How when the world appears to be falling apart around you, do you concentrate on the lighter things in life? Or is that the best time to do it. We’re so good at this, humans. Overthinking, obsessing and then closing our minds of. Women often accuse men of compartmentalising their lives, and it is true that it helps them with transgressions of a sort. But all of us do it. Survival tactics.
So when I started writing this column, it was about being judgmental about younger people and their fashion choices. I wrote over 600 words and then deleted it. Because, who cares? Or maybe some people care, maybe even I care sometimes, but I could not bring myself to expand on the matter.
Instead, my mind got embroiled in a discussion about prejudice and bigotry of a more current, urgent and longstanding manner. I read a letter that the German Photographic Society wrote to a photographer that they decided to award an annual prize, the Iranian-German Shirin Abedi. At the awards ceremony, Abedi spoke for Free Palestine, and also wore a keffiyeh and a watermelon clip in her hair, all symbols for Palestine.
The letter is remarkable in its arrogant tone. It mocks the idea of the “liberation of Palestine” and completely ignores the genocide which Israel has unleashed on Palestinians. We all understand German guilt, whether internal or imposed, over the Holocaust and the torture and killing of over six million Jews by the Nazis. The rest of the world also knows how Christian Europe treated Jews for 2000 years, from social discrimination and abuse to relentless pogroms.
None of that justifies what Israel is doing to Palestine. Any number of Jews in the Western world, orthodox, liberal, believing, political, have spoken against Israel and Zionist policies which treat Palestinians as subhuman. They do not give Israel blanket permission to destroy another people, claiming they are doing the work of the divine. And at the same time claiming that they are a democracy, the “only” democracy in the Middle East.
The German Photographic Society could speak to some of them.
But I am being generous. The German Photographic Society knows about the genocide carried out by Israel. Of course it does. It is just being disingenuous with a self-righteous air. Like so many other Western organisations. It is playing the game of “but do you condemn Hamas” while closing their eyes to hundreds and thousands of Palestinian deaths.
Abedi is Iranian, that is another core issue here. If Abedi was white, she would not be called an “Munichian-German” for instance. She would just be German. (Although I understand why ethnic minorities in predominantly white nations may want to emphasise their differences.) But there is an implication that it is not possible for people who are not white to have consciences or to understand right from wrong or to take moral stands. Or that is, we can take them to be tolerated from a superior position when we mention some ancient tradition that guides our actions. Like: “How sweet, they must do Bollywood danced at their weddings. How I love my masala chai lattes”.
That is, as brown, black, yellow, green, purple people, we must know our place.
You can understand why Mahatma Gandhis is supposed to have said that “Western civilisation would be a good idea”.
Extreme prejudice and bigotry have spilled over with Israel’s genocide. The tight pretend confines of the 20th century have been breached in more ways than one. That the world can be a better world for being more inclusive has come up against barriers set by those very people who argue for more tolerance and more inclusion. You see how thin this post-colonial layer of tolerance and inclusion is with the white world’s unconditional support of Israel. As a contrast, Republican US President Ronald Reagan supported several UN resolutions against Israel and notably in 1982, picked up the phone and demanded that Israel stopped bombing Beirut. Reagan is criticised for a number of reasons, but you cannot accuse of him of cowardice when it comes to taking on Israel.
How much all that has changed since the last century.
And who are we to talk, us in India, when intolerance and disharmony are our default modes? When we claim democratic superiority because of our population but the chief justice of the Supreme Court says that God spoke to him before a significant judgment that has ripped us further apart, when in fact his official position requires the Constitution of India and only the Constitution of India to be his guiding principle.
It shows how far from our ideals we have fallen when we do not even react when Muslims are killed for being Muslim, when dalits are urinated on by upper caste men for being dalit, when a state within the Union of India can be ignored by government as anarchy rules, when large chunks of the media are terrified of criticising government and when larger chunks of the media push an ideological narrative of fascism and bigotry with glee.
Why should the Supreme Court care about the Constitution we may well wonder when no one else does.
It is almost as if everything that was right about the 20th century is being upended in the third decade of the 21st. We started with promises of being kinder and gentler. And we have ended up with a world that’s looking increasing like the pre-war 20th century. Where colonial rule was rampant, where race domination was the law, when voices were suppressed, where women were kept in their place and where people were controlled with misinformation.
Rabindranath Tagore wrote “Where the mind is without fear” in 1913. And over a century later, we find ourselves searching for reason in the dreary desert sand of dead habit.
