I shall be talking about a conundrum that I find myself in every now and then. But before I do so, let me lay the ground for it. What can be more current, and contextual, than what that pulpit bully Donald Trump has disgorged from his foul mouth?
It is unbelievable but even Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected Donald Trump’s comment on banning Muslims, and has said: “Israel respects all citizen’s rights.” Unbelievable, right? This world is a crazy place, I say.
The UK parliament is actively debating to make Trump the 85th banned hate-preacher. The Trump ban traffic has crashed the UK government’s petitions website. There have been murmurs of disapproval from quite a few politicians around the world.
But, have you heard anyone say anything in our own backyards in South Asia? I don’t recall hearing much from the politicians here.
In India, I am sure the right-wing must feel they have an honorary RSS/BJP member in Trump. Indeed, India has had its own share of anti-Muslim hate-preachers amongst its rightwing politicians. But, let’s not discuss the obvious support that he will garner amongst his ideological comrades here. Let’s talk about the other India that doesn’t tolerate discriminations of the kind that Trump espouses.
The Indians who stand up for the Palestinians. The Indians who stand up for the Syrian refugees, and so on. And, I can proudly state that there are plenty of them.
But, here is where I would like to insert the conundrum that I am always faced with. We are enveloped in this uneasy silence when it comes to Kashmir. We are eerily quiet when it comes to systemic discriminations against Muslims, or Dalits in our own country. Many in Pakistan would also throw in their support for such global intolerance and inequities. But there’s a hush surrounding the persecution of the Shias.
A total radio-silence around the repression of the Baloch people. A total denial of any wrongdoing when it comes to the genocide of the Bengali people in 1971 perpetrated by the Pakistani Army. The conundrum surfaces again.
Even here in Bangladesh, we see that people are quite vocal about their support for Palestine. It’s a stated position of the state. Travel to Israel is not permitted on the Bangladeshi passport (though the machine readable ones seems to have done away with the clause). The mass, though, is generally taciturn about the discriminations against the indigenous peoples in the country. The conundrum.
How can anyone stand against one discrimination and not another? How can anyone protest global injustices, but not be bothered about what is happening back home?
Is this some sort of armchair remonstration, a thing to do, like a check-in on social media? Shouldn’t standing up against any form of exploitation, discrimination, marginalisation, mean that one has to stand up to all kinds of inequities and bigotry?
What should we put down this selective amnesia to?
Let’s examine the amnesia of the millions of Indians who filled up the Modi speeches in the US. Clearly, they didn’t mind attending his speeches. He is not much different from Trump -- Modi not only went around spewing hate speeches during his election campaign when he was running for the chief minister’s office in Gujarat, but he is also the same guy whose complicity saw the killings of the Muslims under his watch as the CM of Gujarat. Are they thinking that this is not about them but about those Muslims?
Do they really think that the hate spewing, Islamophobic Americans who dance to the tunes of Trump actually know the difference between Muslims and people of colour like them?
It is clear as daylight that to most of them, the Muslim is an indistinguishable mass of Arabic-speaking, without knowing what Arabic sounds like or that Arabic is spoken by other faiths too (the San Bernardino shooters were thought to be Arabic, though they were of Pakistani descent), or turban-wearing (the Sikhs were targeted in the aftermath of 9/11 because they were thought to be Muslims like Bin Laden, or beard-keeping (“Bearded hipsters are being mistaken for Muslims” -- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), or simply brown skinned people (a Bangladeshi shop owner, Sarker Hoque was attacked in New York by a white man who said: “I kill Muslims”).
If these Indians find themselves the target of hate crimes in lieu of Trump’s xenophobic pronouncements, would they identify with the Muslims in the land of their ancestors who were also the target of similar profiling and targeting? Or, would they continue to wear the vest of double standards?
Fighting against inequities, or standing up for causes has to be well-thought-out. For, if we stand up for one, we have by default stood up for all such injustices. One can’t choose to stand up for gender inequality, and not talk about the ills of neoliberalism, or fight for LGBTQ rights and not stand up against racism. Choosing any one position and ignoring all others, I am afraid, is not standing for truth.
I would like to share the thoughts of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, which beautifully contextualises this conundrum that I have been referring to (and I need to thank John Cusack for bringing this to my attention): “When any single thought emerges in consciousness, I cannot rest until this is brought into harmony with the rest of my thinking. Such an isolated concept, apart from the rest of my mental world, is entirely unendurable. I am simply conscious of the fact that there exists an inwardly sustained harmony among all thoughts; that the thought-world is of the nature of a unit. Therefore, every such isolation is an abnormality, an untruth.”