Condemn the terror strike in new zealand

Condemn the terror strike in new zealand

Hatred that kills randomly no group’s monopoly.

The Chinese might take time to digest this, but the mass shooting of Muslims at prayer in Christchurch, New Zealand, was a terror attack. We join the world’s sane majority in condemning the act of terror and condoling the deaths, whose count stands at 49 at the time of writing. Ideologies of hatred, evidently, are not the monopoly of any particular faith or ethnic group. The white supremacist who trained, planned and executed the attack and live-streamed the video captured by a helmet-mounted camera, followed in the footsteps of Anders Breivik, the Norwegian farright terrorist who shot down 69 members of a political youth camp, after blowing up a van with eight passengers inside. Their ideological DNA abhors any blurring of ethnic, religious or cultural identities. Such people and their organisations hate multiculturalism and the coexistence of diverse communities.

In India, with its dominant polytheistic religion and eclectic pursuits of spirituality shaping a tradition that fails to recognise deviance in theology, tolerance is an inferior aberration from the rule of acceptance. All rivers flow to the same ocean, was the analogy used by Vivekananda. All religions seek the same destination but wind their separate routes to it. Unfortunately, India also allows open drains to flow into those rivers, literally and metaphorically. Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam — the world is one family — remains the official motto, but who says families cannot have the divisions, jealousies and feuds that our television serials so zealously portray, to be lapped up with evident enjoyment by our multicultural masses? The short point is that India, which should offer itself as a shining example of multicultural coexistence to a globalising world, carries the genetic mutation that has fatal consequences of the kind New Zealand has experienced.

It is the job of politics to spot and defeat such deviant trends, even as some strains of politics will seek to capitalise on them to amass some extra votes. For the condolences pouring out from diverse quarters in India for New Zealand’s terror victims to mean anything, politics must do its job of cleansing social values.