Charlie Hebdo and Selective Outrage
The French satirists should never have died. 10 of them paid the price for sketching cartoons with candour and scant regard for propriety. It was their right to push the limits of humour, something which most of us in India and most parts of the world would shy away from: blasphemy.
The global outrage caused by the killing of the satirists was hard to miss. Every social networking site had posts of rants, solidarity messages and myriad articles and opinion pieces on the unfortunate incident. The hashtag #JeSuisCharlie (I am Charlie) has become the most popular hashtag in Twitter history. Others warned of the evils of Islamophobia. Some spoke of the need to protect free speech while many disagreed with the lampooning of Prophet Muhammad. But the outrage was massive and streamed in from different corners of the educated world.
On January 10, Boko Haram militants mercilessly killed over 2,000 people in northern Nigerian villages. Just before the year 2014 was officially done, terrorists indiscriminately gunned down at least 132 innocent children in Peshawar, Pakistan.
But why is our outrage loudest when terror strikes the western world?
I was speaking to an expat friend who was adequately alarmed at the unleashing of the ugly face of terror in Paris. But even though erudite and otherwise well informed, he had not heard about the 26/11 Mumbai attacks of 2008 when 10 terrorists slaughtered 154 people in a dastardly act. Some around the world would remember it only for the westerners who were caught in the siege.
Life in India, Africa or even China for that matter has no value. India and China are overpopulated and of no consequence to much of the western world except when exploiting our vast consumer base and selling us defence deals. Africa stands for diseases like Ebola and Aids. But we need the West too and often find ourselves more plagued by their problems than sometimes even our own.
People die in our own countries every day but there is no outrage. The incidents are reduced to missable snippets in newspapers while TV channels pick up only the most sensational death. None of them make it to our Facebook posts or Twitter.
The satirists of Charlie Hebdo have the entire world rallying behind them condemning the killing and vouching for their freedom of expression. Yes, they should never have died. But there's another freedom too that is being routinely sodomized in other parts of the world...the freedom to life. And perhaps we'll also give better voice to the forever silenced children of Pakistan or the inscrutable violence in Nigeria. May be the western world will be suitably outraged too.
