There was a time when peace prevailed in this country and the bond of brotherhood gave a setback to the British forces and compelled them to quit India. But no one knew that the seed they had sown before departing would turn out to be so fatal for us. It is extremely astonishing when one hears of those tales and bedtime stories from our elders of universal humanity, eternal love and unity projected by the countrymen not a very long while ago.
It’s equally disheartening to see those ideas fade away. We are failing as a society to understand that we are heading towards catastrophe. The country which set a brilliant example globally of unity in diversity has become a victim of communal violence and religious intolerance. Resorting to blame game has become so rampant and is leaned onto every time. Killing and terrorizing in the name of either religion or animal should be condemned equally. There are a chunk of believers who presume that taking innocent lives will attain them Jannat and there are another group of people who assume that a life of an animal, however holy it is remains more precious than a life of an innocent human. We have other groups also who want to emphasize their religion and caste and resort to violence conveniently.
And this is happening because the unaffected part of the society are not paying much heed to the incidents which needs our dire attention. The chunk of the population who reads about the ongoing incidents in the newspaper and express their sorrow or anger for few seconds and gets back to their busy lives are unable to comprehend that, “If not today but someday, which is very soon, you will get affected by this”.
And they ask, “What can we as a society do ?”
For starters, we can not turn our back to injustice and inequality, may be? We can as a society take a stand and condemn violence uniformly. A young boy, Junaid Khan is lynched in a moving train and no one dares to come ahead; a police officer ,Ayub Pandit is beaten to death in front of a mosque and not one man comes to save him; travelers heading to Amarnath Yatra are killed by militants; we also have cases of people with disabilities, Vaibhav shukla(100%blind) and Suvarna Raj(wheelchair bound) where they are mistreated; women are still treated as second citizens in many parts of our country and lower caste people remain ostracized. We can all not turn a blind eye towards all of these social evils that are embedded in our society and break away the shackles of enmity and bitterness for each other. We can accept humans as they are irrespective of their religion, caste and gender. We can propagate peace and impart such values to the generations ahead and not let the hate mongers get away with political as well as religious benefits.
Let’s first preach humanity then follow our religions.
Because if we don’t take a stand today, all of this is going to wreak havoc very soon.
-MOMENA QAISAR.