The Cattle in their Pens: refugees

While India celebrates her various festivals, more than 50000 Christians live like cattle in Orissa. They live like refugees everywhere. Let us enter for a moment into the lives of refugees in any part of the world. We have to do this exercise if we are to really understand the meaning of being a refugee; otherwise the word has lost all meaning due to unending use by the media. New media should be a gestalt experience; what John Keats long ago called a synaesthetic experience.

The contemporary refugee experiences the most unnerving feelings of powerlessness and despair:

a) There remains no sense of belonging. A refugee is at the mercy of unseen and unfeeling powers that herd her or him from refugee camps to other camps. All sense of family and rootedness are erased till the refugee no longer dares or even feels the need to establish roots in one place again.

b) Nothing is private in the lives of refugees. This includes everything from their sanitation to their sexual behaviors. The refugee is now continuously under what Michel Foucault calls “the gaze”. Every movement of the refugee is documented till the refugee accepts that she or he is just a caged animal.

c) All voting rights are suspended.

d) The refugee lives in perpetual uncertainty: she does not know when she will be rehabilitated or asked to move or even beaten for voicing such basic needs as hunger.

In short, the refugee is robbed of his or her name and all remnants of personality are robbed. This is similar to what the British did to us: they called us natives (eg. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, where the whites are individually named, but South Asians are just grouped under the pejorative natives).

Now Christians in Orissa are victims of mass progroms and are no longer being individually spoken off. They are thus being forced to ghettoize. This is remarkable wicked on the parts of their persecutors. How? The answer lies in theoreticians of violence: René Girard posits the scapegoat theory. The bloodlusts of lynch mobs must be satisfied, no matter what. And characteristically they choose innocent victims. What started as a correctional procedure against forcible-conversion has now gone out of hands. This is perceived as an opportune moment for people to settle their personal animosities against their, may be, more prosperous neighbours. It is impossible to believe that all the thousands who have been forced to flee their homes are proselytizers. They are simply victims of the same evil that had arisen in Salem, Massachusetts, long ago. They are victims of the same evil that had goaded Senator Joseph McCarthy to repeatedly ask perceived enemies of the State whether they were Communists or not. And it is the same evil which prompts my own Hindu leaders in Orissa to retort that none is speaking of the violence done to Hindus in the state. I say to them, if Hindus are being persecuted, let us deal with the persecuting Christians with the rule of law and Hindu apologetics. Let us be scrupulous in ferreting out such Christians who are actively converting poor people, spreading derogatory remarks about Hinduism and forcing Hindus to flee their homes. Let us identify them and settle their hashes once for all. But never should one drop of innocent blood be spilled. Otherwise we are not Hindus but animals.

Remember that Shakti, the Atman is in everyone: yah devi sarva bhuteshu (the Mother resides in all). When we persecute Christians we just hurt the very same Atman within us too.