Friends, Hatred and arrogance are detrimental to religion and freedom. Currently, we have the prevalence of both hatred and repression in our country…” echoes the words of retired IIT professor VK Tripathi on a piece of paper.
Through the streets of cities and lanes of educational institutions, the 77-year-old has been walking around for over three decades, distributing flyers — to lend an ear just for a minute. This has been his way of protesting the blindfold that each government ties around the citizens’ eyes.
On Sunday morning, Tripathi held a meeting in the city to share his experiences of witnessing the chaos in the country and highlighting the importance of hope amid the present socio-political situation.
Throughout his life, he has been questioning concepts like imperialism, communalism, and sectarianism. He returned to India from America to choose activism, to develop grassroots resistance against silence and injustice. The demolition of Babri Masjid (1992), the Bhagalpur violence in Bihar (1989) that claimed the lives of 950 people, were a few instances that came as a harsh blow to him. “All those (who died) were workers. And I’m pretty sure their ancestors at the time of Muslim rulers or Hindu rulers must have been workers, and the workers were exploited. They are not exploiters,” he says.
After the distress of living in fear and the malign hatred he had been seeing, he called a meeting of Indians. He then suggested that it was possible to carry out a signature campaign. He recalls, “It was a political movement filled with hatred. It is going to kill our souls. So I thought we should run a signature campaign among non-resident Indians against these two things. So they agreed and we carried on a two-month campaign.”
The plan was to get 1,000 signatures and present those signatures to the president. For this, he had organized meetings in IIT, where he was obstructed by the RSS. Each step he took came with backlash, but he asserts that one has to confront “utilitarian repressive regimes with a wide network of hate mongers and lynchers. He thinks that there are two goals people have to set in mind: “We have to bring humanism back in religion and we have to bring humanism to the people at the centre of power.”
Alluding to the present scenario, he criticises the religious places and their agenda. “They have twin characters. Temples have been having twin characters. A common man, a person who earns his or her living through hard work, he wants some peace, some soul, some satisfaction. So he goes with respect and surrenders himself with humility to a temple or a mosque.”
While he holds meetings with like-minded people, he marches to spread his rebellious words with flyers. While some accept and applaud his initiative, some turn it down. Carrying a mix of disappointment, angst, and a streak of optimism, he marches on and talks of never letting the harmony die down.