In a different time, and a different place, a peace maker saw the rise of violence in his homeland. He understood the cause of the violence, and found that those in government, with their policies were collectively at fault. What he said, though based upon a particular situation, nonetheless has some universal value. How would you adapt these words to fit the violence which we have seen rising in various parts of the world?
I now take up the ticklish question of the riots in East Pakistan. It is extremely embarrassing to speak out one’s mind while dealing with this subject. I am a believer in non-violence and hold that violence never pays. It only serves to evoke hatred and makes the confusion more confounded. Nevertheless, I cannot help remarking that the said happenings in East Pakistan are the direct outcome of the policy you had been following in that part of the country for the last seven years. You gagged public opinion and imprisoned people without trial. You did not care to fill the vacant seats in the provincial legislature and proceeded with the governance of the province in an arbitrary manner without paying any heed to the aspirations of the people, whose goodwill you took for granted. The masses were ruthlessly persecuted and oppressed. Their needs were overlooked and they were subjected to extreme hardships and oppressions. The cumulative effect of all these factors was that a Muslim League could secure no more than a mere nine percent of the seats in a provincial election and the people of East Pakistan returned a decisive verdict of no-confidence in the Muslim League and its government. But then even this lesson seems to have fallen flat on you, and you are still pursuing the policies calculated to embitter the feelings of the people and creating conditions which are sure to engender mutual suspicion and bickering amongst the various classes. You suppress the legitimate aspirations of the people in general and play off one section against another, and when the matters come to a head, a scapegoat is readily seized and declared responsible for all the troubles. I am afraid the direction in which the events are now drifting in West Pakistan too, points to the results not much happier than what we have recently experienced in the eastern wing of the country…
Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, “After Riots in East Pakistan: Speech in Constituent Assembly. 8 April, 1954” in Words of Freedom: Ideas of a Nation. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2010), 89-91.
In reading this speech, I can see partisans in the United States looking at how their opponents meet what Badshah Khan points as the problem in the Pakistan of his day. All sides of the political landscape can bring out examples of what their opponents have done to make things worse. Certainly this is true, but we must look more deeply to the changes happening in our society, and the desperation which we see forming in the American people. Fear and confusion rules the landscape, and it is easy to create enough fear, that even good plans and policies are dismissed by the people who need them. Those who have helped to create such fear, those who have helped make people feel like there is no value left to living, from whatever side of the political debate they find themselves in, have been helping to build the culture of death, a culture which is about far more than abortion. As long as the human person is not seen as dignified in their own right, no matter how bad the moral character of the person, the culture of death will be allowed to continue.
At the basis of our current culture is the depersonalization of the person, turning them into objects: they are turned to mere ciphers, objectified examples of virtues or vices we like or despise, while the person as a whole is rejected – the person is no longer seen as necessary or valuable, and so easily dismissed. It is easy to create automatons, it is more difficult to accept persons, persons with real imperfections, and to let them come to realize themselves in the midst of their imperfections instead of as an object to control, an object we see must suit some universal social norm. We treat people according to the dictates of economics, not the dictates of the heart.
As an example of what I mean, all we need to do is look at how some people in the United States feel about those who are jobless; about the homeless living on the streets: such people are described with all kinds of negative characterizations: they are lazy, worthless, not deserving social help. They are criminals who would rather steal than work. They have no concerns about morality and something must be done to stop them. Are there no prisons, no work camps? They are, in the end, no longer considered as people worthy of respect. They are no longer seen as humans striving to find themselves and improve themselves in situations which often are beyond their control. More often than not, they need not only help to live day to day, but also people to befriend them: without such friends, most of them end up lost and incapable of raising themselves out of the mire they have found themselves in (whether or not it was their fault for the situation). This, of course, is not new. All one has to do is look at the way vagabonds were seen in medieval Europe, and the kinds of stigma placed on them. Various medieval saints tried to help change that situation, some doing so more than others, but despite their efforts, in the end, social stigma more often won out and the impoverished were not understood. They were every bit the outcast as we outcastes in India; many were seen to be punished by their sins, and so deserved their horrible state in life.
We must remember that the poor are not tools which we need in order to prove how charitable we are. Those who look to charity in this fashion show they have no sense of charity: they don’t understand charity is to be an act of love. To them, it is an act of self- justification, where the poor are their tools for salvation. I cannot but feel that many people who contend that social justice must be accomplished merely by personal charity do so because they have no real heart for charity, rather, they look to keep the poor, poor, so they can feel good about the pittance they do for the sake of the poor. If they truly cared, they would seek to find the causes for poverty and change them. Social justice seeks out those structures, and aims to remove them, or put in new structures when necessary. There is no way society can live without structures, the question is, which structures. Those who have a heart for the people will care, and will seek such changes, even if it causes them to not be so well off in the end of their work. It doesn’t have to mean people will lose out on their social status, nor that everyone has to be equal: what it means is people have to respect each other, and work for the common good, so that no one is left without basic human needs. These needs are far more than food, shelter and clothing. These needs are spiritual, these needs are emotional, these needs are social needs, where someone is respected as a person who has something to offer others by their mere existence. This is why, even if the social structures are changed, and the basic material needs are met, there will not be an end to charity: rather, even if the material needs are met, emotional and spiritual needs will always be needs, and true charity seeks to give them as much as the material needs. Everyone needs to feel as if they have a place in the world, and accepted for who they are. As long as people see the poor as impersonal tools to make oneself righteous, true charity will never be understood. How can one deem themselves as caring for their neighbor if they ridicule them for being “welfare moms?” How can one be pro-life and ridicule those who have kept their children. Despising them and demeaning them demonstrates that the human person is not valuable; are you surprised they end up believing it and take the life of a person? But whose fault is it, since you have, in many respects, taken their life away first?
This gets back to our national situation. The poor are desperate, but their desperation tends to be limited and their actions limited in dealing with it. But their crimes cause more desperation. Desperation leads to more desperation, like violence leads to more violence. The cycle of desperation is all before us. Rhetoric, from all sides of the culture of death, has helped inspire desperation and acts of violence. All who add to the rhetoric are guilty. Politicians speak words because they want to influence people by them; do not let them convince you that their words have no impact. Even if their desire is to have people act one way with their rhetoric, this is not to say they are not responsible for other actions which can follow through with that same rhetoric, either directly, or indirectly. Violent rhetoric, like desperation, corrupts many in its path, until at last, somewhere down the chain of succession, someone, someone who has been made desperate, hears the words and responds. Those who are in control, those who have been in charge of society, are, collectively, to blame. We must, like Badshah Khan, keep speaking out against violence, but we must, like him do more than that; we must accept the collective, cultural responsibility, and have, as a society, a change of heart before it is too late.
Just because we were raised to believe some things were good because they are what our founding fathers thought were good does not mean they are; we cannot just go masking our own violence, our own desires for manipulation and control and justify it on the founding fathers. We are alive now; it is our duty to fix the social climate, even if it means repudiating the mistakes of the past. The law should be for man, not man for the law. The time is now. Let us receive the violence which have come before us as a sign of where our society is heading. We must change before it is too late.
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