Samrat Sharma

A Revolution Behind

image courtesy: DCcomics
15th August was my country’s Independence Day. Independence, as everyone apperceives it to be, is Freedom from control or influence of another or others. I am not going to go on a fulmination about how we abuse our freedom, and how many people fought for what we take for granted. Its true, but thats not my point.

I am an inquisitive man. And the wondrous trappings of the world wide web exist, it appears, to satiate my curiousity. Being an Indian, I have not really understood what the Ku Klux Klan was all about. That a country marred with strife and spiritually exhausted after a long drawn civil war still found in itself to stunt itself with racism of the extremum level, does elicit some amount of speculation. I read a lot about the hatred that ran root deep amongst some white supremacists, and the retaliatory emotions that the black community harbored. I also read about Dr. King and Stetson Kennedy and the sanity they sought to bring to their country.

In a land that has long been glorified in the supremacy of the white race, he (the white man) directed his resentment against the black man. His normal instincts became perverted. He became wasteful and careless. He became bestial. He released his pent-up emotions by lynching the black man in order to witness the mental and physical suffering of another human being. He became cruel and inhuman in everyday life as his resentment and bitterness increased. When his own suffering was more than he could stand, he could live only by witnessing the suffering of others.
–� Erskine Caldwell, You Have Seen Their Faces (1937)

And then it dawned upon me. The odium that existed in the United States during 1915-1970, is the similar to what I see in my country today. My fascination with the times in which existed the Klan, seemed almost hypocritical. We are a country defaced with baleful acts of terrorism and struggling to overcome the stultifying outcomes of poverty and illiteracy. And we still find in ourselves to twinge our existentialism with communal strife. I started seeing a pattern that defined the white supremacists and the hindu supremacists.

All hyphenated groups – whether they be Negro-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Catholic-Americans, Italian-Americans or whatever must become American-Americans, or leave the country! The Ku Klux Klan is an American-American organization. As the Army of the Klan we Klavaliers are dedicated to saving America for Americans!
–Cliff Carter, the Night Hawk of the Klan.

image courtesy:spartacus.schoolnet

Suddenly all the Togadias and the Daras had a precedence that I could not ignore. This scares me. Out of the strife and the racism at the times, there emerged many leaders of the black revolution, demanding equality, and expecting no free change. But they were not all right.

Every month, I went to Chicago, I would find that some sister had written complaining to Mr. Muhammad that I talked so hard against women when I taught our special classes about the different natures of the two sexes. Now, Islam has very strict laws and teachings about women, the core of them being that the true nature of a man is to be strong, and a woman’s true nature is to be weak, and while a man must at all times respect his woman, at the same time he needs to understand that he must control her if he expects to get her respect.
– Malcolm X, Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)

At least we are not that Talibanized. But as Gujarat exemplified, there is a distinct problem at hand, the people responsible will not stop until they have destroyed the very fabric that covers their naked, bloody bodies. When I had established my similarities with that dystopia that history forgot and the one we are being reluctantly thrust against, I was scared. It took a civil war, and more than 40 years of strife to bring that society closer to harmony. I wonder what it would take to bring peace in my country. And I disagree with every quasi-perspicacious person who disowns the ugly head of communalism as something they didn’t create, and are not a part of. Of course you are not. But everything is happening in your country, your state, your city. You may play pretend harmony with your friends but the country burns. If you say you can’t do anything to stop it, and that you are disgusted enough not to vote, you are wrong.

That you don’t vote, or choose to ignore what happens around you, just because you are ok, is where the world’s largest democracy fails. I am going to do something about it, in my own small way, maybe you should too. Remember, you celebrated 56 years of your independence a few days ago. Merry Independence day.