Rage and Radicalisation

Smruti D

There is a land diverse and precious. Everyone accepts everybody else. Minor disagreements are handled in a mature way and let go, if not resolved. If people want to fight, they go to the courts, which deliver fair judgments. It doesn’t lead to conflict outright. And even if it does, conflict resolution happens and is not passed down from generation to generation. People strive for one another, no matter what background they come from. They mock as well as appreciate each other. It is all well-received. People eat and wear what they want. They love who they want to and pray to the Gods of their choice. Women and minorities are treated equally. They are in fact in charge of most things. Natural resources are nurtured and used sensitively and sensibly. Everyone has equal opportunities. This is a truly democratic land, where votes are not asked in the name of eliminating someone.

This blissful land is Utopia—out of this world. Our land is the exact opposite of this.

An Indian security personnel in Kashmir takes aim from behind a military truck

The World We Inhabit

Six years ago, two Muslim men stormed inside the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo’s office in Paris and mercilessly shot dead 12 people while injuring 11 others over a controversial cartoon of Prophet Muhammad that the magazine had republished. The brutal attack, which was also an attack on freedom of expression, has led the magazine to go undercover and operate from a ‘secret’ location. Last year again, as several French media reported, ‘A man suspected of injuring two people with a meat cleaver in Paris has admitted to deliberately targeting the former offices of the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine’. The attacker, 18, from Pakistan ‘linked his actions to the magazine’s recent republication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad’. He did not know that the office of Charlie Hebdo did not exist at the same place and that it now houses a television production company.

Last year in October, another brutal case of beheading of a French middle school teacher, Samuel Paty took place in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, a suburb of Paris. The teacher had shown his students cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad as part of a class discussion on freedom of speech. As the word got around, the assailant launched an attack on Paty. The assailant was later shot dead after he opened fire at the police, and they returned it. The French administration labelled this attack as an ‘Islamist terrorist attack’.

Both the aforementioned incidents were instances of intolerance, led predominantly due to extremist views on religion. Today, acts of terrorism have changed their course. Even as countries, rich or poor, try to devise mechanisms to end terrorism, believed to be exported from countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan and Syria among others, security establishments are fighting a new phenomenon of ‘self-radicalisation’, wherein an individual falls prey to radical views mostly based on fundamental ideals that may be against an individual, group of people or an entire community. When an individual is radicalised, s/he falls prey to idea of ‘us’ versus ‘them’. They start to view people belonging to different religions, ethnicities and even gender to be the ones causing harm to the individual’s and his community’s existence. The attacks, when carried out by such attackers, stem from hatred.

Only last month, in March, a 21-year-old white man allegedly opened fire at three massage parlours and spas, spots which generally have Asian staff in large numbers, leaving eight people dead, of which six were women. In the US, the attacks against Asians have increased multi-fold from the time Covid-19 virus made its way into the country. Police officials investigating the case, however, stated that the attacker told them that he was, by no means ‘racially motivated’ and claimed to have ‘sex addiction’ due to which he attacked places he thought were ‘sources of temptation’.

Statistically, hate crimes targeting Asian-Americans spiked across major cities in 2020 and the trend continued well into this year. As per VOA News portals website, there were 122 incidents of anti-Asian American hate crimes in 16 of the country’s most populous cities in 2020. This shows an increase of a whopping 150 per cent compared to the previous year. The news portal also stated that “Asian American rights advocates attribute the unprecedented string of attacks to former US President Donald Trump’s rhetoric blaming China for the deadly coronavirus and, more broadly, the scapegoating of Asian Americans by ordinary people frustrated or angered by the economic and social impact of t