Ever hear the term “backlash”? Sure you have, but have you heard it in connection with some ghastly event? Like: the killings of Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 were a “backlash” for the assassination of Indira Gandhi. (Remember Rajiv Gandhi: when a big tree falls, he said, the earth shakes). The riots in Bombay in 1992-’93 were a “backlash” for the Radhabai Chawl murders. The bomb blasts in Bombay in March 1993 were a “backlash” for the riots. The slaughter across Gujarat in 2002 was a “backlash” for the Godhra atrocity.
Etcetera.
If listing these horrors nauseates you, me too. In one case, it’s even chronologically impossible: the Radhabai Chawl murders happened early on 8 January 1993, whereas the riots went on from early December 1992 to mid-February 1993. How the riots can be a “backlash” for an event that happened during the riots baffles me – except that it is indeed the lying impression that many people have assiduously spread, that many others actively nurture.
Chronological impossibilities apart: what must we make of this “backlash” argument? Is it reasonable? Acceptable? Rational? Anything?
There’s a subtle point here. Yes, backlashes certainly happen, in the sense that people react with outrage to crimes, too often by committing outrageous crimes themselves. That is, this explains how events happen. So yes: Godse’s murder of Gandhi led to reprisals against Brahmins in Pune.
The riots in Bombay caused the bomb blasts a month later. There’s backlash here in this sense: the later events would not have happened had the earlier ones not happened.
But if backlashes happen, if they explain events – that does not mean they are automatically justified. They do not justify those events.
So when a Muslim man cornered me at a party and said: “The Bombay bomb blasts were a backlash against the riots”, I nodded, if warily. But when he went on: “The riots justified the blasts. It was payback time”, I shook my head. For nothing justifies the killing of 300 ordinary citizens in those blasts. Just as nothing justifies the murder of nearly 1,000 ordinary citizens in the riots. Not even gruesome murders in Radhabai Chawl, not even if they had actually happened before the riots instead of during them.
This is the subtle point I mentioned: explanation, yes; justification, no.
And the reason it is a subtle point is that the backlash argument is a slippery slope. It’s too easy to confuse explanation with justification, and that confusion starts the slide into a moral morass. The resort to “backlash” somehow lessens the magnitude of the crime in our minds, thus our outrage over it.
What’s more, mention of a backlash leads to a lockstep progression of more backlashes. After all, if the bomb blasts were a backlash to the riots, the riots were a backlash to Radhabai Chawl, Radhabai was a backlash to the earlier riots, those earlier riots were a backlash to the destruction of Babri Masjid, the destruction was a backlash to Muslim intransigence, that intransigence was a backlash to VHP subterfuge...we’ve heard all this.
The truth in any of it aside, where does it stop? At one Neanderthal man swinging a club at another?
And it works in other perverse ways as well. I once confronted a man who said the riots were a backlash to Radhabai Chawl, pointing out that the riots had raged for a month before Radhabai Chawl. He said: “No, I mean the second phase of the riots.” Well, even the second phase had raged for a week before Radhabai Chawl, from 1 January. “No, I don’t agree that the second phase started on that date. It started after the Radhabai deaths.”
Well of course, if you define the riots as having begun after Radhabai Chawl, certainly they were a backlash. Justified, even. It’s just a piffling matter of definition!
This is the morass I meant: this twilight zone of illogic, prejudice and selective amnesia. And when we set foot in it, we ensure that the cycle of backlash – more accurately, the cycle of backlash-as-explanation or backlash-as-justification – will continue.
We also ensure that nobody will actually get punished for any of the crimes that happen around us. Because for everyone who demands punishment for them, there are others who think “backlash” and resist such demands.
Remember: nobody of any consequence has been punished for the horrors of 1984, 1992-’93, or 2002. I’m sure I could write the same sentence in 2014, adding dates of future horrors, and it would be just as true then.
Your horrible crime, you see, is merely my backlash.
So what’s the answer, then? Simple: when it comes to killing, deal in absolutes. Murdering innocent human beings, whether out of the blue or as a backlash, remains murder. Remains a crime. The murderers must be punished.
Period.
Your horrible crime, you see, must be mine too.