During the anniversary of the 26/11 Pakistan's coward,audacious attack on Mumbai(and India herself),the local media went gaga over the tamasha that took place by the name of remembering and paying homage to the martyrs - the unfortunate lot who had fallen victim to the terrorist bullets and grenades.The candle-lit vigils at the Gateway of India and the passionate interviews by 'social activists' and 'humanists' - the intellectual elite(read page-3 socialites and small-screen celebrities) who seem to have taken up the holy mantle of safe-guarding moral the integrity of India,wearing sombre masks,soaked in mushy melodrama,reeked of nauseating hypocrisy.The shameless lot seemed to make an event of celebration out the anniversary and was equivocal where one short message was concerned - Something has to be done, though nobody seemed to specify who would start doing that coveted Something and when.
While all attention once again fell on Kashab and his minute-to-minute movements,there was another information which the media highlighted,this time with a bit of sarcastic criticism,that India has spent Rs.310 million on Kasab so far,through her efforts to keep him alive and well,giving him unprecedented security,state of the art medicare,and a honest,fair trial.
Justice is proving out to be very,very expensive affair and I wonder when the authorities might get tempted to send this huge money bill to the Prime Instigator Party of the 26/11 massacre.And who is the ultimate instigator of not only the Mumbai terror attack,but all the jehadi attacks,not to mention the more direct wars that India has had to fight against an implacable foe?
No,it is not Pakistan.While this country has been the approximate cause for all the bloodshed,it is not the ultimate cause.The ultimate cause of all this wasteful,mindless violence,the ultimate cause behind the very creation of Pakistan itself is Religion.In other words,God.Or rather,the human perception of this Myth of Divinity. It is not geo-politics but theo-politics which has been responsible for Indo-Pak hostilities.
Similarly,the demolition of the Babri Masjid - the anniversary of which we shall be observing tomorrow,the 6th.of December,again with all the media fanfare and remorseless remorse that we allocated for the anniversary of 26/11 - is also,and even more obviously,a manifestation of theo-politics,the lethally vengeful politics of God.
Today everybody is playing at theo-politics.And in doing so,we are all,willy-nilly,becoming pawns of the very game that we think we are playing.It is not just Kasab,and the Taliban,and the Al-Qaeda,and Pakistan's ISI,which both exploit,and are,in inevitable turn,exploited by theo-politics.We,in our own India,are also increasingly held to ransom by the politics of religion,the viciously perverted sectarianism of a God with a schizophrenic,split psyche,divided along the razor-edge fault-lines of Hinduism,Islam,Christianity,Judaism,Sikhism,Budhhism,and all the 'isms' that man has invented to hide heaven from his eyes while he creates hell on earth.
It is not just the Taliban.It's Indian qualitative reverse image,the Sangh-Parivar,is the practitioner and unwilling dupe of theo-politics,equally complicit,equally the propagator as well as the victim of the politics of the religion of a divisive God.
The Rs.310 million(or Rs.31 crore)spent on Kasab who is an infinitesimally insignificant pawn in the bloody chessboard of theo-politics,is just a drop in the ocean of the logarithmic calculus of human and social costs that human civilisation as a whole(not individual societies,communities or races)has incurred in the name of Religion and a God who encourages genocide and fratricide.
Can humankind(ah that's a ironically curious word;shouldn't it be human'cruel' ?) as a whole afford such a omni-savouring God any longer?Perhaps it's time for those who believe in God-of whatever colour,creed,stripe or nomenclature-to pray to Him(or Her)
to turn us all into atheists,or at least agnostics.We would be no longer be required to,in the name of a God we no longer believed in,by the grace of the same God,to kill each other to complete annihilation to His greater Glory,and could get on trying to deal with mundane,down-to-earth(and not up-to-heaven)problems like poverty,illiteracy,disease and eco-destruction.
Ah you,all of those who believe in His Schizophrenic Holiness,can rest in peace..because this will not happen,of course.The more troubled the times(and ours are very troubled indeed,what with global terror,pandemic disease,economic meltdown,greenhouse effect et al),the greater the premium that people pay to God as insurance cover.Fear and Religion are just two sides of the same coin since prehistory.Prehistoric hominids invented the gods to appease them because storm and lightning,draught and flood,fire and ice,frightened them.And we haven't changed much.Self-invented Fear over caste,race,gender clash and exploitation still hold us to random,and provide us with spurious excuses to enable us with mutual hatred to fight and kill each other.
God be damned.He Is Expensive.
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