Blog: Beware ! Truth kills Here

It is not the intention of the writer to provoke a semantic debate on truth as a spiritual quest. But what is truth? It cannot be just what you offer to show me because you may be hiding more than you reveal. Is truth just what should please you? Or is it what pleases me? Is truth an existential fact that tears through the illusion of appearance, belief, concept, wish, expectation, tradition or heritage? Is all truth as clear as the sun that rises in the east?

The major question that must be asked is: when is the time ripe for the truth? In this imbroglio it seems that a few people are putting themselves in the place of the gods who know all the mysteries of life past, present and future. The common man, in other words, the Mauritian citizen has been reduced to a fragile mortal who cannot accommodate truth about himself. The tyranny implied in this relationship can only lead to the stultification of the Asian community which is being kept prisoner of certain self-appointed custodians at the cost of the whole truth. Are we to be treated like kids who have not reached the psychological age to accept that Santa Claus does not exist and that it is parents who offer Christmas gifts?

These are questions that we raise in the unnecessary tussle between the Commission of Truth and Justice and the archival department of the Mahatma Gandhi Institute (MGI).

Let us see the perspective of the MGI and a certain spokesperson of the Hindu community who has computed his popularity to the tune of 400, 000 adherents. The MGI archives contain arcane data about the real origin of many Mauritians who call themselves Hindus today. One of the responsible officers of the MGI even went to the extreme of warning against riots if the truth about the real identity of many Hindus was revealed in public. These proponents of status quo believe in the numerical superiority of Hindus in Mauritius and therefore gain justification for an unsaid but tacitly understood need to preserve a certain form of hegemony in this structure of a rainbow nation where one blend of opposites finds a glorious celebration in the words ‘Unity in Diversity’.
What are the fears expressed?

@ A few Hindus of a particular caste may not originally belong to that caste because to escape ill-treatment their forefathers proclaimed they belonged to superior castes. Today political power has rehabilitated people whom the unfortunate and iniquitous heritage of history has relegated to an inferior status in the Hindu community.

@ A few Hindus will be shocked to learn that their ancestors were Muslims.

@ One might even venture to say that many will be surprised to find out that their blood is the hybrid of Hindu and Creole.

@ Many have a strange apprehension of becoming iconoclasts (destroyers of sacred statues) if they blaspheme or violate what Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam wisely at a strategic turning of Mauritian history declared a taboo. Certain archival data have been kept secret on the instructions of the first President of the MGI Board who was SSR himself. Our representative feels it is blasphemy to contradict SSR. They do not realise that if SSR were alive he would himself amend obsolete hackneyed decisions made irrelevant by the march of time.

@ The fear is to create an unexpected, an immeasurable unease in certain families that might resent the fact that the shades of their departed ancestors have bequeathed to them an identity which is not original.

@ The shift of a power equation that is favorable today may prove deleterious to those in power.

How fatuous and slow-witted can a few leaders be? To be what one is today depends on years of consciousness, practice of a set of beliefs and convictions, the execution of rites and rituals that have shaped our association with those who are related to us by blood or by kinship.

The indentured labourer who belonged to a nondescript class and who was ready to abandon everything to live in a foreign country was himself in quest of a comfortable identity. How many Hindus committed suicide at that time because they could not accommodate the vacancy in which they lived as workers away from their kith and kin but is not inventoried by our books of history?

There was a wave of uncertainty prevailing in the country. The labourer groping for a space where he would be comfortable against hostile forces of nature and the tyranny of masters and very often of one’s peers. The Hindu has been among those who have constantly in history avenged himself against his religion in order to protest against the oppressiveness of a patriarchal authority. The study of single cases of conversion in this country will reveal how Hindu religion has suffered from bashing at the hands of insecure Hindus themselves. Attacking or denying one’s religion has been like a patricidal instinct to vindicate one’s place in the teeth of authority.

If the Hindu society is what it is today irrespective of the mutations of the past, we should reckon with it as it is, not as it was in turbulent times that assailed the psychological equilibrium of our ancestors.

Some of us seem to live under a pernicious apprehension of living in a country where there will be more heads of another religious denomination than the current ratio. Is it with this mentality that we shall build a nation? More effort is needed to make Hindus become better Hindus. Hindus need to know what makes him or her a Hindu so that he is no longer afraid of skeletons in the wardrobe kept by some archival bank.

We must aim at the researcher’s truth so that we do not confiscate facts to protect a hazy idea of power. I feel humiliated by a mentality of officers who assume responsibility for the integrity of the nation by brooding over facts that are not known to the public. What is the truth about my ancestors that my neighbour should not know lest we disturb the peace and harmony of the country? Am I so low, so narrow-minded and so immature that I shall be provoked by an action determined by my great-grand father at the cost of all the experience that he has bequeathed to his posterity so that I am the Hindu I am? I do not know what use the Commission of Truth and Justice will make of the MGI data.

I feel that it is my prerogative to know the truths that seem to have been dissimulated under a mysterious policy of confidentiality to please weak-willed officers who have wrongly used the delegated authority of a democratic society. In the absence of a spiritual quest, let us settle down with the truth that is the unvarnished historical fact to which everyone must have easy access in order to understand himself better. Let none arrogate for himself the status of an interpreter or a messiah.