Solilquy Of Hate
SEDUCED BY HATE, INDIAN POLITICIAN EMBRACES A LYNCH MOB
By Jeffrey Gettleman and Hari Kumar
HAZARIBAGH, India — Jayant Sinha is a Celtics fan. He graduated from Harvard. He worked for McKinsey.
Born and raised in India but minted in the United States, he found wealth and success in the Boston area. His American friends say his politics were moderate, maybe even progressive.
Then he returned to India.
He ditched the suits he had worn as a partner at McKinsey & Company, an elite management consulting firm, in favor of traditional Indian kurtas. He joined the governing Hindu right political party and became a member of Parliament and then a minister, leading Hindu parades and showering worshipers with flower petals from a helicopter.
This month, he also feted and garlanded eight men who were part of a Hindu lynch mob that the authorities said beat an unarmed and terrified Muslim man to death. His embrace of the attackers, who were convicted of murder, has become the political stunt that Indians can’t stop talking about.
Across the country, the images of Mr. Sinha draping wreaths of marigolds around the men’s necks have started a conversation about whether the state of Indian politics has become so poisoned by sectarian hatred and extremism that even an ostensibly worldly and successful politician can’t resist its pull.
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Why am I posting this NY Times story? It is not personal, local, or even a national story. As I perused the front page of the Times this morning reading the four paragraphs above, the alarm in my better judgment began to flash. This is a story from a far away place. I am certain these events are a variant of the dysfunction that is growing in our own country and even locally in our own state. No matter where we live we are caught out-in -the-open, in the middle of a perfect storm of institutional failure, of weakening and even failure of informal norms of behavior, of a radical and growing income disparity between the uber-wealthy and the majority, and of political extremism that tips into violence.
This is the Indian version of a story that is unfolding in many places. That is why I posted the Times article.
We must make common cause, to the best of our ability to affirm meaning and reject violence, to affirm the sacredness of humanity and of the earth.
There is a great deal at stake.
