Of beliefs and bullets

Looks like expressing opinions that do not conform to the dogmas of some community or other is not just injurious to health but life threatening too. Two years ago, Narendra Dhabolkar, doctor and rationalist was shot dead in Pune for questioning established dogmas and superstitions and now it is the turn of M.M.Kalburgi.


The 77-year-old Kannada litterateur and rationalist was gunned down in his home in Dharwad , Karnataka on Sunday. He was known for ruffling the feathers of his own Lingayat community with his controversial analysis of the poems of Lingayat saints including the sect’s founder Basavesvara and another saint Chennabasava and their families.


He was forced to recant his views once for claiming that Basaveswara had only a platonic relationship with his second wife and that Chenna Basava was the sect founder’s nephew who was born to Basava’s sister from a cobbler.


He said he recanted the views to save the lives of his family members.”But I committed intellectual suicide that day”.


He had asked for police security, A token security was initially given but withdrawn later. Aftera all, who was he? He was no VIP politician, member of a tribe that hides behind Z category security but just an ordinary scholar.And why offend a major vote bank by attempting to protect someone who rubbed the members of the Lingayat community the wrong way.?


This murder is another classic illustration of our cultural, moral and social downslide. But it is not clear to me whether I should feel sad at the killing of a brave man orr hold my head up in pride that the crusade for promoting rational thinking has become so influential that it has made peddlers of blind faith jittery enough to arrange the killing of a harmless old scholar and writer..


Now let the blame games begin. The two main parties in the state Congress and BJP will point accusing fingers at each other. But show me one political party in the country with the exception of communists who don’t try to woo voters on the basis of religion, caste etc?


What is really alarming is the growing intolerance of opinions contrary to those held unthinkingly for centuries, intolerance of people who probe and question established myth and look for the truth behind them and hatred of those who question religious dogmas.
Few years ago there was pressure on Delhi university to remove from syllabus an essay by the poet A.K. Ramanujan on Ramayana. Ramanujan’s sin was he pointed out there are more versions of the epic than the “official” telling of the tale accepted by the Hindu orthodoxy. The killing of the Kannadiga litterateur is an extreme instance of that kind of mindset.


The intolerance ensures that ideas and beliefs are not open to debate an unhealthy departure from the age-old Indian practice of constant intellectual debates that nurtured not only tolerance but acceptance of contrarian opinions But looks like we are living in an age of insecurity where people bury their heads in the ground of imagined certainties like an ostrich. Dogmas are comforting and anyone trying to upset your applecart of belief systems is viewed as a enemy to be taken care of, even through a hail of bullets..

 

Umakumar we are livinbg in a world where who has the muscle is right and not the one who has the brain. Nowadays people are killing each other over parking space and who should be served first in a restaurant. In such times tolerance of contrarian ideas is at a discount as intolerance has reached a new high.

 

Yeah our communication technology might have developed quite fast shrinking the world but unfortunately we are taking a great leap backward developing medieval mindsets. The problem is personal points of view expressed publicly are riling a lot of people.

 

Viswa, the ancient Indian religion has always had mechanisms of self-criticism. Whenever it tends to get too rigid or dogmatic, new sects appear criticizing the tendency. Buddhism, Bhakti Movement and Sikhism belong to this catagory. Also the practice of shastrarth or debate about intellectuals promoted open mindedness, tolerance and acceptance.But I think over a millennium under followers of Abrahamic faiths has infected a section of Hindus. The tendency of these faiths to treat themselves as exclusive clubs and look down upon non-members has infected a section of Hindus as wells, resulting in increasing intolerance and even hostility to debates. This is a dangerous tendency. Absence of debate kills democratic spirit without which democracy is just a shell without a soul.