The
Buddha will forgive. Should we?
Chandan Mitra
http://www.dailypioneer.com/secon2.asp?cat=BKBONE1&d=SUNDAYPIONEER/BACKBONE
The
desecration and destruction of the magnificent Buddha statues in Bamiyan,
Afghanistan, by Taliban marauders is especially painful and humiliating for
Indians. For the rest of the world, they are only heritage sites, but for us
they are symbols and surviving artifacts of our own history, culture and
civilisation. It is futile to condemn the Taliban for this act: You cannot
expect savages to be graced with table manners. And the Taliban have repeatedly
and proudly proclaimed their savagery. They have dragged a former President of
their own country out of the sanctified premises of the UN mission and hung him
by the neck in a public square. They have stoned women to death for allegedly
indulging in adultery, besides banishing them from schools and hospitals. They
have shot people in cold blood for not sporting a beard. They jubilantly
collaborated with the hijackers of the Indian Airlines plane in December 1999,
helping them force a humiliating deal out of our Government from Kandahar under
the benign gaze of the local commander.
The
infuriating part of all this is that the world is so helpless in such
situations. Just two decades ago, it was similarly helpless in the face of the
murderous Pol Pot regime in Cambodia that went about massacring a few million
people for the sheer joy of killing. Of course, the world was equally silent
when Stalin and Mao Zedong liquidated "class enemies" by the million
in their respective countries, but that was before the age of information dawned
upon us. As far as the Taliban are concerned, their barbarism is worse for it is
proclaimed with robust audacity. This time too, there was no hide-and-seek about
their iconoclasm. They elevated statue-breaking to state policy and justified it
on the specious ground of religion. Their arguments are so pathetic that even
their sponsor state, Pakistan, has been compelled to plead with them, at least
for the record, to desist from such savagery.
Now that
the bloodthirsty Taliban have terrorised the local population into cowering
submission, they need to find occupation for their unemployed soldiers. Also,
the regime must be worried that their tanks and rocket-launchers, bought with
money from the narcotics trade, could be rusting. So, what could be better than
sending their rag-tag army and artillery for some target practice to the Bamiyan
hills? The new recruits to the Taliban ranks will presumably be given less
arduous responsibilities like smashing statues inside the Kabul Museum, another
heritage site, with pick-axes and shovels. The UN and international heritage
organisations shall salve their consciences by issuing condemnations and/or
appeals. The US, which sallied into Afghanistan with Cruise missiles to destroy
the ever-elusive Osama bin Laden, can be trusted to maintain deafening silence
on this issue. Washington's machismo has recently been expended on some hapless
Air Traffic Controllers in Iraq!
Not that we can do very much about it, but the Taliban's insane effrontery
provides us occasion to introspect and perhaps resuscitate our shrinking concern
for India's civilisational heritage. Once
upon a time, Kandahar marked the western frontier of Indian empires. Ruled by
local Shaivite kings, much of Afghanistan was in the ambit of the Indo-Gangetic
culture. Gandhari, wife of Dhritara-shtra, belonged to Kandahar, underlying the
close ethno-cultural links between that region and today's Hindi heartland. The
Shaivite kingdoms of Kandahar were eventually replaced by Buddhist monarchies
during the centuries when Gautama Buddha's intellectual rebellion against the
heavy-handed Brahminical Hindu order won him adherents throughout our vast land.
Similarly to the East, Indian culture flourished, reaching islands as far as
Borneo and Bali. Some of it survives even today, evident from the quaint proto-Sanskritic
names that still prevail in Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia and Indonesia. Borneo's
capital, Bandar Seri Begawan is a colloquialisation of Sri Bhagwan, Bali's
headquarters, Jeyapora, is nothing but Jaipur, localised, just as Aranya Prathet
in Thailand is simply the jungle province or Aranya Pradesh. Fortunately, much
of the structure of the gigantic temple city of Angkor Vat has survived the
ravages of the Khmer Rouge, while Borobudur in Java still shines in resplendent
glory.
I am yet to see an Indian documentary on these subjects though. However, the BBC
commissioned a masterly serial on Angkor Vat some years ago, detailing the
efforts being made now, in association with the Archeological Survey of India,
to restore the damaged temple complex at Angkor in Cambodia. I
suppose any effort to educate today's generations of India's cultural heritage,
that too outside India's current borders, will invite charges of saffronisation
by our learned historians. Only a few months ago, they kicked up a
huge row over the grant of some money for a project to investigate the course of
the "mythical" Saraswati. I am amused by their eloquent silence in the
aftermath of the Gujarat quake, for satellite pictures have revealed
subterranean water channels, leading to speculation that the mighty Saraswati
might indeed still be flowing into the Arabian Sea, away from our gaze.
By the
time this appears in print, the barbarian rulers of Afghanistan would
undoubtedly have succeeded in their mediaeval mission. Having triumphed at home,
they might even try their hand at exporting iconoclasm to neighbouring
countries. Unfortunately, there are half-witted people across the globe that
might well fall prey to the Taliban's grotesque logic. Of course, they need to
be asked if the temple of Abu Simbel at Aswan with its gigantic statues,
relocated at vast expense when the dam was built there in the 1950s, also
constitutes an affront to religious sensibilities. But who's going the engage
the Taliban in dialogue? They neither hear nor speak any language apart from
that of the gun.
There are times when the world needs to intervene with physical force to stop
such inhuman atrocities, whether perpetrated on icons or people. The Taliban
represent a far bigger threat to civilisation than Radovan Karadic did in
Bosnia. Their passion for destruction does not stop at human lives. The more we
acquiesce in their barbarism through our silence, the more they get emboldened.
The liberation of Afghanistan from the stranglehold of these diabolical peddlers
of death and drugs has to be placed on the international agenda. Some tentative
steps were initiated last year jointly by the US, Russia and India in that
direction. That needs to be substantially upgraded and a concrete action plan
drawn up. The region controlled by the Taliban is too strategic to be left to
them or the Dr Frankensteins in Islamabad. The Taliban must be eliminated today
to secure humanity's tomorrow.
(*Buddha
is a Hindu god. He is the ninth avatar of Vishnu. Celebrated poets and devotees
such as Jayadev of Gitagovinda fame (12th C) sang about this in his composition
"Dasavataram." )
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