A rootin, tootin, fresh 'n rootin

http://www.palit.com ^ | November 30, 2002 | Suman Palit

[wretchard]

A rootin, tootin, fresh 'n rootin..:

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     ...root cause..

Well, actually, Aziz Poonawallah is searching for a conspiracy, not root causes, while trying to understand the all too frequent and bloody Hindu-Muslim civil wars in India. He finds quiet absolution in a slew of precisely unbiased and precariously balanced set of reports from the B.B.. C (with a Bee and a Bee and a BeeBee..Cee.. hip hip..hooray! .. cough!)

The BBC had excellent coverage of the riots in Gujarat early this year. You can access it by searching the BBC archives. There are 12 pages of search results!

The Gujarat riots are a case of systematic state-sponsored terrorism, in my opinion:

What he should be looking for is root causes. Deep, dark, crunchy root causes. Root causes that slither through the crevices of our racial memory. Root causes from the dawn of time, when the world was young. Root causes that go on rooting, or whatever root causes do, when the last fire in the last sun in the last universe dies out in a gurgle of entropic pneumonia. Root causes, from the primal garbage heap of human shame, of missed opportunities, responsibilities unacknowledged.

And I've got just such a root cause for him, oh boy, do I ever so..! What I've got here is a teat-chewing, ball-chomping, bone-marrow-slurping, great-grand-dandy of a pregnant mother of all root causes. A root cause that spits out other root cause carcasses, between breakfast and lunch, then cleans its teeth with their cracked ribs. A root cause that puts the "Y" in jaundice. Er, anyway, observe, as I light a root-cause fire under your chilly little hearts.

• Since 1000 A.D. life for Indians would never be the same. It was the beginning of a sustained period of conquest and plunder by Muslim kings from Central Asia. Invasion itself is nothing new in the history of the subcontinent. It was a land that always drew its fair share of plunderers, adventurers and immigrants. This one was different. It was the first invading ethnic group that never successfully melded with the natives. And so it began.
• An almost unbroken line of Muslim kings begin their rule over what is mostly Hindu India, looting, plundering, and in general behaving like all other bad boys of their time. Not unusual. However, the karmic counter keeps ticking. Hate lines are scored in blood and tribute.
• Partition of the subcontinent is probably the pivotal modern event that thrust the two sides apart. Possibly for all time. The most current estimates for lives lost on both sides are around half a million. But it's not the numbers that betray the hatred. It is the fact that this was the subcontinents first, unorganized civil war ever..! There were no armies battling it out in trenches. These were people tearing each other's throats out. In neighborhoods where uprooted families fled in the night. In highways where the hungry and mad tore at each other. Half a million civilians killed each other without the benefit of modern weapons of war. Enough said..!
• Two Indo-Pak wars over Kashmir (whaddya know, Ani my boy, whaddya know). The Pakistani bogeyman is born, nurtured by opportunistic politicians planning ahead for a rainy day.
• As the seventies got underway, Eastern India got hit with the Bengali Holocaust. An upper estimate of three million Bangladeshi Hindus and some of their Muslim sympathizers killed by the Pakistani army. A lower estimate of 1.5 million. Ten million refugees. Ten freaking million. It's like a lottery in Hell. A third Indo-Pak war, a frightful year later, Bangladesh is born. Hell gets another armpit on Earth.
• These are the historians who guide the Hindu right wing in India. Call them biased, call them somewhat revisionist. The truth is their influence goes unchallenged, because even the secular elite cannot bring themselves to challenge such an emotive onslaught.

This is the history of Islam in India. I am sorry that it has to be so bloody. I am sorry that there appears to be no end in sight. It is quite simply, the way events have ripped this land apart for hundreds of years.

A question for you (as well as you there, on your way to hitting the ). Root causes tell us why we are here today. They tell us why events seem to multiply upon one another. Some appear as inevitable as death. No? But they do not tell us how things should be, or whether they should even be, one way, or another. Has the world-father cut the skein of our lives already? Are we destined to walk down a path drawn by the first Hindu, the first Muslim who slit the others throat in the name of their ill-mannered faith? Is there no universe of our making?

Aziz is absolutely right to cry out against organized mayhem of Muslims in India. But those who we condemn carry within their hearts a blackness born of religous certainty, and reinforced by centuries of abuse, whether real or imagined. They are convinced that life is a series of zero-sum games, and that their side has lost one too many. It's payback time, and they are not leaving. What does the world have to offer them but sympathy? Pity? A call to keep taking the moral high ground in the midst of bloodshed? A slice of the pie when ten years down the road, Prez. Condi Rice redraws the map of Pakistan? I don't think so. They want their respect and they want it now. Not the genteel, sophisticated respect of their ex-colonial masters, now farting nervously in Brussels. They want the raw, real and fearful respect of their neighbors. They want to carve out a land recreated in a Vedic afterimage from their fevered dreams. They want a past that never was, to become the future of their children. And they are not going away anytime soon. As long as Islamic fundamentalism exists, so too will the Hinduvta reactionaries. Thrust, parry, counter-parry. A bloody point for every bloody counterpoint.

India needs solutions. The subcontinent deserves to rewrite it's future on fresh pages. I have no bright ideas to offer up today, I'm just a humble, often intellectually challenged blogger in a tiny corner of the digital world. But I have to ask? Where are the visionaries? Where are the boys in white? Where are the legions of the new and the brave? Where is our future?

[wretchard]

Hell is place where we can never forget who we are: where no children are ever born innocent and every old man dies embittered. It is a place where hatreds are cherished, embellished and enlarged upon.

America was founded to afford a new beginning for those sick unto death of the hatreds of the old world. We need to get off this planet and go somewhere Islam will never find us.