones in Hindu and Greek mythology. After this evolutionary break-through, new humans will have enormous powers in their long, death-defying lives.

When that happens, the human mind will work in ways that we can scarcely imagine. And if any one of us lived up to that time, she would invariably face the day of reckoning feared by Harari’s friend. She won’t “understand” the new world.

In a different context and for a completely different set of reasons, isn’t an incomprehensible time already upon us? As I grow old, I cannot understand my country. I feel I'm becoming irrelevant. And yes, I am nostalgic about the highly imperfect world I lived in in my childhood and youth. To explain why I say so, let us check a few facts that were unthinkable 10 years ago, but which are “normal” now.

1. Innocent Muslims can be lynched time and again on some pretext or other, with practically no action from governments to rein in the killers? Policemen wouldn’t take lynch victims to hospital to ensure their death if necessary? Such attacks would become a template to terrorise Muslims?
2. Hatred against Muslims and Christians will be openly peddled to bring out the atavistic, caveman fear that lies dormant possibly in every human being towards the “other”? In due course, the fear will spread and the population will be divided along communal lines?
3. Over time, this fear would take the shape of a solid, rock-like support for the ruling party, to the exclusion of the minorities and the people who don’t believe in the ruling party’s ideology?
4. In a strange exercise called preparing a National Register of Citizens (NRC), lakhs of people could be branded as foreigners, sent to detention camps located in overcrowded jails, and asked to prove their citizenship? (This is contrary to the protection that even the worst criminal enjoys. The police have to prove a murderer’s guilt. But if the administration chooses to call you a foreigner, YOU HAVE TO PROVE THAT YOU ARE NOT. Activist Harsh Mander says, “I have seen hundreds of cases in which a small difference in the English spelling of a Bengali name, or a small variation in age is enough for the NRC authorities and foreigners’ tribunals to sound the death-knell of “foreignness”.”)
5. An election could be fought and won with complete disregard to the real problems, like the state of the economy, unemployment, farmers’ distress, etc.?
6. When Muslim members of a new parliament take oath, or when opposition parliamentarians speak, they are heckled by chants of “Jai Sri Ram” and “Jai Hanuman”?

What is infinitely worse, a large number of normal, decent Indians not only feel all these are fine, they believe these are in some way necessary to protect the interests of the Hindu majority.

If you argue with them, in all probability they will throw at you – not their own arguments, but – long texts prepared by the ruling party’s “Ministry of Truth”, texts that put facts on their head. As you would know, the Hindutwa Brigade is desperate to “prove” that Aryans were the original inhabitants of India, something that has no historical or linguistic evidence.

Another example: A message has been doing the rounds that entire West Bengal, including Kolkata, would have gone to East Pakistan during Partition, and Congress had agreed to the formula. The catastrophe was prevented by Dr. SP Mukherjee singlehandedly. The fact is that there was indeed a proposal to create an independent state of Bengal, which was supported by a few Congress leaders from Bengal. But the national Congress leadership including Nehru and Patel opposed the move and preferred partition of Bengal. Mukherjee was irrelevant in West Bengal during his lifetime.

Falsehood has been cornering truth. A noxious cloud is hanging in our sky. I do not understand the world around me, I know that I am becoming irrelevant, but I refuse to give in. The challenge is to remain sane and to restore sanity at a national level. The task is enormous. Every little speck of contribution should count.

Thursday, 27 June 2019