As a Hindu from India, I feel shaken by a remark by Moumita Alam, a Muslim poet from West Bengal. On December 2 she wrote this sentence in the online journal TheWire.in:
“The jubilation in India when Israeli forces kill innocent Palestinians is bone chilling.”
We can’t know figures or percentages, but there is no doubt that a number of Hindus in India have celebrated the killing of Palestinians. They have done so from intoxication. “We Hindus are now running the show in India. Finally, after centuries of Muslim or European rule, and decades of appeasing India’s Muslims, we are on top. Muslims are at our mercy. And in the Middle East, too, Israel is giving it to Muslims.”
Such bragging forgets that dominance over others, whether exercised by an individual, a racial or religious group, or a nation, always runs into limits. It does not extend for all time or everywhere.
Comprising a great majority in India, Hindus are a minority everywhere else in the world, except in Nepal. Millions of close relatives of India’s Hindus live today in the Gulf. Every country in today’s Middle East, and almost every Muslim-majority country in Africa, contains large numbers of Hindus who have intimate ties to India’s Hindus. Bangladesh and Pakistan hold millions of vulnerable Hindus.
Taunting India’s Muslim minority invites danger on the heads of Hindus outside India and is therefore a reckless act. Being a rejection of age-old Hindu prescriptions against ill-will, it is also an anti-Hindu act. Above all, it is a shameful and pitiable act: there is nothing even remotely admirable in humiliating someone who is down or weak.
Of course, the primary fault of the Palestinians whose deaths bring “jubilation” to a section of India’s Hindus is that they are Muslim. If, as poet Alam indicates, that reaction chills Muslim bones in India, at least some Hindu consciences are fired up to ask for basic humanity in Gaza.
If even one Israeli woman was raped by them, Hamas’s attackers deserve to forfeit sympathy. Still, we must ask: how many Palestinian babies should be killed for every Israeli woman raped by Hamas? If dozens were raped, should the world therefore condone the explosion into fragments of thousands of Palestinian children, and of tens of thousands of Palestinian homes? Should it condone forcing thousands of elderly women and men to run again and again from one temporary shelter to another, with bombs falling close to them?
Wicked deeds merit stern responses, but the obliteration with bombs of thousands of human beings with no connection to the perpetrators of those deeds except that of physical proximity, race, or nationality will be recorded in history as genocide. Not as retaliation.
And history will also record the names and nationalities of those financing, arming, or celebrating the devastation.
These are beliefs or predictions. However, exhortation too is called for. The world must demand an immediate ceasefire in the Israel, Palestine, and Gaza area, to be followed by urgent discussions on ensuring the complete security of a well-defined but strictly demarcated and confined Israel, and the independence and security of an adequate and restored Palestinian state from which forcibly installed Israeli settlements are taken out.
If this is not feasible, then the world, inclusive of all the Permanent Members of the Security Council, ought to empower the U.N. to take over and administer the entire area – all of Israel and all of Palestine -- and enforce peace in it.
Neither will happen. Smooth words from the world’s high tables hide a raw truth. Which is this: there are parts of our 21st-century earth where the law of the jungle must be allowed to prevail. Hands with the bigger gun and bomb, and the cleverer AI device, should be able raise the banner of triumph on a blood-soaked, bone-rich desert.
And great news: maybe the desert still has lots of hidden oil.