With conflicts raging around the globe, Fear, Ignorance, and Conscience, engage in a dialogue sharing their feelings about communal fires raging within the Indian subcontinent.
Fear: We need to attack Pakistan. Enough is enough.
Ignorance: Pakistan is creating all the trouble.
Fear: Kashmir is ours. Ours only!
Ignorance: Why do they keep claiming support for the people of Kashmir?
Fear: Muslims just can’t live peacefully under Hindustani (Indian) rule.
Ignorance: Other minorities live peacefully in India. They have their rights.
Fear: It is always the Muslims. Look around the world. Every hot spot involves Muslims.
Conscience: But is it that simple? I mean look at Gujarat. Muslims burn alive 50 Hindus and look how the Hindus respond. Burn alive, rape thousands of Muslims. Hardly civilized.
Fear: You must be a secularist.
Conscience: Does that matter? Murder is murder, rape is rape, and terror is terror.
Fear: Muslims in Kashmir are un-patriotic. They sympathize with terrorists. Pakistan train these terrorists.
Conscience: What about Hindu terrorists in Gujarat? Who trains them?
Ignorance: But wait a minute. Kashmir and Gujarat are two different issues. In Kashmir we have outside intervention, in Gujarat we don’t.
Conscience: You mean to say the terror witnessed by innocent civilians in Kashmir is different from the terror seen by innocent civilians in Gujarat.
Ignorance: No. But the issue is national security.
Conscience: So national security is the unit of measurement here. Killing thousands of innocent Muslims is not terrorism. Does it mean that killing thousands of Sikhs in 1984 was not terrorism either?
Fear: There again it was the Sikhs who started it. Minorities just need to learn to live peacefully with the majority.
Conscience: You mean to say the majority is a peace loving, civilized group of people. Look at how the majority treats its women, millions of Dalits, the division of castes.
Ignorance: Even the minorities have those problems.
Fear: India is a Hindu nation for we are in overwhelming majority and have been here longer than anyone else. All the minorities are derived from the Hindus, even the Muslims and the Christians.
Conscience: If you are so sure of your Hindu faith, then why not let millions of Indians decide for themselves. Your superior faith should be self-evident and people should choose it willingly.
Fear: That is where you have the Christian missionaries and Muslim preachers deceiving the common man. The common man does not know any better.
Conscience: In India, Muslims and Christians came a lot later than Hindus. You had the time to instill the Hindu faith in the masses. How did the common man get convinced otherwise?
Ignorance: Must be the use of force by the Muslims and then Christians.
Fear: Yes and we have to erase thousands of years of oppression at the hands of outsiders.
Conscience: Assuming that all Muslims and Christians were converted by force, does that still justify killing innocent people in the name of national security?
Ignorance: Well it is unfortunate but it happens everywhere. Even the Americans do it. They have killed hundreds of civilians trying to root out the Muslim terrorists in Afghanistan.
Conscience: So it is ok to kill innocent people in the name of national security, and in the name of reclaiming the Hindu nation.
Fear: Yes. If we don’t kill the troublemakers then one day they will multiply and outnumber us.
Conscience: More than half a billion Hindus are in India, a nation with one of the fastest growing populations in the world. Looking at the frequency of communal violence it appears as if it is the Hindu terrorists who are multiplying.
Ignorance: Hindus don’t terrorize. We live in a democracy and we admit we have problems but terrorism, no.
Conscience: So those who killed thousands of Muslims in Gujarat, Sikhs in 1984 must not be Hindus.
Fear: We can go on like this forever. Your problem is that you do not understand your Hindu faith, your Hindu past.
Conscience: You are probably right. But it seems fear is what is driving all your arguments. Fear is what is driving Hindu aggression. Fear is what is leading millions of ignorant bystanders in India to believe that they are in danger from ‘Terror’, to condone mass murder.
Fear: You secularists are just like the minorities. They ask too many questions.
Ignorance: India has been a democracy for more than 50 years. Minorities have the same rights as the majority.
Conscience: Is this the reason why Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains are considered Hindus under Article 25 of the Indian Constitution. If they don’t profess to be Hindus then let them have the right to define their own identity.
Fear: If we let them do it, suddenly everyone else will ask for it.
Conscience: So now we are scared of many so-called Hindus asking for a separate identity. Tell me, do Dalits and Tribals see themselves as Hindus.
Ignorance: They are Hindus. What else could they be? They have lived in India for thousands of years.
Conscience: So that is what defines a Hindu. Having lived in this land for the longest time.
Fear: The Dalit boys also killed Muslims in Gujarat. They identify with Hindutva.
Conscience: Then why have thousands of Dalits embraced Buddhism in India? And why were many Dalits prevented from entering Delhi to take part in mass conversion to Buddhism a few months ago?
Ignorance: Their number is small. Most Dalits identify themselves as Hindus.
Conscience: How many Dalits have you approached with the question of religious identity?
Fear: There you go again. Asking too many questions. Be proud of the Hindu past, the Hindu achievements, and the Hindu gods.
Conscience: Is the nuclear arsenal part of that pride? Ready to sacrifice millions in the name of Hindutva.
Fear: Pakistan creates, supports and sends terrorists across the border. They threaten the use of nuclear weapons first.
Conscience: Didn’t India support Tamil terrorism in Sri Lanka? Would that have justified claims by Sri Lanka that India was the source of cross border terrorism in the ‘80s?
Ignorance: That was different. Sri Lanka mistreats its Tamil minority. It does not provide equal rights for the Tamils.
Conscience: We are certain that we don’t do the same to the people of Kashmir. We all see the world from our own biased lenses. Don’t we? Creating victims of us and aggressors of others. It is perfect. Easy, actually.
Fear: If there is a war, Pakistan will be annihilated, we will have our losses but Hindus will survive.
