Cutting off Chain of Hate

Cutting off the chain of hate

 
 

Mihir Shah

 
 

Martin Luther King's profound inversion of Nietzsche's critique of Christianity is a beacon of light for all those who still dream of making a change in
the world.

 
 

If injustice is a large fact of the world we live in, so is hate. And there is no surprise here. For, the very intensity of injustice provokes anger. Which
fuels hate. Capitalism has created unimaginable material prosperity for millions. But hunger and distress remain widespread. The early years of the 21st
century have seen hungry people rioting in 37 countries. Eighty per cent of the world's population still lives below the international poverty line. The
World Ba nk speaks of an almost unnoticed "silent famine" enveloping large parts of the globe.

 
 

Adding hurt to this absolute distress are widening disparities. A recent World Bank study reveals that between 1820 and 1992, the income share of the bottom
60 per cent of the world's population halved to around 10 per cent, while the share of the top 10 per cent rose to more than 50 per cent. A United Nations
report covering the period 1950-1998, also reveals growing inequalities within nations. These inequalities revolve around multiple axes of class, community,
region, religion and gender. Religion has emerged as a central axis of conflict. Violence as a response to perceived injustice is on the rise, reflecting
in part the failure of democracies to function effectively across the world.

 
 

The fruits of India's own development have been shared very unequally, especially in certain geographies (Adivasi enclaves, drylands, hills) and with specific
social groups (Dalits, Muslims). India witnessed the fastest growth of high networth individuals worldwide in 2007. In the "other India," across 200 districts,
lakhs of people are either committing suicide or taking to the gun.

 
 

Martin Luther King suggests a different response to injustice — the path of love. But the love he spoke of was no ordinary love. In an essay written in
1957, King elaborated the very different meanings of three words for love in the Greek New Testament. Eros, in Platonic philosophy, means the yearning
of the soul for the realm of the divine. It has come now to mean a sort of aesthetic or romantic love. Philia signifies the intimate love between friends,
a reciprocal love, where we love because we are loved. But the love King advocates is best expressed in the Greek word agape. Agape implies understanding.
It intimates a "creative, redeeming goodwill for all, an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. Agape is not a weak, passive love. It is love
in action." Thus explained, agape comes very close to the ideal of lokasangraham — action motivated ultimately by the holding together of the peoples of
the world — the climax of the enunciation of karma yoga in Chapter 3 of the Bhagavad Gita.

 
 

Through a profound inversion of Nietzsche's critique of Christianity, King provides a reconceptualisation of the relationship between power and love. Nietzsche
sought to determine the conditions of a new affirmation of life by overcoming what he regarded as the nihilistic despair produced by Christian values.
King interrogates the very terms of this problematique by providing a radical restatement of his own spiritual tradition. He questions the legacy of viewing
love and power as polar opposites, where love appears as a rescinding of power, and power as a rejection of love. This again is similar to the case against
sanyaas (abdication of action) in the Bhagavad Gita. King argues that "power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental
and anaemic." And this new understanding of power helps King positively formulate the unbreakable bond between love and justice: "power at its best is
love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love."

 
 

Love must necessarily take on the larger structures of injustice that stand in its way. This love includes but goes well beyond isolated acts of kindness.
At the same time, because love is our weapon, we do not seek to defeat anyone and must try not to end up humiliating those positioned against us. For the
struggle is not against persons, it is for transformation of the opponent's view and the system of oppression. And even more for the self-renewal of those
who work for change. As King says, "to retaliate with hate and bitterness would do nothing but intensify the hate in the world. Along the way of life,
someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can be done only by projecting the ethics of love to the centre of
our lives."

 
 

Such an organic link between inner transformation of the individual and larger social change is invariably missing in our politics. But there is more. In
our pursuit of structural change we cannot overlook the immediacy and enormity of suffering. Sadly, this has been the record of many movements for justice.
The millennial quest, based on various teleological certainties of the dynamic of History (with a capital H), has often led to people being treated as
cannon fodder. The finiteness of their life-times appears to have little import for leaders who ineluctably belong to classes quite distinct from those
who suffer injustice. As a result, the desperation for finding tangible solutions appears much less evident in leaders than for the masses they lead.

 
 

We are confronted with a paradox. Narrow preoccupation with daily issues results, for example, in the sterile "economism" of the working class. But the
quest for millennial goals of a distant Shangri-la means a striking lack of concern for real-time solutions and an unyielding "protest for the sake of
protest." The former reflects a complete absence of broader vision, the latter a cruel neglect of immediate anguish. The challenge of creative politics
is to strike an imaginative balance between the two, without disadvantaging either.

 
 

We must stop viewing conflict as an arena of our victory over the "other." It is better regarded as a problem in search of a solution. A conflict needs
not so much a victory, as a resolution. Indeed, a "defeat" that moves society forward on the moral landscape, that empowers the disadvantaged and sensitises
those in power, deepening democracy in the process, could even be preferred to a "victory" that fails to achieve any of these.

 
 

A key to moving forward in this direction is to give up the antediluvian unitary and insurrectionist conception of Revolution (with a capital R). The unique
appeal of "scientific socialism" was its claim to have discovered the "laws of motion of society" that predicted the inexorable coming of a new dawn. This
teleology has ended up becoming the chief weakness of Marxism. If change is visualised in these terms, means-ends questions will be run roughshod over
and horrors of the Stalinist kind will continue to be perpetrated. Indeed, it would appear that without fana or annihilation of the ego as expounded in
Sufi theosophy, without an outpouring of agape love that Martin Luther King evoked, movement towards a more just social order will remain a delusion.

 
 

Spiritual standpoint

 
 

Such a spiritual standpoint finds strong support in recent advances in Neuroscience and Economics, both of which have traditionally been bastions of selfishness
as the central motive of human behaviour. Neurobiologists like Donald Pfaff marshal a new understanding of genes, neuronal activity and brain circuitry
to explain our concern for the other. The path-breaking work of economists like Samuel Bowles questions standard textbook assumptions of the selfish homo
economicus and emphasises the role of altruism in the very survival of humankind in the difficult years ahead.

 
 

A one-track, single-event notion of revolution must also be discarded because it leads to complete neglect of crucial nitty-gritty detail that forms the
heart of the transformation we dream of. It is this dry spadework that also contains solutions to immediate distress. Running mid-day meals in schools
under active supervision of mothers, local people managing sanitation and drinking water systems, social audits in vibrant gram sabhas, participatory planning
for watershed works, women leading federations of self-help thrift groups and workers running industrially safe, non-polluting factories as participant
shareholders — all these and many more are the immediate, unfinished, feasible tasks of an ongoing struggle for change.

 
 

Unfortunately, activists typically push these questions into a hazy future, to be all answered after the revolution, so to speak. One of the greatest weaknesses
of the socialist project in the 20th century was its failure to flesh out the details of possible alternatives to a capitalist society. These are difficult
questions that necessitate intricate answers. And we need to begin looking for these here and now, in the living laboratories of learning of our farms
and factories, villages and slums. Not in some imaginary distant future after a fictitious insurrection. Why do we forget that this love in action for
justice constitutes a large part of the change that we must still dare to dream of?

 
 

(The writer is a social activist living and working for the last two decades with the Adivasis of central India.)

 
 

The dangers of Tamil chauvinism

The dangers of Tamil chauvinism

Malini Parthasarathy

The latest campaign in Tamil Nadu masterminded by a desperate LTTE must not be allowed to undermine the sound policy decision upheld by successive Indian
governments since 1991 to stay out of Sri Lanka’s internal affairs.

Time appears to have stood still for most Tamil Nadu’s politicians who seem completely insulated from the complex ground realities that mark India’s new
political landscape. India’s political establishment and civil society are anxiously grappling with the enormity of the horrific new threat to Indian society
— terrorism — fast becoming an everyday reality on the streets. But oddly enough, seemingly oblivious of the contradiction, political parties in Tamil
Nadu, led by the MDMK and the PMK, have recently plunged into high-pitched activity aimed at garnering support for the LTTE, a deadly terrorist organisation.

These parties have launched a campaign in the State ostensibly to express solidarity with the Sri Lankan Tamils trapped in the war zone in northern Sri
Lanka but the timing of this campaign which appears to have materialised overnight, is a dead giveaway. The Sri Lankan army, just two kilometres away from
the LTTE’s administrative capital, Kilinochchi, has successfully encircled the Tigers and their leader who are virtually trapped in their bunkers. For
the first time in years, the Sri Lankan government appears to be on the brink of a major success in its battle with terrorism. There is now the very real
prospect of the capture of the elusive LTTE chief, Velupillai Prabakaran, who is behind the assassination of a former Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi.

Tamil Nadu’s politicians clearly have different standards for India and for Sri Lanka. It would appear that they accept that battling terrorism in India
and saving Kashmir from Islamist jihadis are important national tasks but not so in Sri Lanka which has been menaced for more than two decades by the LTTE.
It was the LTTE which pioneered terrorism in South Asia and produced two generations of suicide bombers who have claimed numerous high-profile victims.
For far too long have the legitimate aspirations of the Sri Lankan Tamils been held hostage to the hegemonic ambitions of the LTTE chief Prabakaran who
has consistently sabotaged all attempts to find political solutions to the ethnic conflict.

When Pakistani generals and Islamist militants characterise the separatist uprising in Kashmir as a “freedom struggle,” the collective Indian national consciousness
is understandably outraged. Politicians in India are rarely exercised over concerns that the human rights of innocent citizens are often trampled upon
in police action against terrorists or their perceived accomplices. There is indeed a broad-based political consensus behind the Indian state when it takes
strong steps to root out terrorism.

It is therefore all the more incongruous that the political parties in Tamil Nadu, including the ruling DMK and its principal challenger the AIADMK have
decided to work themselves into a frenzy over the alleged violation of the “human rights” of the Sri Lankan Tamils in the context of the military action
against the LTTE. Evidently, the game plan of the LTTE and its supporters is to rally Tamil chauvinist sentiment and translate that into pressure on New
Delhi to signal its disapproval to Colombo, thereby weakening its moral authority in the eyes of the Sri Lankan Tamil community.

There is a strong sense of déjÀ vu, listening to the rhetoric and speeches of leaders in Tamil Nadu, whose understanding of the Sri Lankan political situation
is mired in a time-warp, their images of the ethnic conflict drawing primarily from scenes of two decades ago, particularly the flashpoint of 1983, when
the Wellikada prison massacre highlighted dramatically the plight of the Sri Lankan Tamil community and brought thousands of refugees to Indian shores.
But after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, the Indian national psyche recoiled from a continued engagement with the Sri Lankan ethnic crisis.

Since the 1990s, New Delhi’s policy has been to acknowledge the terrorist character of the LTTE and the imperative of a military confrontation with that
organisation, while continuing to offer moral encouragement to Colombo to find a political solution that would provide a framework to empower the Tamil
community. Meanwhile, India made clear its utter repugnance for the LTTE by banning it not just because it was involved in the murder of Rajiv Gandhi but
because it viewed the LTTE as a terrorist movement that would continuously strive to stimulate the secessionist sentiment in Tamil Nadu as long as Sri
Lanka continued to have ethnic strife.

The situation in Sri Lanka itself has undergone profound changes since the 1980s, when it was easier to conceptualise purely political solutions and rule
out military responses to the violent dimensions of the conflict. At that point in time, it was indeed possible to sideline the militant groups of Sri
Lankan Tamil politics by engaging the political interlocutors in the Tamil community such as the urbane leaders of the TULF, notably Appapillai Amirthalingam,
who recognised the key to political empowerment lay in the democratic process. But with the ruthless elimination of every credible interlocutor in the
Tamil community by the LTTE which insisted that it was the sole representative of the Sri Lankan Tamils, the space for a political solution has narrowed
over the years, rendering null and void the several exercises seeking a devolution of power to the Tamil community.

Yet the Thirteenth Amendment to the Sri Lankan Constitution which was a consequence of the Indo-Sri Lankan Agreement of 1987, envisaging devolution of power
to provincial councils has become a touchstone for the resolution of the ethnic conflict. The Sri Lankan President, Mahinda Rajapaksa, has made it clear
that he remains committed to a political solution of this sort. In a meeting with the All Party Representative Conference (APRC) last Saturday, Mr. Rajapaksa
emphasised that it was the duty of the Sri Lankan state “to ensure to the Tamil people of the North the same democratic rights as enjoyed by the people
in all parts of the country.” He also took care to explain that the military action against the LTTE was against terrorism and not against the Tamil community.

The Sri Lankan President has acquired unprecedented political space for his military campaign against the LTTE. Several factors including the rebellion
of the powerful LTTE commander Karuna and the fact that there is now in place an elected provincial council in the Eastern Province have rendered irrelevant
many of the points in the earlier Sri Lankan Tamil political platform. That there is a credible and workable political solution now in sight has made it
easier for Colombo to launch military operations against the LTTE. It is indeed the sovereign right of Sri Lanka as it is of India to eliminate any terrorist
organisation that poses a fundamental threat to its survival as a nation.

The parties in Tamil Nadu which have strong ties to the LTTE such as the MDMK and the PMK are in the forefront of this new campaign which has sprung to
life overnight after decades of silence. Their rhetoric is dated and wearily familiar. The MDMK’s Vaiko, brimming with moral indignation, has lashed out
at the Centre for allegedly sending military assistance to Sri Lanka which was “unleashing a genocidal attack on the Tamil race”. Likewise the PMK’s leader

S. Ramadoss has alleged that “the situation on the island threatens to eliminate the entire Tamil race”.

That the LTTE’s shadow lurks behind this new campaign is evident in the demand of Dr. Ramadoss that the Union government recognise the “Eelam Tamils struggle
for their rights.” There is also an implied acceptance of the LTTE’s claim to be the only authentic representative of the Sri Lankan Tamils in the declaration
of Dr. Ramadoss that the LTTE is “acting as a fortress for ethnic Tamils.”

As the LTTE has presumably calculated, this binge of competitive chauvinism has compelled Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi to up the ante on this issue, adding
for good measure, his own dramatic assertion that unless the Centre cooperates in stopping the attacks on the Sri Lankan Tamils, not only would the Sri
Lankan Tamils perish but so also would the “Tamils in Tamil Nadu.” The strategic design behind the campaign to “express solidarity” with the Sri Lankan
Tamils that is now under way in Tamil Nadu should not be underestimated.

For the last decade or so, New Delhi has successfully resisted the various attempts made by the LTTE and its supporters in Tamil Nadu to force it to intervene
in the Sri Lankan ethnic crisis. If New Delhi were to express its disapproval, even implicitly, of Sri Lanka’s sovereign right to recapture its own national
territory from the LTTE, it would weaken the moral authority of India’s own actions in regard to its struggle against terrorism and the separatist agitation
in Kashmir. This latest campaign in Tamil Nadu masterminded by a desperate LTTE must not be allowed to undermine the sound policy decision upheld by successive
Indian governments since 1991 to stay out of Sri Lanka’s internal affairs.