Shams Ur Rehman Alavi
In early 90s, right-wing leaders were addressing a public rally near my house. I was passing by and stopped.
There were fiery speeches, speakers were using terms like 'Babar ki aulaad' [Babar's descendants] for Muslims.
I met a 'friend' who was clapping, he saw and gave me smile but there was no awkwardness or shame in him.
I wondered how he is not uncomfortable. This was a 'friend'. I couldn't dare to imagine myself in a similar situation where my friend's religion is targeted or abused and I'm even listening, let alone clapping or feeling happy.
There were fiery speeches, speakers were using terms like 'Babar ki aulaad' [Babar's descendants] for Muslims.
I met a 'friend' who was clapping, he saw and gave me smile but there was no awkwardness or shame in him.
I wondered how he is not uncomfortable. This was a 'friend'. I couldn't dare to imagine myself in a similar situation where my friend's religion is targeted or abused and I'm even listening, let alone clapping or feeling happy.
This was not the first such instance. It happened later too, a boy whom I'd taught when he was in sixth and I was many years senior. He respected me a lot. I'd never charged him a penny for the tuition but then the transformation was really surprising.
For me, it was not the normal human reaction. It bothered me for years. I tried hard to figure out what gets into these people. In my college life too, it happened. Remember, it was all much before Gujarat riots or the Islamophobia across the world.
This is all pre-2000. It was painful. It still happens and now people are even more audacious, don't at all care about basic manners or civility. Those who hate an entire religion or community, generalize, make sweeping remarks. It is too irrational but it is around us.
Trolls have made it worse. But over a period, we develop our own mechanism to deal with it. I've learnt to sever any such relation. Someone who can't take a stand, who knows your for years but still doesn't stand with you, rather, use racist terms, can't be a friend.
I understood more in years to come, the entire process--how it happens, not just this reaction, but the entire psychology. Apart from the cocktail that consists of victimhood, the competition and the grudges, there is a a lot more.
So much is drilled in them about invaders, kings and wrongs committed for centuries, that it changes the personality. Every generation grows up with own experiences. It happened in the 1980s and 1990s. It happened in 2010s and 2020.
Photo. Arti Agarwal