We thought hatred would give us strength, but...

The Election Commission of India’s counsel to the Supreme Court, Mohit Ram, resigned from his position this week. His resignation letter read, “I have found that my values are not in consonance with the current functioning of the ECI”.

Interesting word that, “values”.

What are the values of the Election Commission of India? In its essence, the ECI has Constitutional responsibilities. These are non-negotiable. Or they would be, in a normal world. In the current world, the ECI apparently exists to further the ambitions of a political mindset. Thus, one might argue that our democratic values have been buried under irresponsibility. Or as Ram politely puts it, “current functioning”.

The ECI is not the only Constitutional Institution in India with questionable “functioning” in our current timeframe. Democracy itself is under immense strain. Its core values are under constant threat. Flailing and failing, those are the words being used to describe India right now. Flailing and failing, in the favourite Indian tense of present continuous. And in such use, there is a smidgeon of hope.

Hope for what? That one resignation, one comment in a court, one mammoth humanitarian effort by one generous person, will get a floundering tanker to float upright?

We like the bombast of “never before”, “end of” and so on. There is irony here. The current value system rode in on this bombast of “never before”. That party has not ended. It now mimics those apocalyptic images in fiction, whether art or music or literature or cinema: doomed people dancing and singing their way into despair and death. Human history usually has an answer to “never before”.

Thus, as Indian skies are alight with burning pyres so is the “Central Vista” of India’s National Capital, alight with music and light. Why go do your death so miserable? See, the saviour cares.

The essence of the problem is of course the saviour and the values that brought the saviour to us, that made us choose the saviour. You can weep about the false promises made by the saviour. Or you can get up and take responsibility for what you chose. The saviour was always what he is. It was those values of yours that were suspect. You might question them now because you are surrounded by pain, maybe your own, maybe those you care about. And yet you might not. The saviour rode into fame on the pain of others. That’s why you admired him. That’s why the ECI, to name just one institution, finds its current values questioned.

Our tragedy is that whatever our values, we are trapped by the saviour and his henchmen and his values and our institutions. We got caught by “never before” and we have not yet understood “never again”.

Last year, when we said “never again”, we thought we were saying it to a conquered virus, a vanquished pandemic. This year the pandemic is back with greater strength not because the virus is unvanquishable but because the saviour lied and fooled us. And we were so caught up in the values of hate and deflection that we believed him and his coteries and his massive groups of cultists worldwide.

There is no “never before” and no “never again”. The only way forward is to learn. And we did not learn, we did not want to learn, we chose not to learn. We wanted to believe that hatred would give us strength. We looked for power in the destruction of the other, we still do. In spite of all the devastating despair around us, what did we learn if we still vote for hatred and the pain of others?

The saviour was clever than us. He used the idea of “tolerance” to twist it into tolerance of him and his hatred. We still have those amongst us who give him strength from that, by comparison and example. We should instead have paid greater attention to the tolerance paradox, where if you are too tolerant of intolerance, intolerance eats you up.

Or in the words of the man himself, humanist philosopher Karl Popper: “We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.”

The saviour and his enablers will fight. The game is not over. Can we end it before we reach the final solution?