An eye for an eye makes the world blind

An eye for an eye — said the redoubtable Mahatma Gandhi, as India was being rent apart by retaliatory violence between Hindus and Muslims — makes the whole world blind.

In the exact same week that Pakistan was divided down the middle over the assassination of Salmaan Taseer, a hardline Hindu radical called Aseemanand, who styled himself as a ‘swami’, or holy man, confessed to his involvement in bombing a mosque in Hyderabad and to being fully aware of the conspiracy by other Hindu radicals to bomb other holy shrines, as well as the Samjhauta Express in 2007.

In his confessional, Aseemanand said the decision to target Muslim communities in India was taken after radical Islamic organisations were said to have bombed temples in Varanasi, considered to be Hinduism’s holiest site.“I told everybody, bomb ka jawab bomb se hi dena chahiye,” Aseemananda told his interrogators.

In India, there is a growing complementarity between Hindu right-wing terrorism and Islamic terrorism, both fitting each other like a hand in a glove, mirror images of each other. I would say the situation in Pakistan looks equally bleak.

In the wake of Salmaan Taseer’s assassination, several shell-shocked Pakistanis have asked, in print as well as on television, whether, 64 years later, this is the state that Jinnah fought the Congress Party long and hard for. Jinnah, the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity in 1916, wanted a separate state for Muslims by 1940 because he didn’t believe the Congress would give Muslims a fair deal in independent India.

Salmaan Taseer invoked the name of the Quaid when he went to visit Aasia Bibi and announced he would be seeking a presidential pardon on her behalf. Is this Quaid’s Pakistan, Taseer asked, speaking up for the millions of Pakistanis too scared to talk today.

But with Muslims killing Muslims in Pakistan, including over one man’s defence of a poor, Christian, low-caste woman, it may be time to ask ourselves the question: Is the two-nation theory still valid?

Meanwhile, the Aseemanand confessional is leading the Congress party to consider banning the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a hardline Hindu organisation to which Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin belonged, and of which Aseemanand and his co-conspirators are a part.

Just like Mumtaz Qadri and Nathuram Godse, the RSS believes in an “eye for an eye”.

So here’s the irony, unerringly beautiful in the still-new year: When Aseemanand was asked by his interrogators why he was spilling the beans, he told them of Kaleem, a Muslim, who had been wrongly picked up for the Mecca Masjid blast in Hyderabad and sent to the same jail as him.

“During my stay in jail, Kaleem helped me and served me by bringing water, food for me. I was very moved by Kaleem's good conduct and my conscience asked me to do prayaschit (penance) by making a confessional statement…,” Aseemanand said.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 16^th,  2011.