Serial bomb blasts yesterday (26 July '08) in Ahmedabad and day before yesterday (25 July '08) have brought forth the tragic consequences of the politics of hate and the politics of religion.Politicians of India will now use these events to further divide the people more on the lines of religion (Hindus vs Muslims) and the citizens of India, could again let their minds be manipulated.
Both the above blasts, as per what I have read from the details out so far, appear to me the handiwork of a Muslim militant group who misleadingly think they are avenging the horrors committed on Muslims in Gujarat in February-March 2002. But a recent development (last 3-4 years), which the Indian media has criminally neglected to probe and report on, is the rise of similar Hindu groups. I wrote about this in the last two paras of my blog post two months back.
Two things strike my mind when I try to make sense of the violence in India that occurs through the bomb blasts and the state-sponsored pogroms of minorities. The horridness of the violence of a private small militant group committed under the watch of a large state machinery is less than the horridness of the violence of the state itself (seen in the state use of militant Hindu groups, the communalised police force or the anti-tribal/anti-poor administrative bureaucracy) on various sections of the population. Then, there is the skewness of the Indian justice system (the police and the courts). More often that not, on the one hand, it tilts towards protecting the perpetrators of the state-sponsored violence from being bought to justice, and on the other hand, not only does it leave any stone unturned in bringing to justice the perpetrators of the private small militant groups but also commits serious transgression of some innocent people's rights in the process (through torture of suspects and abusing their family members' dignity).
I pray for peace to prevail in people's minds and for the purging of all thoughts of mis-directed revenge.
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