Return of the Barbarians
hardnewsmedia.com/2008/11/2424
Excerpts…
Be it the terrorist, or the communal fascist, it requires more than human guts to kill people in cold blood; or gang-rape women as a public spectacle or burn children alive as an act of religious redemption, as several testimonies from Gujarat and Orissa have unfolded. It requires a steely barbarism, a trained mind which has totally internalised this doctrine of barbarism in good faith and conviction, which hates like an evangelical and ideological creed in itself, not making any distinctions between good and bad, human and inhuman, skin and eyes, hands and fingers, colour and sensibilities, ideas and feelings, gender or class, man or woman or child. Almost abysmally robotic, sinking in these depths of depravity and perversion, bereft of the littlest trace of either critical rationality or humanism, with absolutely no sense of history or aesthetics, anti-god, anti-human, anti-democracy, anti-secular pluralism, anti-tolerance, anti-woman, celebrating, for instance, the Gujarat carnage as a “successful experiment” - in the words of Pravin Togadia.
In that sense, what is the difference between the Taliban stoning a woman to death for “adultery” in a football stadium in Kabul, the Al Qaeda punishing girls who go to school in South Waziristan, or terrorists killing innocents (distorting Islam) - and the Hindutva brigade unleashing violence distorting Hinduism? Like the Ku Klux Klan, these retrograde groups have no religion or faith or god. All they have is the mindless energy of barbarism and hatred; governments and societies should treat all of them as barbarians - not fit for a civilised, democratic society. In contrast, when they are not treated as barbarians, they effectively destroy the middle ground, the Constitution, democracy, social tolerance and cohesion, feeding communal hate and viciousness against each other.
That is why, Togadia celebrated the Orissa carnage at Kandhamal, literally, physically, while others celebrated by killing people, ravaging homes, burning alive a Hindu woman caretaker of a Christian orphanage, and raping a nun in full public view, including the police as voyeuristic witness. Under the tacit patronage of the BJD-BJP regime in Orissa, led by Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, the man who is selling the mineral rich ecological hot spots of tribal interiors to big business and MNCs by hook or crook, through seduction or repression.
