Sadness and Madness

In December 1936, a boy born in Buenos Aires to migrants from Italy was named Jorge Mario Bergoglio. At the age of 22, after becoming a chemical technician and working for a while in food processing, Jorge Mario joined the Jesuits. In 2013, when he was 76, Jorge Mario was elected the Pope. He gave himself the name Francis in honor of the Italian poet-saint born around 1181 who, we are told, loved the poor and loved also the birds and the animals. 

Pope Francis passed away on April 22. The future will remember him as the first pope (in the last 1,000 years or more) who was born outside Europe; the first Jesuit pope; and the first pope to reach out to divorced and remarried Catholics and to the LGBTQ+ community. 

Treating climate change as an immediate threat and defending harassed migrants everywhere, Francis will be remembered, too, as the pope who raised his voice for justice when rulers of powerful nations remained silent or even backed coercion. CNN described him as “a fervent critic of Israel’s war” in Gaza and recalled that the Pope “ramped up his censures in recent months” and that in January he had termed the conflict “very serious and shameful”. 

Francis fervently sought an end also to the war between Russia and Ukraine. 

On Easter Sunday (April 21) Pope Francis sat in his wheelchair on a balcony while what turned out to be his last message was read out by a cardinal to a crowd of tens of thousands in Rome’s St. Peter’s Square. In that message the Pope decried “how much contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalized and migrants.”

We Are One Humanity shares the sadness of millions worldwide at the passing of a good, great, and courageous human being who headed the immense yet heterogeneous and at times divided family of our earth’s Catholics. Evidently a conclave of up to 135 voting cardinals, including ones from Tonga, Myanmar and Iran, will choose Francis’s successor. The exercise will test the unity and wisdom of this fascinating multiracial collective, which is very different from the groups that chose popes earlier. 

SOUTH ASIA’S DISMAL STORY

Although the neighboring nations that formally belong to SAARC – the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation – have not officially dissolved their organization, in effect that body has faded out. On paper, the following nations are SAARC members: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. In 1921, these eight countries together constituted 3 percent of the world's land area, 21 percent of the world's population, and 5.21 percent of the global economy. South Asia is host also to the world’s tallest mountains, seas with tsunamic potential, a rich assemblage of religions (Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism, Christianity, Jainism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, plus a variety of indigenous faiths), not to mention a plethora of languages, and some ancient (and pretty amazing) civilizations. 

Not that many decades back, both during the excoriated period of imperial rule and for fifty or sixty years after independence, it was both fairly normal and fairly simple for people in these lands to go across a plain, river, sea, or mountain and enter a neighboring country. In old brains, memory of those happy times is now fading, and younger ones, who form the great majority, have never known those times. Conflict and suspicion, and the benefits that conflict and suspicion confer on politicians, have all but killed trade and travel across many of South Asia’s internal borders, when the potential for both trade and tourism is fabulous. 

Unwise statements have further thickened these injurious fences. There was no need for Bangladesh’s interim leader, the remarkable Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, who was visiting China, to have publicly reminded leaders in Beijing that India’s northeastern states that lie east of Bangladesh possess only the narrowest of land links with the bulk of India, through a neck north of Bangladesh and south of Tibet. 

India’s response to this thoughtless bid to spice up Bangladesh’s relations with China by flashing a light on India’s vulnerability has been harsh. Facilities thus far provided to Bangladesh to transship goods by land via Indian soil to Nepal, Bhutan, and Myanmar have been withdrawn. A similar facility that allowed Bangladesh to fly products to Europe and the US from airports in India, where they arrived on trucks from Bangladesh, has also been withdrawn. 

LOVE OF SEPARATENESS

Meanwhile Pakistan’s army chief, General Asim Munir, has described Kashmir as Pakistan's "jugular vein" while addressing (on April 15) an Overseas Pakistanis Convention in Islamabad. The convention was evidently attended by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, senior ministers, and many Pakistanis living abroad. Munir asked overseas Pakistanis to pass on the country's story to their children, emphasizing that their forefathers believed that Hindus and Muslims were different in every possible aspect of life. 

"Our religions are different,” he said, “our customs are different, our traditions are different, our thoughts are different, our ambitions are different. That was the foundation of the two-nation theory that was laid there. [Muslims and Hindus] are two nations, we are not one nation,” the general added. 

During British rule, the “two-nation theory”, which sought to establish that India’s Hindus and Muslims were two different “nations”, was advanced from 1940 by the Muslim League and earlier by the Hindu Mahasabha. However, the theory was firmly and unequivocally rejected by the Indian National Congress and by Mahatma Gandhi. While acquiescing in India’s partition in the summer of 1947, the INC insisted that Hindus and Muslims would be equal and joint residents of the bulk of undivided India that remained after Muslim-majority Pakistan areas opted, at independence, to form a new country. 

NO EQUALITY FOR “THEM” 

In force from 1950, free India’s constitution embeds and enshrines this view and confers equal rights on all. In recent years, however, Hindu nationalists have not only obtained political power, they have reverted to the “two-nation theory” and also demanded that the country’s 15 percent Muslims accept a less-than-equal status. 

On April 4 this year, the Indian parliament passed, by a small majority, a major amendment to the so-called Waqf Act, which governs the religious lands and properties of India’s Muslim communities, used mainly for mosques, tombs, graveyards, schools, and orphanages. After receiving the formal signature of India’s president, the amended Act became law on April 5. India’s Supreme Court is currently examining the Act’s constitutionality, which has been challenged by Muslims. Key provisions of the Amended Act have been temporarily stayed by Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna. 

India’s intrepid online portal, The Wire.in, carries an informative conversation on this subject, captured on YouTube, between seasoned reporter Karan Thapar and one of India’s finest attorneys, Dushyant Dave. 

A major question before the court is about the government’s newly acquired power to nominate non-Muslims to the all-India Waqf Council and the multiple Waqf Boards that run Muslim properties in India’s states. This is quite a jump, for under India’s laws no non-Hindu can have a say in running the religious properties of Hindus. Likewise, only adherents can have a role in managing the religious properties of India’s Sikhs, Christians and Zoroastrians. 

Equality before the law will thus be tested in what is still called the world’s largest democracy despite the hurtful recent history of discrimination against non-Hindus in a nation where Hindus form 80 percent of the population. 

In less than a month from now, on May 13, Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna will retire; he will be replaced by Justice B. R. Gavai. Half a century ago, a brave justice named H. R. Khanna authored the sole dissenting judgment when Indira Gandhi’s unwarranted emergency, which lasted for 19 months, was endorsed by a compliant Supreme Court bench. The shortly-to-retire Sanjiv Khanna is H. R. Khanna’s nephew. Discrimination against Muslims and Christians in Hindu nationalist India has continued from 2014. 

POSTSCRIPT 

Prospects for improved relations among South Asia’s countries received a nasty setback on the afternoon (Indian time) of Tuesday April 22 when terrorists shot and killed at least 26 persons, most of them tourists, in a forest close to the “trekking paradise” of Baisaran, adjacent to the beautiful resort town of Pahalgam, in India’s union territory of Jammu & Kashmir. According to The Hindu newspaper, two foreign tourists were among the killed. The Resistance Front, active from 2019, seems to have claimed responsibility for the attack.