Sunday, November 06, 2005

Pure Evil

Edited & Brought to you by ilaxi

Byline by MJ Akbar: Pure Evil

The Indian voter’s faith in its politicians has collapsed. Its faith in many institutions is dangerously low. But this is more than offset by the Indian’s faith in the country’s economy and the nation’s polity. The view is gaining ground that the politician cannot do much to harm the economy, and the polity is stronger than the politician. This is what makes India much stronger than the sum of its parts and gives it the ability to absorb wounds in order to protect the whole. It will take much more than a few bombs in Delhi to hurt India.


There has to be a reason, even for pure evil; otherwise it is lunacy. We must never confuse evil with lunacy. To say that Hitler was mad is, in a sense, to absolve him because you eliminate his responsibility for his crimes.

Lunacy may extract a grievous price on occasion, but it is an accident — an accident of the brain that destroys the capability of judgment, moral and amoral, whether it is a matter of sifting right from wrong or separating fact from fiction. Evil is a deliberate, often carefully calibrated choice. We must understand lunacy in order to isolate it, and we must understand evil in order to punish it. We have to live with the depressing fact that neither can be eliminated.

Evil can take both a collective as well as an individual form. There are times when substantial majorities of a population become collectively evil, and remain so for hundreds of years if not thousands. There was the spasm of Nazism in Germany, a virulent strain of evil that is unparalleled in human history. Other forms were less destructive perhaps, but hardly less corrosive or forgivable. Racism, for instance.

Americans are mourning the death, and celebrating the life, of Rosa Parks, who became the pivot of a turning point in American history when she refused to give up her seat in a bus to a White man in a small town. The pastor of a Black church in that town was drafted to head the non-violent resistance movement when she was arrested. His name was Martin Luther King, and he led Black Americans to emancipation after hundreds of years of the most inhuman slavery.

Apartheid in South Africa took even longer to destroy. Lest we Indians begin to feel smug, the fate of Untouchables in our country was worse than the lot of slaves in America or Blacks in South Africa. Dalits had to carry a pitcher around their neck so that their spit would not pollute the ground. When you think about some of these facts, all you can do is shudder, for our forefathers who practised such evil, or condoned it, considered themselves civilised. By the 1960s and 1970s the world changed sufficiently to outlaw such practices, not just in word but also in practice.

Terrorism, the contemporary evil, is not collective; it is the work of individuals or very small groups operating through cells. Terrorists are faceless because they are ready for personal obliteration — hence the faint paradox of an identitikit hunt. The normalcy of the men who planted bombs in crowded marketplaces is their weapon, making them all the more sinister.

What were the reasons behind the barbaric, senseless terrorist bombs on the eve of Diwali in Delhi? The checklist is obvious, if often unstated in respectable media for reasons of delicacy.

At the top of the list is surely the bleeding wound of the subcontinent, the problems of Kashmir. Was this an act of revenge? But if it was revenge then it should have been targeted against a symbol of government, not against a marketplace. The purpose seems more mischievous.

Was it an attempt to provoke communal violence between Hindus and Muslims? The moment for this barbarism was the eve of Diwali, the happiest day on the calendar of Hindu festivals. To spread carnage on such an occasion is to incite the mildest of human beings to rage. It is evidence of the growing maturity of inter-community relations in India that there was no such reaction. This is not the first time that such embers have been fanned in the hope of a larger conflagration. But apart from the unforgivable post-assassination riots of 1984, the fallout of the destruction of the Babri mosque in 1992 and the more recent, gruesome Gujarat riots under the watch of chief minister Narendra Modi, the people of India have met such challenges with commendable calm.

Did the anonymous killers hope to derail the peace process between India and Pakistan, in the manner that the attack on the Indian Parliament on December 13 froze relations and drove the subcontinent to the edge of war? If so, once again the result was failure. The first assessment in Delhi in such situations is to measure the role, if any, of either the whole or a part of the Pak establishment in such wanton terror.

Since nothing has been established, nothing can be ruled out, or ruled in. But at least as far as the principal voice of Pakistan’s establishment was concerned, the message to Delhi was reassuring. President Pervez Musharraf seemed sincere in his private conversation with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and, more important, his public pronouncements. He offered "unequivocal" support to India in any investigation and added "Pakistan stands with India on this act of terrorism". We will wait to find out whether this offer of support means anything or not, but it is reasonable to assume that Dr Singh was comforted by what he heard, or there would have been public ramifications. Privately, India and Pakistan believe that terrorists, who feel increasingly abandoned as peace initiatives strengthen, will express their desperation through mindless, destructive terrorism. Their targets will be both innocents and VIPs.

It is now two decades since the Russians were defeated in Afghanistan, and Afghanistan needed another war before America could get the government it wanted in Kabul. One of the motivations of those foot soldiers of the Afghanistan jihad who turned their attention towards India was that a "soft" nation like India would be a pushover for the conquerors of the Soviet Union. It is easy to underestimate the strength of a democracy, particularly when it looks tattered at the top. But a democracy builds very strong underground roots, because it is always nourished by the will of the people.

People have direct ownership of the state; the vote makes them shareholders in the power process; they elect and destroy the executive. Patriotism is common to all nations; democracy strengthens the stake in a nation’s present and future. The strength of India is much more than the strength of its armies, for it derives from the strength of its people. Since the vote is equal, all communities, with time, discover that their stake matters, and that their will can change the nature of governments.

Military strategists have looked wistfully at the geography of India, and the strategic depth that this provides. Basically this means that India’s defence forces have space to manoeuvre, to take a second stand in the event of any setback. But that is an advantage only in a conventional war. The real war today is unconventional, for the nameless, faceless terrorist can strike anywhere and melt into anonymity.

A nation needs a different kind of strategic depth to fight this war successfully. It requires depth of character, and an extraordinary resilience to sustain perspective and balance. Delhi did not grieve any less on the day after the pre-Diwali havoc, but the manner in which the city recovered could not have escaped the attention of those trying to destroy its peace. Only the very cynical, or the very prejudiced, would consider this a sign of indifference. The simple message from the city was that it would not be defeated.

The Indian voter’s faith in its politicians has collapsed. Its faith in many institutions is dangerously low. But this is more than offset by the Indian’s faith in the country’s economy and the nation’s polity. The view is gaining ground that the politician cannot do much to harm the economy, and the polity is stronger than the politician. This is what makes India much stronger than the sum of its parts and gives it the ability to absorb wounds in order to protect the whole. It will take much more than a few bombs in Delhi to hurt India.

We do not know how long terrorism will enter our homes and our markets and our streets, and we do not know when the last battle will be fought. But we do know that this is not a war with set-piece battles; that this is a process in which victory and defeat will be determined in the mind much more than the street. The mind is controlled by the nerve, and democracy has given India nerves of steel. That admittedly flabby flesh you see on the outside is the weakness of a sweet tooth; the other teeth can bite back.

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