Maybe, monsters are insomniacs. They can’t sleep, and worse, wake up during our deepest hour of sleep to haunt us. And become stuff of nightmares. If these are the monsters of the communal hatred credo, then as most sleep doctors would diagnose, the nightmares tend to be the worst, with little to prescribe for instant relief.
Such monsters are raging across India. Awaken after a deep slumber. They played in Manipur to the dance tunes of havoc and shame, of horror and impossibility of atonement. Now, they have travelled, pretty fast, to Haryana.
Who knew Nuh as a place in Haryana about score-odd hours ago in the entire country? Now, Nuh is the new stage of horror, upstaging the predecessor, bringing off a newer scale of violence, lower depths of depravity to plunge into. The fires have spread rapidly.
At least five people are dead and nearly 75 people injured as per latest reports in communal clashes, the kind of which we have not seen in several years. These have now spread from Nuh to Gurgaon. A religious place of worship has been attacked and damaged. Going by the new textbook, police have shut down the Internet.
As per reports of the state government’s response, the police have added extra security to prevent any untoward incident near religious places. The administration has reached out to leaders and seniors of both communities and has requested them to help in talking to the youth to restore peace and calm.
Security around religious places has been strengthened. Both the police and administration held meetings with prominent members of both communities to ensure peace. The injured in these incidents include policemen as well.
Poisoned minds have already started opining on the incident, with fingers accusingly pointed elsewhere. Introspection dies early when the airs are communally surcharged.
A religious rally was stoned by the other. The rally of the other was characterised by provocative sloganeering. The charges and counter-charges in the poisonous oceans of X, Threads and the subterranean varsity, WhatsApp, can hardly help us either understand what went wrong, or begin to discern where to start the process of setting things right.
The police earlier rescued over 2,500 members of a community stranded in a place of worship and sent them to safety. It could have been worse, a carnage.
It has been long that mobs have breached the monopoly of courts to dispense justice; and neither political parties nor police forces reporting to them can be expected to be totally fair and unbiased, or oblivious to the next election, in their response.
The monsters love the indecision of the administration and the inability of an ailing secularism to intervene strongly to end their dance of destruction.
After mobs burnt down restaurants and shops in Gurgaon’s neighbourhoods, police stepped in. Like in our movies, the police mostly come on the heels of the TV news crews. Over 40 cases have been registered and more than 80 people have been arrested, say reports.
The usual theories of “someone, external, wanted to destroy peace” are being parroted. Each side will blame the other, the fires will rage for a few days and then the embers will cool. The satiated monsters will go back to sleep. And we will forget all of this. Having learnt nothing.
