Category: Speeches

Moral Policing – Who Will Guard the Guards?

A speech I made recently as part of a debate. Not all my arguments on the topic are here: only those that I could fit into four minutes of speaking.

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I think it was Mark Twain, one of the greatest wits we have ever known, who once said, “Morals are an acquirement – like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis – no man is born with them.”

Honourable chair, respected judges, ladies and gentlemen – Moral Policing and why it is an abominable folly. Why the people who call themselves the guardians, the watchdogs of morality, can never be trusted. This is one of the oldest of philosophical debates with its roots in our very definitions of morality, our perceptions of self. I stand here vehemently opposing moral policing in all its grotesque forms.

Now why do I do that? Let’s talk about the origin of moral policing. To explain it very crisply, here’s a simple flowchart:

1. Someone thought there were absolute rights and wrongs that apply to all human beings in general – all human beings who have ever existed. This is a flawed philosophy.

2. The same someone thought, because they were absolute, the rights and wrongs can be actually, practically, imposed on their fellow human beings. This is flawed morality.

3. To prevent people from falling away from these principles, they thought they could use instruments of fear, of emotional, religious blackmail. Hence moral policing.

Ladies and gentlemen, absolute rights and wrongs? Slavery, war crimes, suttee by widows – regular practices in one age condemned vociferously in the next. Values change, my friends. And morality – true morality – is something that resides in the deepest reaches of a person’s heart and soul that it cannot be reached, let alone be guarded, by anyone else.

In the past, all people who assumed responsibilities of moral policing had their own glaring fallacies. We all know what happened to the Christian Church just before the Reformation, what happened to the Taliban.

And where do people who assume guardianship find themselves today? In the most ludicrous of all positions – burning Valentines’ cards, prohibiting casual clothes, and taking to task actors who say that consenting adults having sex is their own business. By far, ladies and gentlemen, the moral nadir of the moral police in all history.

Whether a girl wears full length clothes or casual wear is her own business – what she derives from her own principles and choices. The way I choose to love someone who also loves me, is my business. And for that matter, whom I love, a boy or a girl, and whether I sleep with him or her – now that’s the height of it! Whether I kiss her in a park, give her a card or even a car, is nobody’s concern either.

Directives forcing people to stick to one set of clothing styles, prohibiting them from dancing together in hotels – what, marriage next? – and banning bar dancers, these are the acts of the worst of a generation who feel threatened by cultural variation and assume it their responsibility to bring things back to cultural antiquity.

All such regimes are marked by persecution. There’s always been a master morality and a slave morality. Where do these police get their ideas from? Wherefrom their principles and ideologies? What happens to people who don’t accept them – who happen to be a majority?

This is where the police go wrong. They are based on a conceited presumption that one human being can decide and dictate terms to another human being as to how to live their life and what to do with it. Because values change – one man’s meat is another man’s poison.

And, if there is a Heaven and there is a God, then on the day I stand up to answer his questions, not one human being is going to hold my hand and feed me words – my morality and my reasons are my own.

KISHORE KUMAR

War: Do we need it?

This is a speech I made as part of a debate some time ago. The topic was Peace Across Borders: The Middle-east Crisis.

The style is of a speech, and not an Essay. I am no authority on Middle-east History. I present it here as just one of my works. As some other writings of mine, it portrays my own Pacifistic views.

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August 1947.
History’s greatest migration across a newly drawn McMahon Line was accompanied by ruthless manslaughter of thousands. Hostilities continued for another fifty years. We shall live with the implications forever.

December 11, 2006.
Three-year old Salaam, six-year old Ahmed, and nine-year old Osama were on their way to school when they were blown to smithereens along with their car. The reason? They were the children of a Palestinian security officer.

Our history as a species is replete with blood-drenched tales of strife such as these. Human life has been sacrificed at the altar of territorial disputes since the days of unrecorded prehistory. But how often do we look back to see the damage we’ve done? How often do our military leaders look upon life as something more than just troops and casualties?

War is an illegal appropriation of a people’s right to exist. It is never justified, never legitimate. In my opinion, there isn’t a single dispute that cannot be solved over a conference table.

Attribute it to fate or man’s arrogance, but we have always bled in war. Border conflicts, war, insurgency attacks, terrorism – I’m just skimming the surface. Peace across certain borders of the world remains a pipedream today. The Indian subcontinent, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia today alternate between disturbances and spells of uneasy peace.

However, it is the region of the Middle-east which has consistently borne the brunt of human tragedy. It was the cradle of human civilization. Also, our first battlefield. For five thousand years, this region witnessed the most gruesome of wars. The Persian and Macedonian conquests to begin with, following the Jewish Exodus; followed by those of the Romans. Islamic invasions and the fall of Rome in the most decisive battle of all time. Then, the advent of Byzantium ; the coming of the Seljuk and the Ottoman Turks, and the unstable Mongols.

We took an irreversible turn with the “holy” call by Pope Urban II to a series of unholy Crusades – history’s most lamented chapter. What followed was a blur of conquerors redrawing borders every few decades.

The turn of the 20th century saw a chaotic and weak Middle-east, ready in every way for a European domination. Hitler’s systematic genocide of six million Jews validated the Zionist movement. Failure of the 1947 UN Plan for the Partition of Palestine and the Declaration of the State of Israel by the Zionist leadership the next year, were the beginning of literal pandemonium in the Middle-east.

The land of the Patriarchs is now rent by anger, fear, and hatred. The core issue of conflict in the Middle-east is the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories as well as the Syrian Golan Heights and what is left in Lebanese Occupied Territories. Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq still suffer from open wounds. More than a hundred civilians die every day in the Middle-east. And in the recent past, 2.3 million people have been displaced from their homes: large chunks from Iraq and Palestine. The Middle-east is burning.

It is high time the peace process made a headway. And a final solution to this problem can only come from a profound understanding of the region’s ailments and an integral view of the peoples. The creation of a viable Palestinian State, and a settlement of all disputes to end all hostilities, over conference tables, is of utmost importance. As long as a commitment to peace is absent, there will always be grenades flying into our homes and revenge building in our hearts.

My fellow makers of tomorrow’s world, History’s mistakes stare at us from the eyes of homeless refugees, estranged families and orphaned children. We can never correct these mistakes, but we can pledge, this moment, that we will never repeat them. Because there is no such thing as a good war.

KISHORE KUMAR