Skip to main content

God’s men?

 

Image from The Guardian

The problem with organisations like the Taliban and the Sri Rama Sena or Bajrang Dal is that they make choices for everyone in the country. The Taliban decides what the people of Afghanistan will wear, eat, learn, etc. The myriad right-wing organisations in India make similar choices for Indians though they haven’t yet reached the extremes of the Taliban. They will. It’s just a matter of time. Once the descent begins, it gathers momentum more rapidly than you imagine. All degeneration is like the avalanche: small beginning and disastrous ending.

Who wants to make decisions for everyone in the country? Who decides what everyone should wear, eat, drink, which god they will worship, which language they will speak, who they will love or hate? The answer is obvious. Only those who think they possess all truths can make such choices for everyone.

The Taliban think they are the custodians of all the essential truths. One such essential truth is that the television, music and cinema are immoral. Another: girls aged 10 and over should not study in schools. These custodians of truths are against knowledge, arts, and science. They think ignorance is innocence. They think morality is the edge of their sword. Their god is not very unlike a mafia don.

Last month, when the Taliban tightened their tentacles in many parts of Afghanistan, a directive was issued to religious leaders to provide a list of girls over 15 and widows under 45 for ‘marriage’ with Taliban fighters. For the women in Afghanistan, hell is just beginning. The women of Afghanistan won’t forget what the Taliban did to them when the outfit was in power during 1996-2001.

Is it about morality, truth, goodness? No way. It’s about who controls whom? It’s about power.

If it was about morality, truth and goodness, people would welcome it. Instead people are fleeing Afghanistan. They are jumping into airplanes. Some of them are hanging on the tyres. And they are falling off the planes from the skies. If the Taliban was bringing paradise, would the people be killing themselves this way?

The Taliban is giving to people what they want, not what the people want. They are not people’s leaders. Are they god’s men? Well, you decide. And don’t forget we have similar creatures in the making in India right now.

A paragraph from Tariq Ali's book, The Clash of Fundamentalisms

 xxx

 

 

 

Comments

  1. Hari OM
    Appreciating the personal anger generated (trust me, there is gnashing of teeth and wailing in The Hutch at the state of Kabul today), it must also be understood that none of this, ultimately has anything at all to do with any Non-Earthly Presence and everything to do with greed and power. What is more, it is not the power you may think.

    As you quote Tariq Ali's book which was a repsonse to 9/11 and which holds clear arguments as to the influence of 'the west' (read USA in particular) in all these regions and how it actually is a causative factor, this recent discourse from TA may interest you. In it he mentions 'listen to the bells tolling in Kabul'... the filming was four months back.

    What is happening is an international disgrace. Within that wider scope, at the local level, what is happening could be considered a crime against humanity. Both of these are political in nature and require political response.

    Closer still, pertaining to the tract you chose to share in the image, is the personal effect by some on some. There we have crimimal behaviours within the structure of society. A societal injury requires societal treatment.

    In the political arena, we are at the mercy of those we elect (or elected by majority, whether we voted there or not). Change can oly be effected by the majority lobbying and voting. In the societal arena, any one of us can make a difference and take a lead in making change.

    The great problem for Afghanistan and India at the moment is that these two things have been conflated. The unholy union of religion and state - the most 'ungodlike' of situations. Very difficult to see this ending in anything short of tragedy... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Even the US media doesn't seem happy about what their country did to Afghanistan. They took over Afghanistan from the Taliban 20 years ago and now handed it back to them just like that. What was the point of all those exercises and killings? I can't understand this kind of power-games. "International disgrace," indeed. It's time the world took serious actions against this sort of things.

      Yes, again, we are the mercy of the very people whom we elect to power. Bregman is right: Democracy is not the government of the people but of the elected leaders. And if the leaders are useless, what can the people do?

      Delete
  2. You've said it as it is.
    Watching the events unfold, it feels like we're speeding towards our own end with our eyes closed.
    Fundamentalism, as you've said, is exactly like an avalanche.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I have been questioning religion itself for many years precisely because of its misuse like this. The good done by religions seems so insignificant in comparison.

      Delete
  3. Agree with every word of your article. It's agonizingly astonishing that the world at large (including the so-called progressive countries as well as the UN) appears to be silently supporting Taliban.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I think the West is just washing its hands off the entire mess they created in the first place.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation