An Eye For An Eye

Mumbai, India [March 01, 2002]

by Rohan Dalal

I heard an unconfirmed report of the following incident in Gujarat  yesterday: a man wielding a machete cut open the pregnant belly of a woman, pulled out her unborn baby and hacked it to pieces in front of the woman's eyes before slitting her throat.

An act like this would surely move even a rabid dog to shame. Is religion responsible for this and other despicable expressions of anger and hate?

Inured to Machiavellian agendas of politicians - caught in the harsh glare of nationwide and global disrepute one views with skepticism the judicial enquiries being set up to find out who let the dogs out.  Sadly, the reality is that animals didn't do this; humans did. In the state of Gujarat.

It is a cruel twist of fate that the horrendous events since last Wednesday took place in the backyard of Mahatma Gandhi, repudiating in a flash of hatred the fifty-year old principles he so uniquely strived to instill in the cradle that was India. Even more ironic is that the train that was torched - setting off the ensuing mindless saga of destruction - bears the name of the ashram he built as a symbol of brotherly peace and tolerance.

That this cradle has turned into a fiery cauldron is our shameful testimony as citizens of the largest democracy on the planet. Religion has become the source of discrimination, not diversity.  At the crux lies Ayodhya.   How many lives has it claimed?  What will be the body count before a solution is found?

Maybe a historical example can help. The Hagia Sophia is a very special edifice in Istanbul, towering over the city, and arguably the single most visited tourist spot in Turkey.  For centuries it stood at the heart of two of the worlds great religions: To Christians it was Hagia Sophia, Church of the Holy Wisdom, mother church of the Orthodox faith and of the thousand-year-old Byzantine Empire. To Muslims, it became Ayasofya Camii, Mosque of Holy Wisdom and jewel of Istanbul.  It was first built in the 6th century A.D. as a church and subsequently converted to a mosque in the 15th century by the Ottoman invaders who conquered Constantinople. For 500 years since then it became the cause of fomenting hatred between the offended Christians and devotees of Islam. Last century, Kemal Ataturk, the progressive Turkish leader, appalled by the severe religious tumult and strife it caused in his country, closed the mosque in 1932 and reopened it 1934 as not a church or a mosque - a national museum.  Nearly 15 centuries after it was built, the Hagia Sophia now stands as a monument of unification to both human and divine wisdom.

If history can teach us a way to stop the bloodletting, let it be so. Unfortunately, the minimum requirement here would be progressive leadership and the initiative of another once-great edifice, the Supreme Court of India, where the matter of Ayodhya now rests. Maybe there is a solution in this; maybe not. Nevertheless, the example is right there for us to see.  Unless, as Gandhi said, an eye for an eye is making the whole nation blind.