‘Love humiliates you, but Hatred cradles you.’- Janet Fitch
People who are brave, stable and confident believe Martin Luther King Junior’s principle that ‘darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can.
Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can.’ But people with low self esteem are usually afraid of the emotional light of love; because more often than not, it exposes them to vulnerability, pain, hurt and embarrassment. Such people are comfortable with an emotion that provides them with a false sense of security and control.
That is Hate, in its most vitriolic form. So what most of us perceive as negative, feels comfortable for those uneasy with the vulnerability associated with love. That is the paradoxical nature of human emotions.
Even if Love and Hate are closely connected because the two powerful emotions tend to have many of the same components, hatred can be difficult to address because its roots aren’t as pliable. They run even deeper than emotions like anger, disgust or vengefulness and its intensity is so toxic that it overrides all others and poisons your very soul. Personal grudge eats you up but when it involves a group, it can lead to a range of destructive outcomes like social unrest, riots and even large-scale conflicts like wars.
Very often ‘communal’ hatred is politically motivated. It manipulates grief and transforms into mass anger, thus fracturing harmony, eroding trust, squashing peace and creating lasting divisions. Usually it happens when a group is targeted into believing that the communities living together for ages have more differences than similarities. It happens when they are brainwashed that they are superior and the ‘others’ are inferior. It happens when the communal interest supersedes national interest. Then nothing nothing will be labeled as ‘anti-national’.
When a government wants to lie to its people, it first makes the media its accomplice. The tragedy is that people actually ‘allow’ themselves to believe them. Maybe because more than the lies or the truth, what their propaganda holds is a mysterious power of a source that is legitimized by an authoritative voice. Earlier this voice came through the Radio or Newspapers, but with the rise of Social Media, when multiple voices dare to speak up, that myth is thankfully busted.
But how far, how low and to what lengths can people actually go to prove their ‘communal hatred’. Apart from the lynching and the bulldozing, one recent incident is a testament to this disturbing factor. In Hoolikati village in Belagavi, 12 children fell ill after consuming water from the school’s tank that was ‘poisoned’. The police traced the act to a fifth-grade student, who disclosed that he had been bribed with 500 rupees, given a bottle of pesticide, and instructed to pour its contents into the school water tank. The person who allegedly handed him the bottle Krishna Madar, who was reluctant but did it anyway because he was allegedly being blackmailed by Sagar Patil and Naganagouda Patil, who threatened to expose his ‘inter-caste’ romantic relationship. One of the accused was, according to media reports, a local leader affiliated with a right-wing group called Sri Ram Sene.
But why poison the school tank? It was to reportedly create panic and suspicion around Suleman Gorinaik, who for the past 13 years was the Headmaster of a Government Lower Primary School. It was a plot reportedly intended to malign the reputation of a man from ‘another’ community and force his transfer. Luckily the 12 students were treated promptly and have recovered. But the question remains- what kind of sick people commit such heinous acts, targeting innocent children just because they are driven by religious hatred?
Even when Man was ‘less civilized’, women and children were always given levels of protection. In historical warfare or in any life threatening situation, ‘Women and Children First’ was the unofficial code of conduct to spare them from any direct conflict. Fast forward to the present- where most victims in any crime, at home or across the globe are usually women and children! Even in the systemic onslaught of the genocide going on in Gaza, they remain the main targets.
UN experts have condemned the continued reports of sexual assault and violence against them as thousands have disappeared since the beginning of Israel’s onslaught. While the silent world wants to forget Gaza like a bad dream, in this inexorable march of Death, Disease and Destruction, all ‘conventions’ and ‘laws’ are being challenged. So it’s not even about women and children anymore.
After 21 months of genocide, Gaza is completely stripped of humanity, with 2.1 million people experiencing alarming levels of famine with widespread starvation, malnutrition and hunger related fatalities. 60 thousand people have lost their lives out of which 20 thousand happen to be children. In the last two months alone, 1000 people received bullets instead of food, while they had gathered to get some aid.
Big Corporations and Companies continued to profit by supplying Israel with new technologies, while parents continued to bury children. All the progressive countries of the West continued to show their progression, their democracy and their human rights, by turning a blind eye. But even hypocrisy also has its limits. A sleeping world is finally waking up, saying ‘Enough is Enough!’
All these inhuman practices and tactics could have worked in the 13th Century. Or during Hitler’s regime that finally ended with the motto of ‘NEVER AGAIN’. But for something like this to happen again, in the 21st Century, right under the nose of an International community; in the glare of a social media where everyone has access to the heartless atrocities going on. I mean, what kind of cold blooded people have we become? What sick mentality have we adopted? How can we choose hatred over humanity?
We may protest all we want, light candles, hold placards, chant slogans or keep writing. Perhaps some of the inhuman shame and guilt can be wiped out. But nothing can erase the permanent stain of inhumanity from our collective conscience. NOTHING!
Day by day, the contrast between our comfort and the suffering of others is becoming unbearable. It’s a brutal reminder of how desensitized we have become.
So whether it is one incident of hatred or an ongoing major humanitarian crisis, people just cannot afford to be selective. The truth and the only truth is that humanity cannot be limited by Religion; Nationality; or Politics. Everyone needs to speak up. Everyone needs to be brave enough to stand on the right side of history!
Nargis Natarajan is a columnist and author. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.
Cover Photograph Reuters