Unless we have blood which does not boil 
Kalam Nishan Singh

One quick glance at this edition of the World Sikh News, and your blood will boil. One quick read of the first person accounts of the November 1984 riots given by many of India's civil society leaders – some reproduced elsewhere in this edition – and your blood will boil. One casual sitting through the telecast of the latest Tehelka tapes of the Godhra riots and your blood will boil. But in India, where Hindutva’s monster rules, the blood is only spilt on the roads, or burnt by using a well-designed India-specific multi-tyre system.

Multi-tyre system is simple in its effectiveness. Take a lot of tyres, burn them, and put them around any Sikh you can grab. India watched the system’s effectiveness in 1984 on the roads of its national capital Delhi. The burning tyres on many of the pages of this WSN are a testimony to the effectiveness of this Indian invention.

India’s blood did not boil. Therefore, India watched the monster's deathly dance again in Gujarat. India's blood did not boil.

The world is currently watching the anatomy of the Hindu terrorism against India's minorities. The Tehelka investigative weekly has brought out the truth behind the killers, straight from the killers’ mouth as they explained how a ripped open a woman’s stomach and thrust a sword through the foetus, how they killed a politician, shredding his limbs one by one. The world is aghast.

Official India's blood did not boil.

Those who were shouting “Khoon ka badla khoon se lenge” even as a newly annointed Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi stood by and national TV telecast the slogans – exhorting the killers to use the tyres more effectively, burn more Sikhs, rape more women, loot more shops – one thing was very clear. The killers knew that India’s blood will not boil.

A nation whose sense of outrage is dead is only a state without a soul. Those with claims of thousands of years of civilisational history behind them have been exposed as having remained only heathens. Civilized men do not do what the pages across this edition of the World Sikh News depict them as doing. And civilized nation do not act the way India acted after these killers did what they did.

No civilized country’s Prime Minister stands before TV cameras and says when a big tree falls, the earth shakes.

Unless, of course, they have blood which does not boil.

In this edition of the WSN, we have brought to you a fare aimed at searching for this sense of outrage within ourselves. As someone said recently, we live in an age of spiraling hype and sensation. An age of cheap spectacle in which the indulgences of sports and cinema can be so easily deemed landmark and historic. An age in which words like chilling, appalling, inhuman, outrageous, have all lost their charge. We are all desensitized viewers set upon by a turbo fuelled media. Image is chasing image at such blistering speed that we dare not hold on to anything — lest we burst. In such an age, it becomes necessary at times to hold on to our soul, to say a prayer, to remember someone killed before his father’s eyes, someone raped in front of her mother.

Unless, of course, we have blood which does not boil.

Where is our sense of outrage?

31 October, 2007