A fine sentiment, called sympathy, missing
For some time now, minorities across the country have been at risk. Young women are denied education on flimsy grounds, dietary rituals of minorities are attacked, meat shops are forcibly shut, crude shelters and workplaces of poor Indians are bulldozed and Muslims are relentlessly bullied by mobs brandishing deadly weapons and shouting provocative slogans. And the rest of us stand by and watch!
The spectacle of Indians being reduced to an audience readily consuming violence causes unease. There is something lacking in our society —perhaps, a vital element of fine minds called sympathy.
“How selfish soever a man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it….[Emotion], like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous and the humane… The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society is not altogether without it.”
These are the opening lines of 18th-century Scottish moralist Adam Smith’s magnificently crafted The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Though Smith is better known for his theory of self-interested action, in this work, he focused on the capacity of human beings for an ‘original passion’ that he called sympathy. Sympathy is more than fellow-feeling. Persons are able to feel another’s pain and grieve for their calamities because they possess imagination. We can experience the torture our brother suffers on the rack through our imagination. We can forge bonds of sympathy with people we may never meet. We can be happy together and mourn together.
Our Constitution establishes a relationship between the citizens and the government. Notably, our Constitution also creates a political community because all citizens share obligations to constitutional norms. We inhabit a community of fate; the lives of others intersect with ours. If the rights of our fellow citizens are violated, we should be concerned. We should be aware that indifference to violence cheapens us and damages society. What kind of a society is based on selfishness and indifference?
The notion of a political community, relatively autonomous of the rites of procedural politics, reiterates a truth that is often overlooked by legal jurists. A society cannot be held together only by the dry bones of law. Legal ties prove brittle, laws are subverted, corrupted and ignored. Law inhabits a cold hard place. Political communities should be able to reach out to vulnerable sections of society and to connect with each other. Otherwise, we will continue to live in the Hobbesian pre-political state of potential war against others.
In India, the construction of a political community provided an alternative identity and alternative politics to the hate that had consumed people during the Partition. The consequences of the Partition were appalling. Approximately eight million Hindus and Sikhs moved from what is now Pakistan to India, and six to seven million Muslims from India migrated to Pakistan between 1947 and 1951 in one of the largest involuntary migrations the world had seen.
Poet Firaq Gorakhpuri had famously written: “Sar Zamine-e-Hind par aqwame-e-alamke Firaq/ Kafile baste gaye/Hindostan banta gaya.” India was created as a plural society, wrote the poet, by successive waves of migration.
In 1947, the situation was reversed. India witnessed processions of bedraggled, dispossessed people travelling from the East to the West, and from the West to the East of Punjab. As processions of dispossessed and demoralised individuals, for whom the homeland had become an alien space, crossed each other, they clashed. About one million people were killed in bloody massacres, and half of this number was in Punjab alone.
The horrors of the Partition reduced Indians to their primal identities — Hindu, Sikh and Muslim. But there is always an alternative identity. In MS Sathyu’s poignant 1974 film Garm Hava, Salim Mirza, played brilliantly by Balraj Sahni, is forced to migrate to Pakistan. He reluctantly climbs on to a tonga. And then the political miracle happens. He sees a procession carrying a red flag adorned with the hammer and sickle. Salim Mirza climbs down, straightens his cap, and joins the procession. There is an alternative to the blood-soaked politics of religious violence — it is solidarity.
When religion is politicised, it diminishes us as human beings. Make no mistake: those of us who stand by and silently watch our fellow citizens being bullied and butchered participate in hate crimes. We lose the finer feelings that mark even the most hardened ruffian, as Smith had remarked.
It was precisely solidarity that motivated Russian poet Anna Akhmatova’s famous poem Requiem Without a Hero. In the 1930s, thousands of Russians were rounded up and sent to the Gulag. Anna spent 17 months waiting in long queues outside a jail in Leningrad to find out what had happened to her son. She began the Requiem with these heart-rending lines: “No, not under a foreign sky/Nor in the shelter of a foreign wing/ With my people there stood I/With them in their suffering.”
How many of us stand with our own people when they are attacked? And if we do not do so, are we not diminished as human beings? How readily we get swept up in a storm of hate against innocent Indians who have laboured for this country! How easily we forget that we are capable of sympathy and solidarity!
