There's absolutely nothing wrong with intolerance. Not if you know how to sublimate it. Some of the greatest art, music, poetry, movies have emerged from intolerance, created by people who were angry, frustrated, resentful. It was their fierce intolerance that found creative expression and taught us, over the centuries, the importance of artistic freedom. It is such freedom alone that can sublimate the anger and violence that many of us feel against what is happening all around us.
It is when you try to stop that artistic freedom, when you stop writers from writing what they want to, when you stop painters from expressing themselves or music groups from voicing their angst in their music and their lyrics, when you arrest poets for lending voice to what is in the air, when you censor movies that the anger and violence spill onto the street. You create the conditions for extreme rage and bloodshed. And blinding fury finds its outlet in political extremism.
That's why creative freedom needs to be protected. For when you curtail that freedom and start censoring things, you clog the process of sublimation. The anger and violence that so desperately seeks expression then spills out in physical acts of intolerance. It begins by burning buses and trains and public property. Then it targets the specific focus of your rage—the people of a caste, a community, a faith who in the perversity of your blinding rage begins to represent all that's wrong with your life and surroundings—and then comes the lynching mob, the terrorist strikes, the bomb blasts, all backed by an ideological or political matrix of complex (and often convoluted) arguments, most of them actually nonsense.
That's when political parties move in to give your anger a new legitimacy. In return, they want you as their slave. You are no longer the source of that anger. You become part of an angry political movement and your safety lies in numbers. You can go vent your anger in public. You can burn down homes and places of worship. You can join the lynching mob. You can destroy public property and give voice to all the frustrations you have. You can even loot, rob, murder, rape with impunity because now you have the moral sanction to do it. You represent The Cause. The Cause redeems your every action. If you are arrested, you become the victim. If you are punished, you become the hero. Your anger becomes the anger of every man. You are no longer isolated. You belong. Ergo, every crime you commit is redeemed as a political act. And, since democracy assures you political freedom, you are now free to do whatever you want to without being embarrassed or repentant. The angry young man is now a political arriviste.
This is exactly what we are seeing today. The anger and frustration of the youth, pretty normal under most circumstances, is no longer finding its voice through creative expressions. It is morphing into thuggery, crime, lynching mobs, terrorism. There's actually no difference between these crimes though we, as a nation, choose to rate them on a scale where terrorism is the worst crime one can imagine while raping nuns, killing Dalits or lynching migrant labour is much lower in the pecking order of villainy. What we fail to realise is that all such crimes start at the same place, follow the same pattern: Disappointment, helplessness, frustration, blind rage. Villainy here is the outcome of fear, desperation, anguish, anger, all of which find no other way to express itself and finally slides into hopelessness. And, as we all know, there's an instant connect between hopelessness and crime. The angry Marathi boys who are beating up the poor Biharis on the streets of Mumbai are as hopeless as their victims. That's why they are choosing soft targets. If it wasn't Biharis, it would have been someone else—the Muslims, the South Indians, the Bangladeshis, anyone. It is just blind rage seeking expression. Raj Thackeray merely gives it a voice and a target.
To return to my first argument, there's nothing wrong with intolerance as long as we express it in the right forums, not on the streets. Everyone can have a point of view, however outrageous. It's only when they stop discourse and take to the streets, that we have problems. So let the discourse continue. Don't censor that or else every issue will spill out on the streets and find political mentors who will exploit them. So our first priority must be to restore our traditional dialogues without State intervention, without censorship. Let people say what they want to. Let them give voice to their feelings in safe forums instead of terrorising the streets and shedding blood in the name of caste, community, religion, language, state of origin. We are all Indians and denying any one among us his or her right to national pride is nothing short of an act of treason.
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