Right Turn (November 21)

If the devastating attacks at the World Trade Center on September 11 has virtually turned the confidence of the world upside down, it must be said that it has also seemingly given the moral edge, however superficial, to the militant rightist argument that the only effective conflict resolution is through the annihilation of the opponent. 

Right now, in the case of the face of the US bombing of Afghanistan to avenge the September 11 terror, speaking out against such an aggressive stance has been made to seem unpatriotic, anti-national and more than that as the American President George Bush said it, and many other are parroting now, anti-civilizational as well. 

The war against terror has been so forcefully portrayed as a clash between good and evil, that any argument  has been made to appear sinful. The whole issue has been reduced to just two colors. It is either black or white, evil or good. To quote again the chief protagonist of this “crusade” George Bush "You are either with us or against us." 

Everybody, it seems has lost his or her right to see beyond just these two choices. To use a terminology from the photography dark room, a moral pasteurization process has happened so completely, eliminating all shades of gray that fall between the colors black and white. Eclipsed in the process has also been freethinking and free vision. But we reiterate again, every violent movement need not necessarily be equated with terrorism.

Terror must not only fight, but fought on all fronts. One of these fronts is to identify the causes of terrorism and root them out. Although the seeming success of the US strategy at the moment makes the exercise of introspection on the issue seem redundant, it is still too early to say if terrorism has been defeated. The sense of relief on the faces of ordinary Afghans at being freed of the Taliban's medieval savagery is indeed a joy to watch but it should not be confused with the original objective of obliterating terrorism. 

It may yet turn out that vanquishing the Taliban and freeing Afghanistan from the warp it had been trapped in, is not equivalent to ending terrorism. For it would be wrong to believe that history is mere a sequence of unrelated string of events  "one damn fact after another". There ought to be a lesson for everyone in American's own involvement in Afghanistan's history.

Back home too there has been an upsurge in ultra rightist thinking ever since September 11. The opportunistic floating of the POTO in the wake of the attacks at the World Trade Center is just one instance. Although it is now evident the ordinance has a slim chance of being cleared by the parliament to become an Act, the overriding mood of discarding the old philosophy's own insurgencies by their roots, will most probably linger. 

While it is true the extraordinary law and order situation that comes along with these instructions make some extraordinary laws handy, and that if not for the defunct TADA the conspirators in Rajiv Gandhi's assassination may never have been convicted, it must also not be forgotten that unlike the US bombing Afghanistan, a country many thousand miles away from it, in the Indian scenario, be it in Kashmir or the northeast, the prospect is civil war. 

(Courtesy: The Imphal Free Press)

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