A student of the Veterinary and Animal Sciences University at Pookode in Wayanad called Siddhartha met with a tragic end on February 29. He was stripped naked and paraded in public before fellow students beat him up repeatedly for two days, locked him up in his room, starving him of food and water. Neither any of the students who witnessed the torture nor any of the authorities of the college said anything in public about what occurred. They did not even inform the police about. It was through some non-Malayalee students that the public came to know about it. It was nothing short of a brutal and merciless monstrosity. Every Keralite should ponder how such a thing could have happened in a supposedly enlightened state like Kerala. Why did the students and the staff not have the courage to prevent it or at least have the ethical conviction to report it to the police? The student union of the Marxist Party is in the dock on this. The fear of the Marxist Party and the possibility of becoming a similar victim haunt those who work or study in that institution. Hardly any different is the situation in other government run educational institutions where the Marxist student union enjoys a brutal majority. In certain Northern districts of Kerala, it is the Marxist Party and its leaders who rule the roost.
Where a party and its ideology have a vice grip on disillusioned youth who have a criminal bent of mind, they use the party flag as a facade to unleash violence, confident that the party is there to protect them from the consequences of it. The political murders that mar Kerala’s image are a proof of it. The reason behind such monstrosities is plain and clear – an ideology that promotes violence. When such an ideology rules, ethics becomes a casualty. Such an ideology won’t entertain any overriding concern. It dictates what is good or evil, right or wrong. Ethics is made its slave. Levinas wrote: “We face an ideology more desolate than all ideology, one that no science could rehabilitate without running the risk of being bogged down in the very unproductive game that it sought to break up.” Theoretical reasoning rules supreme. We are scientific animals. It can become “a stratagem in the war of class against class, or a refuge for the frustrated, a bundle of illusions dominated by class interests or by the needs of compensation.” The terror they unleash will shut up the mouth of onlookers for the mortal fright of becoming the next victim.
What happened in Waynad follows a historical trend. The famine deaths and the murders during Stalin’s Russia, the murderous stories of Mao in China and the massacres of Pol Pot in Vietnam can get reproduced anywhere. But is this a tragedy of Marxism only? This is a danger which can happen to any religion or system of thought which insulates itself from every other idea or thought. Such a system cam become totalitarian. Pope Francis repeats that Christianity is not an ideology, but a person. The war against heretics and the hunt after the devil-possessed are such instances of totalitarian brutality. We have seen how terrorism in Islam made it a religion of murderous Jihad. The reduction of Hinduism to Hindutva is ideological. Adolf Hitler of George Steiner’s novel tell his jury who try him in the Amazonian jungle: “‘We were chosen to be the conscience of man,’ said the Jew. And I answered him, yes, I, gentlemen, who now stand before you: ‘You are not man’s conscience, Jew. You are only his bad conscience. And we shall vomit you so we may live and have peace.’ A final solution. How could there be any other?” Finally Hitler said, “Gentlemen of the tribunal, I took my doctrines from you. I fought the blackmail of the ideal with which you have hounded mankind. My crimes were matched and surpassed by those of others. The Reich begat Israel. These are my last words.’
In a world as cruel as ours, something like the miracle of goodness could appear as infinitely worthy of amazement. A direct optics—without the mediation of any idea–can only be accomplished as ethics. Integral knowledge or revelation is ethical behaviour. Ethics is to posit a radically more demanding, transcendental sense of ethics. “Ethics” is not an advocation of virtues, or the explication of moral imperatives or universal rules of conduct, commands or prohibitions. Ethics is referring to a pre-predicative calling to irrevocable responsibility for the other.