The mind cries Rohingya

Fifteen-year-old Azizul Haq did not have much to think than just mumbling “Allah” and “Mama” in his dying moments. However, in the lead-up to the eventuality, he must have asked his mother where they were headed and what made them run for their lives. For such a complex question, his mother surely would not have much to answer. After eight days of the horrific battle for survival, Azizul died in a Bangladesh hospital with his two legs ripped off by a landmine. The number of Azizuls is just mounting with every passing hour.

Sitting at a distance, fortunate enough to analyse the fates of the Azizuls, what exactly do our minds think of the Azizuls?

Mind full of the usual suspects

We were (are) happy to start with, to be honest. For so long, one religion has had held as a hostage. In blasts, hijacks and sabotages, our world has suffered a lot in the name of that religion. Many of us saw the crisis as ‘Good, finally, the jihadis are being killed.’ Or, ‘They are getting the taste of their own medicine’, we decried. It did not matter how and by whom, or if there were any links between the cause and effect, but our long-held frustration against a religion was just fermenting in the masked contentment to start with. A large part of us just saw a common evil in Rohingya Muslims and satiated it with happiness to some extent. A section of us was (is) afraid. We dreaded terrorism, conspiracy and larger troubles. We linked an entire community to possible threats of radicalism regardless of their plight, age, and gender. To our defence, we have established some (or very little) evidence of such threats. ‘Trained by Al Qaeda’, ‘Potentially exploited by the ISI’ and ‘Radicalised by the Hizb’, how we termed them. Possibly true or misplaced justifications, in the name of national security and in fear of added troubles, some of us have just bypassed the issue with why-unnecessarily-subject-ourselves-to-such-hassles attitudes.

Mind turned astonished and sad

With passing time or otherwise, some of us were astonished and bewildered. When we got to know that more than 60% of the affected–the disparaged-hit-burnt-raped-killed population in a discussion–are children and women, it became agonisingly difficult for some of us to stay stoic. We wondered how in the supposed bright democratic sunshine of the 21st century such thick darkness of backwardness, deprivation, and suppression may exist. As we enlightened ourselves with phrases such as second-class citizenship, snatched white-cards, ethnic cleansing and alike, we turned surprised at the peculiarity of the crisis, relative inaction of states and magnitude of the problem. Our emotions didn’t just stop at being surprised. Gradually, some of us started developing a sadness somewhere deep in our minds. In our minds of many layers, sadness was not easy to give birth to. Living in the era of mind-your-business and self-obsession, sadness is usually hard to harvest. After all, such feelings had to pierce the construed happiness and joy first, unsighted fear second and gaping doubt third before it could get to a humanitarian sadness. However, the more we see pictures and videos of thousands of ‘apparent’ innocent faces, sullenness engulfs us. The stories of Azizuls make us deeply remorseful.

Mind becomes uncontrollable

More than three weeks since the beginning of the crisis and divided by religion, demarcated by boundaries and obliged by political ideologies, the crisis is now at a tipping point. Seemingly, the beginning of the end of a community. What emotions are we left with now? From happiness to surprise and from fear to sadness, it’s gyrating to anger and frustration now. That’s a full spectrum of emotions. For a country’s fight against an eternally deprived populace and for nothing momentous, it is just sheer upsetting for some minds to imagine helpless Rohingyas die in the quest for shelter and home. For some, it is getting increasingly difficult to tolerate the passivity anymore. The silence and indifference of the rest of world, barring a Bangladesh, in conducting their business, as usual, is causing more and more frustration. In the largest democracy, there’s music and light in the air in its eastern parts which are busy welcoming goddess Durga. In its West, there are celebrations in laying the foundation stone of development. Barring these, including the North and South, albeit, in the brutal murder of a media person, in languishing GDP, in fixing the GST backbone, the largest democracy has many problems for which it needs time and attention. Somewhat dishearteningly, giving helpless refugees shelter still does not merit much consideration. The frustration and anger are just not in the largest democracy alone. But, looking beyond causes equal or more frustration. There’s business as usual almost everywhere. None have much time to think about the Azizuls.

The ‘whole’ of the world’s emerging powers just had a summit in Xiamen where they discussed many critical issues including terrorism but nothing much came to the surface about the Rohingyas. In the Far East, there’s a nation antagonising others by launching one missile after the other. In the West, the best of Europe is going to poll and hence preoccupied. There’s debate to deport people to safeguard its legal citizens, in far West. It hurts somewhere to see the Azizuls and alike in one frame and — with a pressing of the TV remote button— to watch a set of people discussing fast mass transit system, professional sports, and international trade in other frames with a simultaneity. Guts churn when the mind compares the Azizuls, trying to run and jump across a landmine-laid road to find a safe haven, with people willing to pay a premium to travel faster on luxuriously engineered tracks. Such contrasts in people ‘praying for lives’ and people ‘aspiring to live in comfort’ is numbing. Or for that matter, such disparity of people chasing for lives to people running in athletic pursuits is heart-wrenching. A numb and unsettled mind is uncontrollable. The wavering mind questions almost anything and everything. It challenges the sanctity of the ‘Nobel Peace Prize’. For, the recipient administrator has turned blind to what’s just not ‘peace’. In shock, it seeks definitions of true democracy. For, the home country which is the epicentre of this crisis is supposed to take footsteps to be a democratic nation. It probes the past. And it finds that those who boasted, ‘The Sun never set in their empire’, are the culprits in displacing the community out of its home in the first place. It almost blames and then restrains that tiny residual part of that empire which is finding solace in an ‘exit’ today. Mind exclaims that it is as much Myanmar’s problems as world’s.

Mind seeks solution

The mind must calm down. It must behave logically and mature. It must understand the linkage of geopolitical web and listen to arguments of all parties. The mind then freaks out. Rohingya crisis is probably too large a problem now for the mind to be on balance. The mind has had enough of being the prisoners of identity politics or being divided into religious lines. Mind now wants to take a stand. It believes, where a herd of 400,000 people is running for their lives, starving day and night, losing lives daily, it’s not the time to be coyly diplomatic and exaggeratedly concerned about security. The mind almost convicts a superpower as powerless seeing it too troubled by its own security and its failure to ‘help’ others. It equates, somewhat desperately, that to turn one’s back to such needy people on security concerns is to ask a dying person in a road accident to divulge details before he could be helped.

Mind reasons, it is not the time to refer to treaties and pacts, it is time to amend a few and impose some. But the mind must be careful. It must understand the delicacies and the variables in the equation. Mind questions if the Rohingya crisis is asking mankind to find solutions where there are more variables than a number of equations. It doubts if the equations can only be solved at the expense of one variable. The exam of democratic excellence is on, the mind seeks a solution.

The author can be contacted on Twitter @ ImDebnath