Your Humble Blogger was listening to the BBC this morning, and was surprised to find out that the commission looking in to the fire on the Sabarmati Express which sparked the awful riots in Gujarat two years ago has decided that it was accidental. That is, the whole story about a Muslim attack on the train was fiction, and the thousand Muslims slaughtered in the subsequent riots were not only individually innocent, as everyone must have known, but not even incidentally connected by culture or ethnicity to the nonexistent murderer.
I wasn’t sure which was worse. The idea that some horrible person had killed fifty people and started the thing was bad, so the nonexistence of that horrible person is, in theory, good. On the other hand, knowing that the horrible people who used the incident as an excuse for brutality did not even have or require that excuse is pretty bad, too.
Of course, the worst possible thing, presumably, would be to have the commission’s report dismissed as a political ploy, leaving those people most likely to be swayed by violent anti-Muslim rhetoric even more likely to believe any sort of hash served up to them by self-serving bigots. One of the lasting ill-effects of events of this kind is that the opportunity to reflect on them and learn from them, to protect yourself from getting involved in that sort of hatred and to repudiate those who do, is often ignored in favor of digging into deeper holes of certainty and isolation.
Not, on the whole, that I think there is much good that can come out of a thousand people or so locked in burning houses. Perhaps it makes me aware of my good luck in being American, where things like that simply do not happen on that scale. Not here at home, anyway.
Thank you,
-Vardibidian.
to some extent we are protected from messes by our ideals and our relative wealth, and to some extent our ideals and wealth are protected by our willingness to benefit from or cause messes in other places.