[Reader-list] Understand the Whispers by Rajeev Bhargava

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear Readers,

here is a text that has been sent in by Rajeev Bhargava, a political 
philosopher in New Delhi, on the moral dilemmas that are being obscured by 
the rhetoric of war and vendett in the aftermath of September 11.

Shuddha
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Understand the Whispers
Rajeev Bhargava

In India, as elsewhere, every person understood the cry for help: the horror 
and fear writ large on terror stricken faces, the trauma in the choked voices 
of people who saw it happen, the hopeless struggle to control an imminent 
breakdown in public, the unspeakable grief. For one moment, the pain and 
suffering of others became our own.

In a flash, everyone recognised what is plain but easily forgotten that 
inscribed in our personal selves is not just our separateness from others but 
also sameness with them,that despite all socially constructed differences of 
language, culture, religion, nationality, perhaps even race, caste and 
gender, we share something in common. Amidst terror, acute vulnerability and 
unbearable sorrow, it was not America alone that rediscovered its lost 
solidarity. In these cataclysmic events, all people across the globe reclaim 
their common humanity.

As we empathised with those who escaped or witnessed death, and re-lived the
traumatic experience of those who lost their lives, we knew a grave, 
irreparable wrong done to individuals, killed, wounded or traumatised by the 
sudden loss of family and friends. These individuals were not just subjected 
to physical hurt or mental trauma, they were recipients and carriers of a 
message embodied in that heinous act. From now on they must live with a 
dreadful sense of their own  vulnerability. This message was transmitted 
first to other individuals in New York and Washington, then quickly to 
citizens throughout the democratic world. The catastrophe on the east coast 
has deepened the sense of insecurity of every individual on this planet.  

However, this was not the only message sent by the perpetrators. Others are 
revealed when we focus on our collective identities. These messages are  
disturbingly ambivalent, morally fuzzy. They are less likely to sift good 
from evil, more likely to divide than unite people across the world.  

One such message which the poor, the powerless and the culturally   
marginalised would like communicated to the rich, powerful and the culturally 
dominant is this: we have grasped that any injustice done to us is erased 
before it is seen or spoken about; that in the current international social 
order, we count for very little; our ways of life are hopelessly 
marginalised, our lives utterly valueless. 

Even middle-class Indians with cosmopolitan aspirations became painfully 
aware of this when a country-wide list of missing or dead persons was flashed 
on an international news channel: hundreds of Britons, scores of  Japanese, 
some Germans, three Australians, two Italians, one Swede. A few buttons away, 
a South Asian channel lists names of several hundred missing or dead Indians,
while another flashes the names of thousands with messages of their safety to
relatives back home. 
Intangible wounds

Hard as it is to talk of this right now, it must be acknowledged that the 
attacks on New York and Washington were also meant to lower the collective 
self-esteem of Americans, to rupture their pride. Not all intentional 
wrong-doing is physically injurious to the victim, but every intentionally 
generated physical suffering is   invariably accompanied by intangible 
wounds. The attack on September 11 did not merely demolish concrete buildings 
and individual people. It tried to destroy the American measure of its own 
self-worth, to diminish the self-esteem of Americans. 

Quite separate from the immorality of physical suffering caused, isn’t this 
attempt itself morally condemnable? Yes, if the act further lowers the 
self-worth of  people with little enough. But this is hardly true of America, 
where the ruling elite ensures that its collective self-worth borders supreme 
arrogance, always over the top. Does not the Pentagon symbolise this false 
collective pride? 

Amidst this carnage, then, is a sobering thought.It occurs more naturally to 
poor people of powerless countries. Occasionally, even the mighty can be 
humbled. In such societies, the genuine anguish of people at disasters faced 
by the rich is mixed up with an unspeakable emotion which, on such 
apocalyptic occasions, people experience only in private or talk about only 
in whispers. 

I have spoken of two dimensions to the message hidden in the mangled remains 
of the destruction of September 11. The moral horror of the individual 
dimension of the carnage is unambiguous and overwhelming. But as we pause to 
examine its collective dimension, a less clear, more confusing moral picture 
emerges. How, on balance, after putting together these two dimensions, do we 
evaluate this more complicated moral terrain? 

The answer has to be swift and unwavering. For now, the focus must remain on 
the individual and the humanitarian. To shift our ethical compass in the 
direction of the collective weakens the moral claims of the suffering and the 
dead. This is plainly wrong. Nor is it enough to make merely a passing 
reference to the tragedy of individuals, a grudging concession before the 
weightier political crimes of a neo-imperial state are considered. The moral 
claims of individuals are currently supreme. 

But we cannot permanently screen off the collective dimension. To do so would 
obstruct our understanding of how tragedies of individuals can be prevented 
in future; in any case, in the long run it extends another already existing 
moral  wrong. 

Victim must not turn perpetrator