Country without a soul

Business Recorder

14-05-2025

India, under Narendra Modi, has descended to its lowliest lows. The civilization of hundreds, nay, thousands of years, has been torn to shreds. The villain of the peace is Modi, an example of human baseness at its zenith. Maha— (a prefix) in Sanskrit means 'great', and Aatma means 'soul'; together the word is Mahatma. Rabindranath Tagore, the poet, philosopher, and Nobel laureate in a letter to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in 1915 wrote, 'To the one whom India's millions call Mahatma — to him my grateful full homage.' Gandhi was reluctant to accept this honorific title but acquiesced, saying that it meant a reminder to him to serve others. He became an icon of peace and non-violence. From the Mahatma the descent is to the evil headed nincompoop, called Modi. He is a dishonourable antonym for the honorific tittle of Mahatma.
Evil enters like a needle and spreads like an oak tree (an Ethiopian proverb). The Mahatma (M.K. Gandhi) in his Non-Violence in Peace and War had said in 1948: 'Must I do all the evil I can before I learnt to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.' Modi, an answer to the Indians and to your own soul, in case it is still alive.
Only when evil increases, does its potential to harm strike the eye. It appears that Stephen Vincent Benet in 'John Brown's Body' is actually describing Modi, the evil, when he says, 'Some men wish evil and accomplish it, but most men, when they work in that machine; just let it happen somewhere in the wheels; the fault is no decisive, villainous knife, But the dull saw that is the routine mind'. honi soit qui mal y pense (shame on him who thinks evil of it). An evil man sees not the same tree as a wise man sees. Modi's Hindutva philosophy is built upon sand dunes. Adventurous men are not necessarily courageous, they are but only small time cowards, and may not be seen as men of principle. Principle knows no forgiveness. They are to be observed and adhered. Expediency can last for a few hours, but principles survive for ages.
Indians, generally speaking, are good people. They are mostly peace-loving. The recent refusal of a Lieutenant-General to do his (Modi's) evil bidding also indicates that the armed forces are also not warmongers or haters. It is purely a Modi phenomenon to spew poison against the minorities, particularly Muslims. He denuded India of its past glory of being a tolerant society. He stabbed to death the 'soul of India', rendering it today as a soul-less country.
With malice he attacked places of worship. Modi is an arch enemy of Islam and Christianity. He destroys their mosques and churches on one pretext or another. Recently, he targeted only mosques in the cities of Kotli, Bahawalpur and Muridke. He is now after the resting place of Emperor Aurangzeb claiming his tomb is built over some imagined, ancient temple.
Modi having massacred Muslims in Gujarat entered the Prime Minister's office with a conscience that was long dead and buried. Indians were misled by his religious doctrine of supremacy of Hindutva, and voted him into power. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke thus: 'He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.'
Recently, in the short military engagement between India and Pakistan, the world witnessed with humour and laughter how the Indian media tried to create its own climate of opinion. The Indian media stood confused between what is honourable and what is evil? What is lost by them is the fact that there is no such thing as the lesser of the two evils because once the choice is made it still is evil. The media behaved like evil, and was no less than the evil of Modi.
India must remove Modi if it wishes to retain its original character as enshrined in its Constitution to be a secular and democratic state. However, looking at BJP's leadership starting from Modi and ending with Modi's thought and philosophy, I am reminded of Shakespeare's line from The Taming of the Shrew, 'There's small choice in rotten apples.'
Modi is a wolf in a wolf's clothing. How then are the Muslim leadership deluded away from recognising his mindset? Our Muslim brethren in the Middle East warm up to him so dearly. It is time they recognise the devious mindset of the man; any failure to do so will result in a costly learning exercise. A man who has blood on his hands of the angelic small children who were martyred by his deadly missiles can never be a sincere friend to anyone. To the recent belligerent attacks upon several cities in Pakistan our government responded with hitherto unseen maturity and patience. This restraint was being misread by Modi as a sign of some inherent structural weakness in the command and control authority of our political setup and national security apparatus. Only a single day of strong retaliation proved to be a very long time for Modi and his cohorts.
Flustered by this fierce response and retaliation and acting like a retarded pygmy Modi sought ceasefire through the friendly mediation of US and a host of other countries. His acceptance will always remain in doubt. He will find or artificially create conditions like he did on the night of 22nd April in Occupied Kashmir, to wriggle out of his commitment to discuss 'all issues' at a neutral place across the negotiating table. The acceptance of third-party intervention to resolve all outstanding issues must be gnawing away at his peace and sanity. Most would suspect that he will find a reason to revoke the commitment; he is not trustworthy.
The efforts of friends of India alone are not enough to instill sanity and maturity into BJP's leadership; in the end it will be the people of India who must discover the evil, to shun it, and they must help themselves by jettisoning all those who are hell-bent on destroying the rich social fabric that has been in existence for thousands of years upon the soil of the subcontinent. India must go back to its Gandhian and Nehruvian political philosophy of tolerance and peace.
It is expected that Indians will now with the liberty of hindsight see how he misled them into a war hysteria, 'ably' supported by an ever-enthusiastic and hysteria-filled broadcast, digital and print media. The anchors in their frenzy declared Lahore to be a seaport!! Modi has brought shame upon the peace-loving people of India. The time is ripe for all political parties, including the BJP, to go for wholesale jettisoning of this frustrated and politically dead cargo once and for all. Any continuity of Modi and his cohorts at New Delhi foretells the looming disaster of the seven sister states in the North-East of India, who are already seeking independence from the union of India.
The wrong person Lieutenant General Rana who until recently was General Officer Commanding in Occupied Kashmir was banished to the Andaman and must be brought back to the peninsula's capital and the rightly deserving candidate must be sent forth to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal. India and Indians by doing so will restore their lost stature in the comity of nations. A government in Delhi that has no religious rabid Hindu will be a good neighbour to all the countries of South Asia.
The hyena in saffron clothing — Modi — will be enshrined in history as a synonym for both evil and devil. His biography will be the longest suicide note in history.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2025