And God said; let us make man in our image, after our likeness….
—Genesis 1:26
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While all creatures of God respect the Divine will, man has repeatedly manifested a satanic identity. No man is born a sinner, they say. Destroy the sin but not the sinner. But is this always a practical solution?
Christ warned us against being presumptuous enough to stone a sinner unless we were free of sins. Ramakrishna would agree. The fire of love melts the most-stone hearted sinner. Ashoka and Akbar in the past and Gandhi, Mandela and Martin Luther King in the last century have demonstrated that opponents can be overpowered with love.
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But there is no gainsaying the fact that this world witnesses a constant struggle between good and evil which is aggravated by the machinations of certain people with vested interests. Terrorism threatens the very future of mankind today as intolerance rules the roost. Domestic fury and fierce civil strife are as much a part of the Gaza strip as it is of Kashmir. Different periods in history have failed to communicate to man the futility of violence and crime.
The two World Wars, the nuclear holocaust in Japan, the communal riots in the summer and autumn of 1947 when humans slew each other like goats—the crimes committed against humanity have been endless. Would Gandhism work here? Would our freedom fighters have been successful if they had the Nazis or Stalin to deal with instead of the British? Would the ruler who demolished twenty- seven Jain and Hindu temples to construct the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque in Delhi or those that destroyed the Babri Masjid deserve to be forgiven? Can they ever be made to learn to respect humanity? History does not support the utopian view that forgiveness can make a wolf turn sheep.
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It takes courage and a big heart to forgive a sinner and give him/ her strong humanitarian values. But the sinner needs to be humane enough to recognise the value of this forgiveness. Each soul is potentially divine but perhaps, some are soiled beyond repair. It would be difficult to preach non-violence to Bin Laden! Ending with a reference to the nuclear holocaust, we pause a moment to wonder whether it is possible to forgive and forget the perpetrations. Perhaps we have to, for the future of mankind.
… I saw, dismayed
A woman with a child standing in my path
Both naked…
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A naked man—and now the thought arose
That some strange thing hath stripped us of our clothes.
The face of an old woman on the ground
Was marred with suffering, but she made no sound.
Silence was common to all.
—’A Doctor’s Journal Entry for August 6, 1945′ Vikram Seth