Picture from First Post |
Lately, I have been wondering where this country is heading,
looking into the recent happenings all over the country. Atleast forty people have died in communal
riots in Muzaffarnagar so far. If newspapers are to be believed the chain of
events is like this, a Muslim youth stalked and sexually harassed a Hindu girl.
Two men (apparently her brothers) killed him in a fit of rage. This sparked
anger in other community resulted in the lynching of two youths. Meanwhile, a
video got viral showing a mob lynching two youths. Though that was shot in the Afghanistan
some two years ago but people thought this is the same incident involving two
youths. Some persons from Hindu community gathered for the revenge. On the way
while returning home they were attacked leaving approximately eight persons
dead and the riot followed and now mostly those persons are suffering who didn’t
have anything to do with that riot.
Tell this story to persons from any
developed country and it will be very hard for them to believe that a fake
video could spark so much of violence in the country. How could watching a
video make them kill other people?
These incidents are the result of religious extremists
and this extremism is going to destroy
mankind very quickly if this continues. Whenever something hurts the sentiments of
people, they demand banning of that. When M. F. Hussain drew paintings of nude
god many Hindu groups cried foul, some even attacked his house and vandalized his
artwork. When Salman Rushdie wrote Satanic Verses he had to face outrage from
the Muslim world. Similarly, Dan Brown had to face criticism from Christian
community. Taslima Nasreen was forced to
leave Bangladesh as she was critical of Islam in particular and religion in general. A cartoonist was put behind bars by Mamta
Banerjee for depicting the prevalent situations there.
A month or two
before, an IAS officer, who was checking on illegal sand mining, was suspended
by state government citing the reasons that she hurt religious sentiments of
people. Her dutiful act was convicted of a crime which was against religious
sentiments of people. These ‘religious
sentiments’ were behind the scenes all the time and people were driven by
religion. In my opinion, if they think they saved the country and by banning
the above mentioned people, to really save the country by all these unfortunate
events, they should have banned religion so that no innocent people would get
killed in riots, no writer, painter or any other type of artist would face such
fate and not a single honest officer would be suspended for doing her duty. Those people should be banned from living who
become killing machine by watching any stupid video, painting, poster or by
listening to any speech full of hatred.
As a student I am concerned because this is not what I was taught at my schools, this is not what I read in my books and more importantly this is going to harm my future. As a citizen I am concerned because I never want my fellow citizens to meet such faith despite of the religion they follow. As a son or a brother, I can feel the agony which those families are going through after losing their family members.
I know this article might hurt the sentiment
of some religious extremists as I am asking them to close their business,
deterring them from doing terrible things which they do in the name of religion.
If they get a chance to read this and who knows they might even ban this blog
or bar me from writing but fortunately I am not that popular and they would
never bother because they know that a video spreading hatred would do more harm
than a blog post from a common man who wanted to change the mindset of people from
immorality to morality would do any good.
Why can’t we stop this stupidity in the name
of religion?
Why can’t we live together as a family, as a human being?
Why can’t we live together as a family, as a human being?
Why
can’t we be so strong and rational so as not to driven furious by a fake video?
and most importantly why can’t we head towards a better tomorrow???