Of the wrong kind

The huge ghost that is now 9/11 is back to haunt us again, as it has done every year since 2001, when the World Trade Centre came crashing down in a cloud of lethal rubble. In contrast, in some strange manner, the other two equally deadly crashes – one into the Pentagon, the other into a field – has left an eerie emptiness that has little significance, even though memorial meetings are held and the bereaved still weep as heart-brokenly. Death has no measurable magnitude, but destruction does, and what happened in Manhattan overwhelmed humanity and continues to do so, especially since every excruciatingly moment of it was captured on film and beamed over television networks the world over.

For us, as Indians, that day has begun an inheritance that magnifies what we already had and will probably always have – a fear of being rejected, of being stigmatised, of being unfavoured. Because post-9/11 there was a wave, albeit not too unmanageably strong, of feeling against Asians, especially of Muslims, which still exists, now tempered to more ‘civilised’ levels. The ‘terror plot’ unearthed in the UK, planned on the lines of a much larger are far more terrifying and devastating 9/11 brought all the negativity back. But why? What is the point of the bias? Are all brown-skins, Asians, Muslims (at one time, after the Kanishka crash or Indira Gandhi's murder, it was the Sikhs) the bad guys?

In a way, the prejudice is justified. Sort of. After all, the proven villains of the terrorism piece are Muslims, from an Eastern country, people who have no compunctions blowing up planes, the innocent and themselves, all for a cause that, according to those who have studied and understood the true meaning of the religion, does not exist. (I have just finished editing a piece by a Muslim writer of some repute that demands to know what makes a Muslim kill, particularly because nothing in the Koran suggests he should or does condone it.) But then, as my editor point out, there is a reason, a justified one, for a certain degree of racial profiling to be done by security agencies, since there is a known set of parameters that define the terrorist in today’s world, and these groups fit.

But in a manner that I have never understood, the tag of ‘Muslim’ tends to cause eyebrows to rise along with hackles, and a cold distance to be established between people who could normally be close friends. It has happened to me often enough during my life in Delhi, when people who were in one moment very chatty and bonhomous turned, in the very next, into icicles, making me feel like a very bad smell, when they found that my own intimate circle of friends and family included those who were followers of – gasp – Islam. A buddy in Karachi and I often speak about this and wonder how people we know can behave thusly. After all, we wouldn’t, why would they? And they are part of the same social milieu, right?

Ask yourself a question, the way I ask it of myself. You do have discriminations, you and I both know and accept that. But which ones? And why? Is it a religion that you have a bias for or against, or a personality? A social group, or a type of individual? Is it a belief system that you cannot accept, or x, y or z’s thoughts and affiliations? Think about it.