Author: Chandan Mitra
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: March 7, 2001
The desecration and destruction
of the magnificent Buddha statues in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, by Taliban marauders
is especially painful and humiliating for Indians. For the rest of the
world, they are only heritage sites, but for us they are symbols and surviving
artifacts of our own history, culture and civilisation. It is futile to
condemn the Taliban for this act: You cannot expect savages to be graced
with table manners. And the Taliban have repeatedly and proudly proclaimed
their savagery. They have dragged a former President of their own country
out of the sanctified premises of the UN mission and hung him by the neck
in a public square. They have stoned women to death for allegedly indulging
in adultery, besides banishing them from schools and hospitals. They have
shot people in cold blood for not sporting a beard. They jubilantly collaborated
with the hijackers of the Indian Airlines plane in December 1999, helping
them force a humiliating deal out of our Government from Kandahar under
the benign gaze of the local commander.
The infuriating part of all this
is that the world is so helpless in such situations. Just two decades ago,
it was similarly helpless in the face of the murderous Pol Pot regime in
Cambodia that went about massacring a few million people for the sheer
joy of killing. Of course, the world was equally silent when Stalin and
Mao Zedong liquidated "class enemies" by the million in their respective
countries, but that was before the age of information dawned upon us. As
far as the Taliban are concerned, their barbarism is worse for it is proclaimed
with robust audacity. This time too, there was no hide-and-seek about their
iconoclasm. They elevated statue-breaking to state policy and justified
it on the specious ground of religion. Their arguments are so pathetic
that even their sponsor state, Pakistan, has been compelled to plead with
them, at least for the record, to desist from such savagery.
Now that the bloodthirsty Taliban
have terrorised the local population into cowering submission, they need
to find occupation for their unemployed soldiers. Also, the regime must
be worried that their tanks and rocket-launchers, bought with money from
the narcotics trade, could be rusting. So, what could be better than sending
their rag-tag army and artillery for some target practice to the Bamiyan
hills? The new recruits to the Taliban ranks will presumably be given less
arduous responsibilities like smashing statues inside the Kabul Museum,
another heritage site, with pick-axes and shovels. The UN and international
heritage organisations shall salve their consciences by issuing condemnations
and/or appeals. The US, which sallied into Afghanistan with Cruise missiles
to destroy the ever-elusive Osama bin Laden, can be trusted to maintain
deafening silence on this issue. Washington's machismo has recently been
expended on some hapless Air Traffic Controllers in Iraq!
Not that we can do very much about
it, but the Taliban's insane effrontery provides us occasion to introspect
and perhaps resuscitate our shrinking concern for India's civilisational
heritage. Once upon a time, Kandahar marked the western frontier of Indian
empires. Ruled by local Shaivite kings, much of Afghanistan was in the
ambit of the Indo-Gangetic culture. Gandhari, wife of Dhritara-shtra, belonged
to Kandahar, underlying the close ethno-cultural links between that region
and today's Hindi heartland. The Shaivite kingdoms of Kandahar were eventually
replaced by Buddhist monarchies during the centuries when Gautama Buddha's
intellectual rebellion against the heavy-handed Brahminical Hindu order
won him adherents throughout our vast land. Similarly to the East, Indian
culture flourished, reaching islands as far as Borneo and Bali. Some of
it survives even today, evident from the quaint proto-Sanskritic names
that still prevail in Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia and Indonesia. Borneo's
capital, Bandar Seri Begawan is a colloquialisation of Sri Bhagwan, Bali's
headquarters, Jeyapora, is nothing but Jaipur, localised, just as Aranya
Prathet in Thailand is simply the jungle province or Aranya Pradesh. Fortunately,
much of the structure of the gigantic temple city of Angkor Vat has survived
the ravages of the Khmer Rouge, while Borobudur in Java still shines in
resplendent glory.
I am yet to see an Indian documentary
on these subjects though. However, the BBC commissioned a masterly serial
on Angkor Vat some years ago, detailing the efforts being made now, in
association with the Archeological Survey of India, to restore the damaged
temple complex at Angkor in Cambodia. I suppose any effort to educate today's
generations of India's cultural heritage, that too outside India's current
borders, will invite charges of saffronisation by our learned historians.
Only a few months ago, they kicked up a huge row over the grant of some
money for a project to investigate the course of the "mythical" Saraswati.
I am amused by their eloquent silence in the aftermath of the Gujarat quake,
for satellite pictures have revealed subterranean water channels, leading
to speculation that the mighty Saraswati might indeed still be flowing
into the Arabian Sea, away from our gaze.
By the time this appears in print,
the barbarian rulers of Afghanistan would undoubtedly have succeeded in
their mediaeval mission. Having triumphed at home, they might even try
their hand at exporting iconoclasm to neighbouring countries. Unfortunately,
there are half-witted people across the globe that might well fall prey
to the Taliban's grotesque logic. Of course, they need to be asked if the
temple of Abu Simbel at Aswan with its gigantic statues, relocated at vast
expense when the dam was built there in the 1950s, also constitutes an
affront to religious sensibilities. But who's going the engage the Taliban
in dialogue? They neither hear nor speak any language apart from that of
the gun.
There are times when the world needs
to intervene with physical force to stop such inhuman atrocities, whether
perpetrated on icons or people. The Taliban represent a far bigger threat
to civilisation than Radovan Karadic did in Bosnia. Their passion for destruction
does not stop at human lives. The more we acquiesce in their barbarism
through our silence, the more they get emboldened. The liberation of Afghanistan
from the stranglehold of these diabolical peddlers of death and drugs has
to be placed on the international agenda. Some tentative steps were initiated
last year jointly by the US, Russia and India in that direction. That needs
to be substantially upgraded and a concrete action plan drawn up. The region
controlled by the Taliban is too strategic to be left to them or the Dr
Frankensteins in Islamabad. The Taliban must be eliminated today to secure
humanity's tomorrow.
