Polemics

“ All this madness, all this rage, all this flaming death of our civilization and our hopes, has been brought about because a set of official gentlemen, living luxurious lives, mostly stupid and all without imagination or heart, have chosen that it should occur rather than that anyone of them should suffer some infinitesimal rebuff to his country’s pride.”         Bertrand Russell.

 Every person who is   not an exalted nationalist (like the folks of the BJP, ABVP and the Sangh) would wish that he or she had a daughter like Gurmehar Kaur, the conscientious and brave young lady. I hope that my own girl has the courage to stand upright and speak conscientiously as Gurmehar Kaur.  I think one must use ‘audacity’ in lieu of the word ‘courage’ if you must, so as to throw more punch into that wonderful trait.

But it requires a different sort of mental makeup, deep moral bankruptcy and arrogance to call Gurmehar’s brave polemic, anti national and attack her on the social media like mad swarm of wasps brandishing and using their uniquely nationalistic (sic) vitriolic as the ABVP members and  Sanghis did.  

 What did they do?                                                                                                                     They trolled her and posted invective that tell us how morally depraved, blind, sick, petty, unjust, bloodthirsty, licentious, rapists, misogynistic, racist, genocidal, filicidal, sadistic and feral uncouth they are. The wider and glaringly ominous matter is that the trolls were mostly all by folks in their youth. That tell us that the future of the country is precariously on the verge of doom; so is the place and status of women in the society. Imagine that a few years from now we may have such depraved minds lording over us. Oh well, they already are!

Threat of rape and incessant abuse forced Gurmehar Kaur to back off. She asked to be left alone. It is a sad reflection of the times we live in, that a young woman is not allowed to express herself. We call this a free country! That these rowdy elements and barbarians had to take recourse to threats of rape, violence and abuse tells us the fact that the premise of their outrage and anger is baseless and they cannot argue for their beliefs with clarity, logic, truth and substance.“ The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. ‘Off with his head !’ she said , without even looking round.” Lewis Carol, Alice in Wonderland.

Indeed it was the war that killed her father and not Pakistan; indeed it was not a Hindu that gored out the foetus from the womb of a Muslim woman in the cleansing programme in Gujarat, it was the indoctrination of religious hatred; it is not Muslim men who kill hundreds in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan every other day detonating  suicide vests strapped on them, but it is the vile religious hatred which they succumbed for. More often than not is it not the thought process that leads a person to commit a crime that must be seen as culpable, than the person who commits the crime physically?

Gulmehar Kaur has in her young mind wisdom, that perhaps we heard before from renowned thinkers like Bertrand Russell .“ Of all evils of war the greatest is purely the spiritual: the hatred, then injustice, the repudiation of truth, the artificial conflict.”

 It is the pathetic state of the minds of these men who hounded her and that of their handlers in this Government in power that sanctioned them to abuse this young woman for what she opined and eventually threatened her with the most potent weapon in the male armoury- the threat of rape. True, rape is very much part of the Indian masculinity(sic) that these rogues laud about and often is used wantonly by authorities in Kashmir, North East and against the Maoist & Tribal women. Rape- a potent male weapon to pound, plow down and scythe women into submission, submission of abject state, when they lose all semblance of self respect and worth.

I wonder if these men or their handlers in power would ever be able to logically, intellectually and with civility repudiate each of the arguments Gurmehar Kaur made and earnestly used in favour of her plea for peace and cessation of hostilities with Pakistan. No they won’t. They can’t. For just as the military establishment in Pakistan wants perpetual simmering hostility with India, the BJP needs the Pakistan bogey to stay in power when all the  sophistry, loot and lies come to light and people get restless.

But until then we need to be in awe of this   young lady whose wisdom and courage, we can only hope pollinates many such young minds.