Gaza: the private politics of public solidarity

My male-line ancestral family seat is in Patuligram, West Bengal. We are Bengali Shaktos (worshippers of Mother Kali and Goddess Durga). I am strongly attached to my clan’s faith. We are classified as Hindus. My maternal ancestry is from East Bengal. They were Partition-era refugees, pushed out of their family home with no ‘right to return’. Both Hindus and Muslims fled their ancestral Bengal for their corresponding Bengal of relative safety. Post-1965, tens of lakhs refugees, almost exclusively Hindu have fled East Bengal. This continues to this day – victims of a continuing partition. This is an issue very close to my heart. My involvement in the human rights violations of East Bengali Hindus is not unrelated to my particular family origin and my commitment to ‘our’ preservation in a particular sense. But concentric and expanding circles form one’s identity. At some point of expansion, this touches the people of Palestine. My Palestinian rights activism while I was a student at Harvard directly resulted in the denial of a lucrative position that I was already chosen for. It was a price worth paying.

However, there is something sinister about the solidarity politics that originates from one’s private identification with victim’s ethnicity or religion but is publicly couched in terms of general humanism, whatever that is. When someone splashes graphic pictures of dead children in Gaza, killed by Israeli attacks and never shows equally graphic pictures of the victims of Boko Haram or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the objective is three-fold. It is to evoke compassion for a certain kind of victim, to evoke hatred about a certain kind of perpetrator and to remain silent on a certain kind of perpetrator. Some convenient brutes are condemned and the same people rarely condemn some inconvenient brutes. Is it because, in some ghastly private political and ideological calculation, some human rights violators are ‘ultimately’ doing it for the ‘right’ cause? It ceases to be about the victims. Why do I get the feeling that the religion of the killer matters? Why this unholy convergence of such elements with professional anti-imperialists? Closer to home, why is the large-scale destruction of ‘Hindu’ villages and massacre of ‘Hindu’ villagers by state agencies in Chhattisgarh or the daily sodomization of Hindu male-prostitutes by policemen not worthy of comment by the thikadars of political Hinduism? 

While we witness this bursting forth of honest indignation about Israel’s reprehensible actions in Gaza, let’s remember that both honesty and indignation are byproducts of a global hierarchy of ‘issues’. When we ‘wake up’ to Gaza, we ought to remember who sets the alarm, who creates the machinery of the spread and perpetuation of such awareness -- who decides priorities, whose deaths gets headlined, whose deaths get sidelined? One’s politics is not only what one condemns, but also what one overlooks. 

In 2014, the Islamist insurgencies in Iraq and Nigeria have each claimed more than 5,000 lives in 2014. Till now, the Gaza death toll is less than 400. Comparing the number of dead is horrible but using the death for private ideological satisfaction is more horrible. Is a victim of Muslim-on-Muslim terror less of a victim than others? Considering some killers as scum of earth and other killers as unmentionable is reprehensible. When one is chanting ‘death to America/Israel’, from relatively safe perches in New York, Delhi, Kolkata and elsewhere, one probably should take a moment to think what precisely is the origin of this blood-thirst. One owes it to the silenced victims of not-so-popular-but-much-more-populous massacres.

The author is a Bengal-based commentator on politics and culture @gargac