Sai Mukhesh
Harmony and hatred can coexist within individuals, at the same time, from different religious communities. This is not a matter of harmony being present in the distant past, only to be replaced by hatred after some incident. In the Indian subcontinent—with a long history of communal tensions—it is difficult to understand what the public’s collective memory is capable of; more often than not, the collective memory pushes for a black-and-white understanding of the different communities and their values. Given this complexity, one could stoke up the tension or appeal to the good common to human beings. While the former is the raison d’être of the RSS and its front-end organizations, the latter is the grounding principle of Mahatma Gandhi. His assassination also shows how dangerous it is to be good. A life-long appeal to recognize sameness among differences—i.e., the good common to all souls, necessary for valuing human qua humans without ideological pretensions—killed him.
Engaging with his idea of good is important if we understand what living together despite differences means. His insistence on the good is a recurring theme. He constantly affirmed that,
Good is a self-acting force. Evil is not, because it is a negative force. It requires the cloak of virtue before it can march forward. (Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (CWMG), Vol. 35, 464)
In another instance, he made it very clear how the self-acting force of the good is the fundament of his idea of non-violent resistance:
The whole science of satyagraha is based on faith in all living beings. The faith may well prove wrong in the end…Satyagrahis believe that sin does not have the strength to exist independently on its own…That is to say, evil subsists on the strength of the good. If this is true…[evil] will perish on [its] own provided we do
not help…In this reasoning lies the origin of no-cooperation. (Mahatma, Vol. 42, 24)
Some may argue that concepts like good, bad, truth, and satyagraha are no longer relevant, a sentiment that is perhaps understandable in this post-truth era (I’ve discussed post-truth elsewhere). Are these ideas truly obsolete? Could our experiences be sacrificed in favor of some grand, extraordinary imagination, perhaps shaped by our shopping mall existence? Or, as a dogmatist might claim, have we simply outgrown these ideas? Just take a moment to reflect. Everyday experiences seem to point to a different story. I want to reflect and share a personal, ordinary life experience of friendship—one that is now increasingly tinged with unease, a kind of dissonance, perhaps stemming from the activities carried out in the name of a militant vision of Rama-rajya.
For a long time, before mobile phones became everyday objects, although almost all homes had the Cello alarm clock, it was the rooster that woke my grandmom up, and if she was not in a mood to wake up to the rooster’s call, she knew she would wake up to the sound of Fajr. In those days, we had a dog named Jackie, who would sing along to Fajr and wake me up. While my grandmother decorated the front of the house using muggu, our Muslim neighbor would stop by for her morning chat. She always encouraged me to learn Hindi and Urdu as a kid and taught me the Hindi alphabet, which made my life easier at school.
My uncle often shared stories about how, as a young boy in the village, his favorite festival was Muharram. Though traditionally a time of mourning, in some villages in Telangana, the relic procession, known as Alam, was an occasion for children to dance alongside it. My uncle loved dancing in the procession and even carrying the relic. At the time, no one thought twice about Hindus joining the Muharram processions—Muslims welcomed them, and Hindus didn’t consider it an exclusively Muslim event. I remember Hindus regularly attending the procession, and I, too, walked alongside it many times.
Today, Muslims are often viewed with suspicion, and even my neighbors, with whom we once shared harmonious relationships, have not been exempt from this shift in perception. Over time, a set of troubling narratives about Muslims began to circulate within our town, portraying them as outsiders and enemies of the nation. Stories proliferated, claiming that Muslims are descendants of Turks and Mughals, foreign to India, inherently backward, uninterested in progress, and intent on converting others to Islam if given the freedom to do so. These stereotypes—layered with historical distortions and communal anxieties—have become ingrained in the social fabric.
When I remind my grandmother, uncle, or friends about the fond memories we once shared with our Muslim neighbors—the chats, the festivals, the mingling during Muharram processions—their usual response is a telling silence. This silence, I believe, signals a deeper discomfort, a dissonance between the warmth of those past relationships and the divisive ideologies that now pervade the present. It’s not that they are angry or hateful toward Muslims; they still shop together, take morning walks, and share daily experiences. Yet, these same people accept the growing stereotypes about Muslims as if trapped between two worlds—one shaped by their lived experiences of friendship and another molded by a dangerous ideology.
This dissonance is not easy to explain, but one contributing factor seems to be the ideological project of building a great Hindu nation, a vision promoted under the guise of virtuous action. In everyday life, however, people do not operate according to the stark divisions prescribed by political ideologues. The ideologues thrive on amplifying unease, projecting a future defined by conflict and separation. But ordinary people, despite the influences of these narratives, have to live together, and more often than not, they do. This tension—the coexistence of ideological pressures with the human need for connection—defines much of the current social landscape.
And it was Gandhi who thought more than anybody else about these questions. Gandhi would say human kindness and generosity are universal, and since bestiality is unnatural, only through non-violent dialogue and action can one reason their way through and out of this dissonance, if not to the perfectly harmonious existence, at least to the non-violent state of affairs.
The statement from one of the above citations from CWMG, “The faith may well prove wrong in the end,” was true in light of bloody massacres during partition, 1984, and 2oo2. However, it only teaches us not to raise our sum total bestiality to such a level that no amount of reasoning works. That is, here and now, not later on, stand up and say no. People operating on the plane of profundity—for example, some professors in academia—may not be capable of seeing what scores of people in India saw in Gandhi.
This man taught us to “Stand up, Say no,” and do you, my dear reader, not think it is relevant forever for the people of this country?
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Nina Martyris on the trustee of time
उड जायेगा हंस अकेला / जग दर्शन का मेला – Remembering Mahatma Gandhi
Duty of disloyalty. M. K. Gandhi (1930)
Anil Nauriya: Gandhi on secular law and state (2003)
Gandhi During Partition: A Case Study in the Nature of Satyagraha
After the truth-shower 