Tolerating intolerance

The news shockers that have been arriving with alarming frequency would suggest that we have collectively made a U-turn on the road to civilization.

Closer home, this has taken the form of moral policing and caste capers.

Earlier this week, a bunch of activists belonging to a right-wing outfit known as the Shri Ram Sene entered a pub in Mangalore and assaulted some girls for "destroying Indian culture" by drinking and hanging out with their boyfriends.

Yesterday, the new chief minister of Rajasthan--who belongs to the Congress, the party at the other end of the political spectrum--announced that he will be closing down a lot of wine shops, limit the opening hours for bars, and reduce the number of malls. This will curtail the pub-and-mall culture, i.e. the "alien culture of drinking and boys and girls holding hands", he declared.

A grand convention of Brahmins from across the country, held in Pune last week, passed a resolution urging its members not to marry outside their caste so as "to preserve its purity"!

In the wider world, there are increasing instances of "might is right" displays by various governments, in a blatant throwback to the dark ages.

Even after the editorial written by Lasantha Wickramatunga--who had rightly anticipated that government-sponsored goons would kill him someday--was published posthumously, yet another Sri Lankan editor was stabbed in the face, once again by unidentified assailants. Both of them wrote about excesses perpetrated on defenceless civilians by President Mahinda Rajapakse's army, in its own war-on-terror against the LTTE.

In Russia, a human-rights lawyer, Stanislav Markelov, and 25-year-old intrepid journalist, Anastasia Baburova, were shot dead on January 19, in broad daylight and barely a mile away from the Kremlin. They had just finished telling newspersons at a press conference that Russian colonel Yuri Budanov--sentenced to 10 years for rape and murder of a 18-year-old Chechen girl in 2000--was released on parole on Jan 15 based on a false statement by the prosecution.

China, of course not the beacon of civilisation of human rights, has started clamping down on "suspected criminals" in Lhasa. Every potential trouble-maker is being rounded up so that a repeat of last March's protests does not happen. The fact that this March marks 50 years since the Tibetan rebellion that led to the Dalai Lama's escape, is playing on the minds of the Chinese oligarchy which has ordered the systematic crackdown.

All these remind me of Edmund Burke's ever-so-true statement: ""The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing".