Trials of faith

Illustration/Uday Mohite

As I travel in another country right now, the news from home is dark, and my heart sinks a little more each day. Physical disconnect creates a different despair, as if watching a last light burn out on a distant hill.

The violence in North East Delhi echoes the 1992-93 riots Bombay saw in which police were not just complicit, but active, insisting people say Jai Shri Ram, then killing them. It is haunted by ghosts of Gujarat in 2002. And yet, this is different because social media shows it to us so much more graphically; because it came on the heels of two months of peaceful protest; and because the state machinery is so avidly and nakedly in its favour, not even maintaining fig leafs of decorum. To hold on to faith in anything as this cruelty and injustice dwarf life, seems impossible.

And yet, holding on to faith is the option that so many, including those directly affected by violence have taken. We sometimes see people stamp their feet at religion in these moments, holding it responsible for violence and narrow-mindedness. Politicised religious identity does often fuel barbaric violence. Buddhists in Sri Lanka, Muslims and Christians from the Crusades to colonialism, Hindus in India, have all demonstrated this.

But, what of those who have drawn from religious faith to believe in the best iteration of being human? The Sikh community who, declaring they hope not to see 1984 repeat itself, have stepped up repeatedly in the last few months to support Kashmiris, to cook at Shaheen Bagh and now, to open the doors of gurudwaras across Delhi for the victims of violence in the BJP-led constituency of North East Delhi. The Christian community has done the same with churches and schools in Delhi.

In the affected areas too, such gestures gleam in the ashes, persistent embers of a different, positive fire: Muslims surround a temple in Chand Bagh to prevent any harm coming to it despite having been attacked by Hindutva mobs. The women of Seelampur returned to their protest site on Wednesday.
Some friends, pursued their faith in democratic principles as they pushed to get a midnight hearing to allow ambulances into burning areas. Young journalists kept their professional faith reporting against all odds and intimidation. Karwan-e-Mohabbat started relief work while the Delhi government tweeted. A young artist shared a drawing of people darning torn fabric, a gift to those mending the world. Some friends, even in despondency, fixed to meet their MLA to discuss a long-term response solution.

Efforts to understand the roots of Hindutva resentment, aren-t always equivalent either. One must struggle to understand the world and where hate comes from, to find responses other than contempt for it, even in one-s anger. The principle of understanding difference, while upholding one-s values, is not the same as endorsing violence.

Such times feel like breakdowns of belief, with a cynical media and social environment. But we cannot afford to lose faith confronted by a wave of those who have no faith - to hate another religion is not the same as loving one-s own. As one song goes, "chalo ki khatm ho na jaayein, zindagi ki hasratein." It is indeed a darkness to have belief in nothing but violent supremacy, which we must, in all humility and variety, refuse to be engulfed by.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com

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