When carnage is reduced to numbers and development to just economic growth, real human beings and their tragedies remain forgotten.
Empires collapse. Gang leaders/Are strutting about like statesmen. The peoples/Can no longer be seen under all those armaments —Bertolt Brecht.
German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt gave the world the phrase, “the banality of evil”. In 1963, Hannah Arendt account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi military officer and one of the key figures of the Holocaust. Eichmann was hanged to death for war crimes. Arendt’s fundamental thesis is that ghastly crimes like the Holocaust are not necessarily committed by psychopaths and sadists, but, often, by normal, sane and ordinary human beings who perform their tasks with a bureaucratic diligence.38 years back in 1984 same ghastly crime against humanity happened in Indian capital Delhi and around hundred cities across India when Sikh as community were butchered and burnt alive and Indian prime minister described this just a tree shaking off.
Jagdish Tytler was, allegedly, one of the key individuals in the 1984 pogrom against the Sikhs. He was born to a Sikh mother and was brought up by a Christian, a prominent educationist who established institutions like the Delhi Public School. A Congress Party leader, he has been a minister in the Union government. The supposedly long arm of law has still not reached him. Guess they never will, considering that the conviction rate in the cases for butchering thousands of Sikhs is only around one per cent.
Evil, according to Arendt, becomes banal when it acquires an unthinking and systematic character. Evil becomes banal when ordinary people participate in it, build distance from it and justify it, in countless ways. There are no moral conundrums or revulsions. Evil does not even look like evil, it becomes faceless. Banalisation of evil happens when great human crimes are reduced to numbers. So, apparently, if we change the terminology, the gravity of the crime and the scale of the human tragedy would be drastically less!
This intellectual discourse is mirrored in ordinary people who adduce long-winded explanations for how moral responsibility for events like the Sikh pogrom cannot really be attributed to anybody, especially the prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and the congress party who remained at distance from the crime scene.
No moral universe exists beyond the one of “legally admissible evidence”. To be innocent means only to be innocent in the eyes of law. But what does evidence mean when the most powerful political, bureaucratic, and legal machineries are deployed to manipulate, manufacture and kill evidence as seen in the 1984 cases related with Sikh carnage.
Present prime minister Modi’s infamous response to post-Godhra violence is countered with than prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s equally notorious comment after his mother’s assassination. In this game of mathematical equivalence, what actually slip through are real human beings and their tragedies. Banalisation of evil happens when the process of atonement is reduced to a superficial seeking of apology. Even when that meaningless apology is not tendered, we can wonder to what extent reconciliation is possible.
Fascism is in the making when gruesome human tragedies are amputated from ethics and an overarching conception of human good, and violence against minorities becomes banal.
When Hannah Arendt a nazi Holocaust survivor and a leading political thinker witnessed the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi General, in Jerusalem, in early sixties she was taken aback. Reporting for TheNew Yorker , she went to Jerusalem for the trials, and also to see things in a post-War scenario. However, she was taken aback to hear what Eichmann had to say. He had no remorse for whatever crimes he had committed. He did not feel anything because he was doing it in the sheer fashion of bureaucracy. It compelled Hannah’s thoughts to cross the limits of pre-existing “normal” and come up with the thought of a new normal, or the “banality of evil”.this is evident even today when you come across same kind of glee on the faces of congress leadership during these painful days of Sikh carnage remembrance and public gesture of present day congress party people.
Banality means unoriginal of the truest sense; a sense that is normal enough to lack even slightest interest and becomes boring. Hannah Arendt wrote about how the crimes committed against humanity in Germany were nothing unusual for the Nazi soldiers. When she talks about the banality of evil, she refers to how evil has found its place in a world where people not only do wrong but even try to justify that without realising the gravity of their sins. same scenario fits in Indian congress party leadership even in Punjab and elsewhere in India.
In the latest form of “cow protection groups”, or as these are often quoted “the cow vigilantes”, people are facing a similar situation. You see people taking the law into their hands with the justification ready. It becomes painful when the culprits are honoured by a few for their political benefits.
social values have taught people that violence in all its forms must be condemned. However, it seems people are now trying to justify violence in all its forms for the sake of political gains. Whether it is the case of mob lynchings, or the murder of a scribe. Or bigger issue like Sikh carnage of November 1984. None of the major political parties in India seem to remain an exception to this.End of the day, it is not very difficult to conclude that Hannah Arendt was not wrong after all in saying that modernity has given rise to the banality of evil. It remains true even in a society like India that has had deep cultural roots since time immemorial.
