Holi Reflections

Mar 09, 2012 Editorial

Yesterday, all the major political parties sent out “Holi” messages, which our newspaper dutifully published. But each of them managed to sneak in a political message. It is not that we believe we can form hermetically sealed compartments between our politics and our religion. Both realms of activity engage the same constituency and putatively at some levels, to achieve the same ends – the betterment of our lives.
But we hoped that the messages would have taken the moral high ground so that the eyes – and possibly the aspirations – of the citizenry would be more uplifted. Let us first peruse the PPP’s message: “LET GOOD TRIUMPH ALWAYS OVER EVIL”. The capitalised caption emphasising that we should “let’ good triumph…”, implies that ‘good’ on its own would automatically ‘triumph over evil’. But this is just not the case.
For “good” to triumph, those that stand on its side must be prepared to struggle on its behalf. It was the political theorist Edmund Burke who proposed: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. Centuries later, Gandhi proposed that at a minimum, ‘non-cooperation with evil is our sacred duty.’ His disciple Dr Martin Luther King was to put this exhortation in a starker formulation, “To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it.”
One evil was positively identified in the Guyanese body politic – corruption. Even President Donald Ramotar agreed that this was a fact. Yet now that he has assumed the presidency, we are yet to hear of any concrete initiative to address this scourge. We are not talking about witch-hunting or going after specific individuals but to unveil some programme that will close the gate to the egregious instances that were identified.
The PPP statement then announced: “there are many demonic personalities who would deprive whole nations of their freedom, if given the chance to rule.” This seems to imply that the ‘demonic personalities’, with presumably the proclivity to evil, are all outside of the PPP. Surely this cannot be so. Not only Hinduism, but all religions accept the universal weakness, and potential to commit evil. There is, of course, the plea to transform oneself before starting on others.
The PNC in its Holi message began by contra posing the “religious’ and the ‘secular’ messages of the festival. They would be well advised to learn that Hindus do not accept such a distinction since their practices constitute a “tradition” or way of life rather than ‘religion’ typified by a prophet, a book and a set of ‘beliefs’. In this way, the adherent cannot have two sets of standards that ultimately may conflict.
The statement went on to expand on one ‘secular’ aspect of Holi: “the results of the last General and Regional Elections provided a golden opportunity for all parties to sit down and craft plans, policies and programmes to benefit all Guyanese.” Surely it did. But could not the PNC concede that the combined opposition might be destroying the aforementioned ‘golden opportunity’? Cooperation, like charity, begins at home. We must first remove the mote from our own eyes.
The AFC took the same tact as their confreres: the Guyanese people are exhorted to “identify the evil forces that influence them and in so doing, commit to a future where they pursue a virtuous living.” They make the same mistake of projecting ‘evil’ as an external force that somehow will disappear by itself.
Firstly, there is the point that we cannot be self-righteous and assume that we are free from ‘evil”: we might be part and parcel of it. The question of the ‘mote’ once again. Secondly, ‘to ‘pursue virtuous living’ is almost impossible when we might be evil or if evil abounds around us. Let us all get involved to fight the evil before we are all consumed.

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