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The Rediff Special/ K V Bapa Rao

Two Nations, Two Martyrs

Reading in the American papers about the suicide of Bishop John Joseph of Pakistan, in protest of that nation's open and legalised oppression of its minorities, it is hard for me to suppress a smirk of superior amusement at the irony of it all.

Here is a country which loses no opportunity to bray at India about the latter's alleged oppression of its Muslim minorities. And now, in front of the whole world, its miserable excuse for a legal system stands exposed as little more than an elaborate and horrid ritual concocted for the purpose of bullying and dispossessing its Hindus, Christians, Ahmadiyyas, women, and whoever else the bully-boys running things think they can get away with stomping on.

And this is the country that styles itself the "land of the Pure." Land of Pure Unadulterated Fascism is more like it, I think.

Then, I think about another public suicide, this one in India, and start to feel a bit less smug. Thupten Ngodup immolated himself in New Delhi on April 27, and died from his burns two days later in Ram Manohar Lohia hospital. I am writing this on May 9, which means, if Ngodup had been Hindu, it would be just about 11 days after his demise, the end of the formal mourning period. I cannot say that I mourned for Ngodup. I did not know the man except for what I read of him in international wire service dispatches. (The Indian press, at least their Web editions, carried precious little about Ngodup's death or its backdrop.) He was 50, a Tibetan refugee, and had been a soldier in the Indian army during the 1971 Bangladesh war. And now, at an age when calm, pragmatic counsel is normally thought to prevail over the impetuosity of youth, he chose to bring his life to a sudden end, in a manner that is gruesome and painful beyond imagining. "I did it for Tibet," were his dying words.

I did not mourn for Ngodup, but I cannot get him out of my mind. Why did he do this horrible thing? If he had wanted to draw the world's attention to his people's continued torment at the hands of the Chinese authorities, surely his energies, judiciously expended in the cause over the few decades remaining in his natural life, would have been more effective? Why waste a precious life? And in any case, what is it to me? Ngodup, by his own admission, did what he did as a political statement for Tibet and, by implication, Lamaist Buddhism.

I am Indian, not Tibetan; Hindu, not Buddhist. And, not having served in the army, I don't share a bond of military fraternity with the man.

India's public voice has been silent about the matter: neither the media, nor the politicians, nor the left-wing activists, nor the religionists of various persuasions -- in short, virtually no one -- has had much by way of feelings to express on the death of Ngodup. So, why should I worry, why should I care?

Well, there's the matter of what triggered his suicide. For the past several weeks preceding the event, a number of Tibetan Youth Congress activists have been staging a fast-unto-death in New Delhi (wire services referred to "an old observatory", presumably Jantar Mantar) demanding that the United Nations investigate China's human rights abuses in Tibet. For the most part, it appears that the authorities left them to fast, unmolested.

On April 26th, General Fu Quanyou, China's military chief, arrived in New Delhi for talks with Indian defence officials. By this time, wire service reports had it that the hunger strikers were considerably weakened, and in danger of dying. On April 27th, police swooped down on the hunger strikers, roughed them up, and carted them off to the hospital to be force-fed.

Tibetan Youth Congress activists expressed dismay at India's apparent eagerness to avoid embarrassing the visiting Chinese military official, as well as the high-handed zulmi approach of the police in dealing with emaciated hunger strikers who were, after all, hurting no one. It was at this time, and in this context, that Ngodup decided to make his fiery statement.

So, yes, Ngodup's statement was about Tibet, but it was also a rebuke to India, an accusation that she is exhibiting a national servility that is more befitting of a vassal state of Communist China than a sovereign democratic republic of free people.

His suicide also carries the message that it may be all very well for the nominally-free Indian people to countenance routine abuse by their own paid servants, namely the police, but he, a Tibetan free in spirit if not in name, will not accept the abuse of his people by those same police.

I worry because Ngodup's accusations hit home. I want desperately to believe that we are a proud, free people with a grand civilisation and fairly normal, transient problems, which we will transcend and move on to better times. But I don't believe for a moment the authorities's half-hearted protestations that the police assault on the hunger strikers just happened to coincide with General Fu's visit, and no appeasement was involved.

In any case, the whole sovereign democratic republic theory rather got the stuffing knocked out of it by the subsequent spectacle of virtually the entire media and political establishment scurrying, like so many whipped puppies, to repudiate Defence Minister George Fernandes's simple factual observation about China being the prime strategic threat to India.

A free people would have politely pointed out to the Chinese that, in a democracy, it is the job of the defence minister to report honestly to his bosses, namely the Indian people, about his assessment of foreign threats facing their country, so that they, in turn, could debate among themselves and get back to him with instructions as to what to do about said threats. (By the way, my congratulations to George Fernandes on doing the job he was hired by the people to do.)

The picture of India that emerges, when I think about Ngodup is not a pretty one. It is that of a smug, deluded nation, colluding willy-nilly with those who would rob us of our freedom and dignity. With the Chinese, it is foreign tyrants who, directly, or through surrogates, murder our heritage in places like Tibet and Cambodia, and suppress the torchbearers of our new ideology of freedom in places like Burma. (Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma's legitimate leader imprisoned by the Chinese-supported Burmese dictatorship, is strongly influenced by modern liberal democratic Indian values.)

With the police, it is domestic tyrants from whose abusing and torturing ways it appears that no one, guilty or innocent, poor or rich, is immune. Fifty years after Independence, there are no signs of an emerging replacement for the Raj-era police system which was consciously designed to rob the freedoms of Indians.

If this Tibetan hadn't killed himself so dramatically, I doubt that I would have felt his accusations as acutely. So, though the idea fills me with horror and disgust, his suicide now looks not entirely pointless; in death, Ngodup communicated, if only with a minority of one.

Just as Bishop John Joseph has sought to communicate by blowing his brains out. And maybe, despite my presumption of Indian moral superiority vis-a-vis Pakistan, the cases of Ngodup and John Joseph are not so far apart after all.

In both cases, it appeared on the surface that they were speaking for an embattled segment of society with which the dominant establishment had little empathy. The majority Muslims in Pakistan, by and large, don't give two hoots about what happens to Hindus or Christians or various heretics in their country. Likewise, Indians are not known for fervent mass expressions of solidarity with the Tibetan cause.

Yet, Pakistan's Muslims would do well to pay attention to the implications of John Joseph's message -- just because their stupid and arbitrary blasphemy laws are being applied mostly to various kafirs and mushriks today doesn't mean that they can't be applied to various segments of newly-created "heretics," defined, it would seem, as "persons with less clout than me."

Likewise, Indians should think about what their freedoms and values mean to them, and what they are willing to do to defend them. The Tibetans lost their freedom, yet show a remarkable appreciation of it, unlike the Indians who seem inclined to thoughtlessly cede their freedoms away by default, be it to the Chinese hegemonists or to their own corrupt officialdom.

So, for a brief moment anyway, India and Pakistan share the common spirit of their two different martyrs from the Houses of Bodhisattva and Jesus respectively. Whether one believes any good will come of it to either people depends, I imagine, on a lot of complicated questions of faith and theology. Me, I'll just hope that the shades of John Joseph and Thupten Ngodup have finally found their quietus, and go back to my worrying.

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