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Is resistance dead?
>From the Hindu Magazine (21/3/99)

The stars of Bollywood agitate when their interests are on "fire".
Teachers strike to promote their interests. Their students take them to
court to teach them that they should not. Muslims, Christans, Sikhs and
Hindus come out in the open when their respective interests are at stake.
The poor and the dalits, who comprise the majority, cry alone when they
are betrayed, burned or butchered. Each party, each group, is busy
nurturing its own constituency.

Public debates on vital issues are rare. While there was a semblance of
debate preceding the General Agreement and Trade and Tariffs (GATT), there
was none on the Pokhran Two blast. Any discussion died soon after the dust
settled in Pokhran. Nearly 10 million Indians are infected with HIV, and
the media indifference to this is near total. The true implications of the
Insurance Regulatory Authority (IRA) and the Patents' Bill are closely
guarded secrets. Arm-twisted by the World Trade Organisation (WTO),  the
Government intends to impose these measures as fait accompli on the
peopli. Hardly anyone seems to mind.

Self-Interest and absolute indifference are the characteristic features of
the Nineties. Resistance is necessary even to protect self-interests. But
the irony is because self-centredness is necessarily shortsighted, the
need to resist all oppressive forces in order to create a rationale for
protecting one's own interests is not obvious to most people. This truth
dawns only too late. As a German bishop said about the Nazi times: "First
they came for the Jews. I kept quiet because I was not a Jew. Then they
came for the Marxists, and I did not protest because I was not a Marxist.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I kept quiet because I was not a
Catholic Then they came for me; and by then there was none left to help
me.

In today's time, there is no will to resist evil. Instead there is a
corresponding preference to avoid the cost in defending what is right. How
has this come about? What to help me."

In today's times, there is no will to resist evil. Instead there is a
corresponding preference to avoid the cost in defending what is right. How
has this come about? What are the reasons for this change?

In the first place, there is growing cynicism about the effectiveness of
public action, including resistance movements. This is no ordinary

cynicism. This is an integral part of the human predicament, characterised
by a loss of faith in a larger-then-life force we call God. The exclusion
of god from the contemporary worldview has brought about the erosion of
significance from all human enterprises. To history, this has introduced
chaos; to literature, the death of the plot; to public life, the decline
of the principle of accountability; to culture, the forces of drift and
purposelessness.

This powerful truth was obvious to Gandhiji. To him, the struggle for
freedom was essentially a spiritual enterprise. God was at the centre of
it. Politics had to be purified by prayer. There is no other way known to
the human species, to invest actions at any level with enduring
significance. The alternative to God-centredness is a situation plagued by
inconsistency, meaninglessness, and the free-play of vested interests.
This, indeed, is our problem today.

In place of the God-centred worldview, worldview, sustained by religion,
we have the core-less culture of materialism. There is a multiplicity of
forces, but no point of coherence. The facts, figures and facilities of
life multiply. But the strength to organise them and a vision to maintain
them are absent. In the resultant situation, the isolated event has its
reality and importance. But it is so, only to involved. In our fractured
existence, the inter-dependence of individuals is not apparent. This has a
crippling effect on every aspect of our social life and is harmful to our
well-being, but eminently suitable to the forces of injustice and
exploitation.

Consumerist materialism fosters a culture of self-indulgence, which can
turn every person into a passive and isolated consumer of pleasure,
unmindful of the suffering and oppression around him. Pleasure has a
weakening affect on the individual. It insulates him from others. It
organises his energies and obsessions in a way that leaves no room for the
neighbour. This inhabits the development of altruistic concerns in public
life. The managers of the State tend to develop a vested interest in
promoting a culture of indulgence and passivity among the people, if only
to preserve the status quo and to enfeeble the spirit of resistance and
revolution. So we see TV transmitters, for example, even in those regions
where primary schools and potable water may not be available.

Courage and poverty: It is a well-recognised principle that there is a
connection between courage and poverty on the on hand, and between
unregimented thinking and austerity of life on the other. The richer
people get, the less willing they become to risk their interests. The poor
have nothing to lose, and so do not hesitate. But the poor are mostly
dependent on the elite for leadership and guidance. Until the elite give
in to crass materialism, there is hope that some of them could be
catalysts in awakening the people. That is, if they have not lost their
spiritual sensitivities, and their own accountability to history. The
unprecedented affluence of the Indian upper middle class, and the sensing
of this prospect by the expectant middle class, is an important reason for

the death of the revolutionary fervour at the present time.

The emotional deficit: Added to this is the reality of the emotional
deficit that characterises contemporary life and culture. We are connected
to our fellow beings by our emotions, foremost of which are love and
compassion. Unless we love, we do no fell for others; and unless we feel
for them, we shall not respond to their needs or be moved by their
suffering. The impersonality of human beings, the shallowness of modern
culture, thanks to materialism aggravated by urbanisation, and the
devaluation of emotions, are factors that have to be reckoned with in this
context. The collapse of faith, and the resultant cynicism, worsens the
situation.

Faith is a quality that enables people to embark on efforts for which
their human resources may not be adequate.

The decline of faith creates a mindset in which enterprises not in
proportion with the means available are unlikely to be undertaken. Since
public life is organised on a mega scale, its challenges also tend to be
gigantic. Moreover, people do not have the stamina to sustain an effort
over a period of time. This discourages initiatives. We are not short on
good sentiments and intentions. It is the eagerness to act on them that is
lacking.

In addition there is the added problem of the diffusion of the forces of
good. There are far too may groups and agencies making waves in their own
little pockets, like "ineffectual angels beating in the void their
luminous wings in vain". In contrast, the vested interests are well
focussed and coordinated. They have a sense of immediacy, a clarity of
purpose and a high level of motivation, all of which are found wanting in
the opposite camp.

The tyranny of the trivia: Finally, we need to reckon with the tyranny of
the trivia in our life. Today, most people are buried under the burden of
their routine life. They have neither the energy, nor the time, nor the
inclination for anything else. The change-and-culture managers aggravate
this problem by deliberately promoting the regimentation of human thinking
and doing. What is encouraged, in a thousand tacit ways, is the pursuit of
the commonplace: doing the done thing. The done thing, in nine cases out
of 10, happens to be running the daily routine, and seeking the best deal
for oneself out of every situation. Resisting the forces of injustice and
corruption is more akin to revolution than to routine. It needs
self-denial, which is the secret of spiritual freedom, without which
resistance cannot be cultivated or practised.

A sense of community: This state of affairs is unlikely to change unless
we reinforce, even against the drift of our times, a sense of community in
our midst. It is within the community ethos that human solidarity and
inter-dependence become clear to people. It is this basic heritage that we
have squandered in the pursuit of modernity and the
urban-consumerist-materialistic culture. We have, in the process, become
rootless, heartless items of mortality thrown together in a faceless
massified society, devoid of compassion and fellow feeling.


The idea of stewardship is basic to sense of community. Stewardship is
different from management, precisely in its sensitivity to the needs of
others, beyond the compulsions of transactional and legal obligations.
Seen from this angle, each one must hold himself responsible for the
health and wholeness of the total context. He cannot offer alibis and
remain apathetic. What needs to be done, instead, is to challenge and urge
one'' community to look beyond its confines and address the common causes
in the given context. This should be obvious enough; for only within a
society where the basic norms of justice and fair-play are safeguarded can
individual communities also grow and flourish.

Mood of melancholy: Today, individuals and non governmental organisations
who are active in defending what is right and just, are living through a
period of considerable discouragement. They feel that the juggernaut of
the establishment rides over them, and nothing they do is good enough to
arrest its implacable progress, That being the case, it is not surprising
that there is growing cynicism about the possibility of stemming the
present rot.

This too is a fallacy. The fact that there is no appreciable change in the
present trend does not mean that it is futile to try, and nothing can be
done. We need to ask now massive and large scale changes are being
engineered every now and then. After all, in less than a decade, the
entire economic mechanism of this vast country has been fine-tuned to
globalisation and privatisation. Almost overnight, India was turned into a
nuclear weapons State. The very feel of this country has been changed. So
it cannot be that radical changes are impossible. It may well be that the
forces of sanity in public life are o scattered and unfocussed to make a
dent. The possibility of a change for the better, nonetheless, needs to be
affirmed unequivocally.

As of now, there is a need for NGOs to come together, periodically, to
share their experiences and to reinforce each other's effectiveness. From
the present outlook of running some programme or the other, the NGOs have
to try and make a difference. They need to be informed, with a sense of
mission to reinforce the wholeness of public life, and to renew the moral
and spiritual foundations of our society. It is futile to work in an
isolated fashion. The need is to evolve common strategies and a plan of
action commensurate with the challenges involved.

Even though they have done commendable work, they have not had much
success in raising the level of public awareness on the issues that they
address. Much of public apathy is the result of ignorance. The second
reason is the imbalance between needs and means, as perceived by the
common man. This makes most people despair of any breakthrough. It is in
this respect that better coordination between NGOs will help boost the
morale of the people.

The key to effectiveness has always been the willingness to pay the price,
which comes out of total commitment. It is in this context that we need to
worry about the decline in the NGO culture in recent times. It is not
infrequently that people become rich in the name of the poor, or on

account of earthquakes, floods and droughts. The lifestyle of NGO
executives leaves much to be desired. The more the NGO movement is
infected with affluence, The less zealous will its managers be in pushing
relentlessly towards the goals envisaged. The fire of commitment dies out
under the rain of profit-motive and the compromises it smuggles in.

Everything is, in the end, a spiritual struggle. Much as we need
strategies and material resources, They are of no consequence unless set
ablaze by the fire of the Spirit. The multiple maladies of our times have
mushroomed in the twilight of our spiritual and moral decay. Those who
encounter vested interests stand in danger of being infected by what they
combat. As and when that happens, it will perforce enfeeble their energy
to resist the forces of evil. They my continue to produce edited sounds
and sights of protest, without the burning zeal it takes to make a
difference.

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