Left of Right, Right of Left and off-center

Prime Minister Narendra Modi meeting Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif

Talk of mixed perspectives.

A few posts I made recently have set me thinking about how many of us supposedly neither right nor left political inclinations actually have swallowed a lot of left and right.

The recent turning upside down of terrorism as an Islamic speciality by Hindutva enthusiasts provided many such opportunities to notice how we simply accept certain fiction as gospel truth – even atheists 😀

Some shining moments were when people who have no issues with saying ‘ban Islam’ or ‘ban all religion’ suddenly went into tangents when Hinduism was criticized. Apparently, the halo is all permeating. Hindu is good, its true religion, it is assimilation of cultures and what not. Best thing since a million years before sliced bread. As though criticizing all religion doesn’t include Hinduism – but that isn’t a problem, because the brainwashing doesn’t have those triggers.

In the meanwhile, Muslims are busy defending Islam from within and without. Apparently the Taliban and company are all sinners and kafirs and are destroying the religion – no problems stating that. However, if you compare it with anything non-Muslim, the tape about how Muslims are oppressed or provoked to violence because of powerful enemies etc starts playing. Wait a minute, isn’t this the very logic used by terrorist recruitment propaganda?

Christians have their own issues. Apparently, Christians are the final authority on the west. What they object to is truly objectionable. They have the honorable task of reaching out to the world in their need, of bringing the word of God to the ignorants (thank you very much). They think it is persecution when people have issues with paid conversions or aid to flood victims in Pakistan being supplemented with Bibles.

I would have loved to claim that atheists are beyond all that, but they can be just as stubborn. Listen to their certainty that religion is the root of all evil. What is the basis of that? Its not like they have data from a world without religion, or that atheists have somehow proven to be violence free.

Human rights activists have their own blind spots. I have yet to find one who can stay on topic and answer satisfactorily questions like “what interrogation is appropriate and effective” or “what are the rights of armed forces or civilians” or why aren’t terrorist victims considered to have had their rights abused – its not exactly like they were respected, you know?

The mystifying thing is that all sense seems to desert us when we hit topics for which we have ready answers. We rarely wonder how come these tidy answers resolve all our questions when ordinarily we are confused about many things under the sun. If a question touches them, we switch to the ready answers – even if those answers don’t really answer anything. At that time, we may claim to be left, right or center, we are always “not quite”.

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