This post is basically for everyone across the globe who lives in a secular nation or any nation that is a blend of a variety of religions and cultures.
There are some lessons we need to learn from the Charlie Hebdo incident and the most substantial of all those is, I believe, conditioning the society to tolerate. Above everything else, above the need to eradicate the Jihadis and the extremists, what we need is a society that can tolerate an individual’s freedom of expression. It is one thing to say this but in deed, it is smothered in a million ways by a million people. How, I will tell you through this example.
In India, which is a secular nation with a Hindu majority, this tolerance to an individual’s freedom of expression is taken and interpreted in a context that is convinient for the politicians and their vote banks. There is a little pesky thing called ‘hurt sentiments’ which has seen an enormous rise in India in the recent years. Anything like a movie or a painting or a speech, anything that is displayed publicly on a general social platform that seems poignant and pointy to a particular religious group immediately ‘hurts their sentiments’. Then we often have funny situations where Hindus protesting for their hurt sentiments is called “an attack on the freedom of expression of an individual” but if the minorities do the same, it is always considered to have genuinely hurt their sentiments. I am a Hindu but I am not supporting the Hindus’ protests against someone hurting their sentiments in anyway because glorifying the picture of things seen through relgious points of views is the gateway to extremism which in turn is a gateway to terrorism. What I’m saying is here in India, we are people who believe that a religion in majority should be kept under strict surveillance of the government and if they protest because their sentiments are hurt, they should be constantly reminded of the freedom of expression of others whereas if the minorities protest for the same reason, it is considered legitimate because they’re the minority and the freedom of expression doesn’t hold any importance in such cases. I am okay and in fact satisfied with the former part. What I am not okay with is the latter part where we readily accept the minorities’ demands to ban things that hurt their sentiments overlooking the liberty of expression of an individual. That’s the misinterpretation of tolerance and freedom of speech I’m talking about.
Then we have a caste among the Hindus called the Dalits who cringe about every single thing that looks like a problem to them. Since the Dalits are a part of the minority, the government seems to caress them like they’re a child and that is where they begin to become the problem child.
The Dalits have a problem with everything that the non-Dalits do. Calling a Dalit a Dalit is a crime by law because ‘it hurts their sentiments’. If you ban a bad government officer and he is a non-Dalit, the good government is doing a good job. But if that bloke is a Dalit, “you are doing this deliberately to insult us and to isolate us from the society. This is a conspiracy.”
This way, the Indian minorities are not just thwarting an individual’s freedom of expression, they’re also trying to bend the government and the system as a whole to their frame of convenience. And all this because they have the golden key to sympathy: “we are Dalits.”
If this goes on, it will one day open the gates to another incident like Charlie Hebdot. Only, it won’t be the Islamic extremists doing it in France because of a pencil sketch. It might happen at the hands of any religious minority in any secular nation because “you hurt our sentiments.” Probably in India.
The lesson to be learnt from Charlie Hebdot is therefore to program the society in such a manner that no religion or caste, no ethnic groups, and no races would have a problem with someone trying to say something even if it’s going to prick them a little. We all need to learn to be tolerant. And this isn’t just for India. As I said in the very beginning, it is basically for all the people from all the nations in the world that harbor a blend of cultures and religions within themselves.
So if you have already tweeted or written a facebook post saying “I am Charlie”, ask yourself if you can tolerate things expressed about your community and your people regardless of the fact whether it pricks you or not and if your answer is a ‘yes’, you are Charlie.