Identity, pride and Internet trolls

Among many instances of bashing specific communities and peoples on social media, one in particular drew my attention, which I wanted to talk about. Not because it is going viral yet (or may be it is, I’m not sure). But probably because while many such trolls, relished unabashedly by highly educated folks, are borderline perverse, there are ones like this with a bullet-point pithiness that makes it consumable as a seemingly fine assortment of historical truisms.

It runs something like:

“Someone asked me, what is the difference between an Indian and a Pakistani. This picture should do the job.

• CEO of Google is an Indian
• CEO of Microsoft is an Indian
• CEO of PepsiCo is an Indian
• CEO of MasterCard is an Indian

.....

• CEO of Taliban is a Pakistani
• CEO of Al Qaeda is a Pakistani
• CEO of Lashkar-e-Taiba is a Pakistani

.....”

Now if we evaluate the statements themselves, as historical truths, they appear accurate, individually. However it’s not about the statements, it’s about the underlying claim which, per my understanding, is as follows.

-   Pakistani lives, historically, have promoted, primarily a culture of violence and terror. Lives of Indian origin, on the other hand have (eschewed all that, and) primarily been devoted to pursuit of excellence and betterment of humankind.

And then that constitutes the basis for shaming of one national identity by comparison with another, the two tortured identities themselves being created in the aftermath of the 1947 partition.

This claim, which seems absurdly out of context, will be revisited afterwards. For the moment though, it will suffice to say, that the claim can be shown to be false for the simple reason that the glorification of Indian history is laughably selective, perhaps done deliberately. A look at Indian military policies in the last 30-40 years should be enough to wipe off any claims to a moral superiority. Kashmir, Punjab, Bangladesh border. And the narrative has been the staple narrative of any state that uses terror. We don’t commit war crimes, we just use counter terror.

It is at that point that the pride and self-righteousness that so beset the Indian national identity perplex me. And at two levels.
-          German history has seen both Goethe and Hitler. While both have shaped that history, neither typifies it. That is how their history has unfolded; that is how history generally unfolds with a statistically distributed share of ageless intellectuals and mass murderers. Likewise, for every Sundar Pichai one might be able to locate a policy maker who made possible large scale murder a daily event in Gujarat in 2002. For every Primo Levi, we could find one IDF soldier who shoots at Palestinian children with impunity.

-          But it is at a more fundamental level that such hubris seems incomprehensible to me. One really has no role in his/her birth - Pakistani, Indian, German or Jewish. So why should the onus of guilt and shame fall on anyone and everyone that shares that ethnic identity? Does every German-born child have to inherit Nazi guilt? I mean, I understand the argument of citizens being accountable for an elected government and its actions, but that’s hardly the argument being presented in those bullet points. In fact, if that was the argument, I don’t see how Indians could get around it, when the state uses so much repression and terror in its troubled areas.

Back to the claim itself, why that part of the Indian subcontinent has been a breeding ground for terror is a complex subject, which is outside the scope of discussion here. I’ll say this though - the claim is meaningless without a context. There is no understanding of pro-Kashmiri terrorism without understanding repression and torture by the Indian army. There is no understanding why 19 people flew planes into buildings, no understanding of ISIS, no understanding of anything we would like to label as “terror” without acknowledging other forms of terror we give a free pass all day long. Just that such terror has a different form – occupation, missiles and bombs; not the suicide belts or beheadings that suit our narratives.

I may have to contradict myself now – but as an Indian American, I find it quite shameful, yet somewhat comical also, that so much negativity has recently been spewing out of people of Indian origin, mostly Hindus, who would set out with the objective of self-glorification, but in the process establishing themselves as bigger bigots.

Primo Levi carried a different kind of guilt – the burden of living, the oppressed who survived when so many had perished. That guilt made him end his own life eventually. So did Tadeusz Borowski, another oppressed soul who had provided us a gleaning into that abyss where humanity had sunk.

As long as I can breathe and be able to read Levi and Borowski, I would try and have the humility to acknowledge that my sharing an ethnicity with successful CEOs means nothing; I am just a speck on the wall, and all of humanity has given us dark abysses to stare into. What we make of our lives is something else.