Why the Protesters of Hong Kong are Different from the
Protesters of Kashmir
“When a Chinese athlete
wins a gold medal at the Olympics, what do you feel?”
“Does it bring
tears to your eyes when the Chinese anthem is played and the athlete stands on
the podium?”
“If you don’t
feel anything, go to your class teacher and understand why you don’t have
tears?”
The above are some
of the questions that the school students in Hong Kong had to answer before the
last Olympics. Their teachers presented it to them. It was compulsory for them to
answer. Shown by a friend who translated it from Chinese, she had asked my opinion
as a psychologist.
As she also told
me almost all the students in the schools had answered in the negative making
the Principals being called to explain why their students were so insensitive
and what steps they would take to bring patriotism in them.
Each question
was a subliminal statement designed to brainwash the mind of a child.
“Who has thought
of it?” I had asked her.
“Chinese
authorities are very angry,” she had replied. “They find that time is passing
out and Hongkongers do not show patriotism towards China. So, now they are determined
and want to make them true citizens by posing such questions.”
The above is one
of the many ways in which China is trying to gain control over the minds of the
children of Hong Kong. Nothing less than falling teardrops from eyes will
convince the authorities that the Hong Kong children are becoming true Chinese
citizens, human beings devoid of spontaneity and any emotions of their own, a
characteristic of a totalitarian society where any dissent or protest against
the authorities is a cardinal sin often punishable by death. This is what the Hongkongers
have understood too well in the last thirty years ever since the British left them.
When the choice
is to be between turning into a robot devoid of will and humanity, where you
prove your citizenship by laughing and crying as dictated by the State as in an
Orwellian nightmare, the people of Hong Kong are choosing the right to be, the
right to have their own emotions first. It is a choice between freedom and being
part of a totalitarian State where you lose the last of the freedoms to be as Victor
Frankel put it in his book ‘Man’s search for meaning’.
The Hongkongers
wanted democracy. They wanted to have elections. China said yes you can have
elections and democracy but we will select the candidates for you. Choose one
of them and you can have your democracy.
There was no
religious issue in Hong Kong protests. No call from mosques asking the ‘infidels’
to leave or they will be killed like in Kashmir. No threats that their women
will be converted to make a new country. No, those aren’t the issues that the Hongkongers
are protesting about. They are protesting about a basic right – the right to
live not as an automaton but as a free being with a choice unknown to
totalitarian States.
Unlike his Hong
Kong counterpart, the protester of Kashmir walks as a free being. He flaunts his
stones and guns with pride and without much fear. He walks out of the mosque after
the sermon, a stone in one hand, a cloth covering his face. He has just been paid
rupees few hundred for the day by his leaders to throw stones at the Indian
army and the police. Little do they know why they are throwing stones except
that they are infidels who are his oppressors. This has been going on for the
last thirty years and started by throwing out half a million infidels from the
valley and destroying their temples. If they had tried to do something similar
in China, the results can be well imagined.
Maybe there is
one similarity and only one between the two. Both are at the prime of youth, boiling
with rage against the power, the authorities but while one is genuine and is
against injustice, the other has its origin in religious bigotry and hatred. Its
origin perhaps lies in the sermon which they have just heard where imams have
told him to go throw stones, pick up Kalashnikovs and threaten violence.
Not very many
people know that brainwashing as a tool originated in China. It was a psychological
form of torture used by Communists to force political dissidents to toe the
official ideology, to tell them they are wrong in their thought processes and
need indoctrination. Millions were incarcerated. Some even died or led a
vegetable like existence. Those who didn’t, the only way was to follow the
official line and orders like an automaton, be a subservient obedient robot who
moves at the command of his masters.
While in Hong Kong
the protesters are resisting a violent ideology, in Kashmir it is the very
protesters who have been brainwashed being made to believe that they are victims
of persecution.
The enemy of the
Kashmir protester is the unknown Indian whom he sees as an infidel. The enemy
of the Hong Kong protester is an ideology of control, of subversion that robs
him, a human being of his most fundamental right.
What many
journalists choose not to see in their writings about Kashmir is that the
Indian government has corrected a historical wrong that denied the rights to
its own people. In doing so the media shows one thing unequivocally that neither
has the fault line that colonialism constructed towards Hindus has changed nor
the mindset remaining the same even after seventy years.
A human rights
worker once told me that Hong Kong, Tibet and Taiwan are three mirrors around China
showing the Chinese a reality they have to face one day. When asked what she
meant, she said that all three are perpetual reminders of the power of the State
vs Individual.
“Do you know,”
she had said, “Hong Kong remembers Tienanmen Square more than China ever does. China
can never understand why Hongkongers remember it so much and its deepest fear
is the spirit of Hong Kong that is the spirit of freedom will flow and destroy
every trace of totalitarianism. That is why they want to crush Hong Kong.”
During the years
I spent in Hong Kong, every year I went for the commemoration of Tienanmen Square
massacre. It was a unique ceremony to remember and commemorate those who died there
thirty years ago in 1989. Almost half a million people come together to
remember the students and pro-democracy people who captured the Square protesting
and asking to be treated with dignity and equality, a language China has known
only to silence.
This happened almost
at the same time when the protesters of Kashmir threw out half a million Hindus
from amidst them making the valley Islamic. They denied the human right of the Hindus
and their right to live there because they belonged to another religion and
refused to convert. The world had remained silent then to both the human tragedies.
The journalists
who are today comparing the two and finding the similarities perhaps will do
well to ask their conscience why they remained silent then and are once again
silent and will only prove that it is the perpetrator and the powerful whose
side they chose to take and write. They may soon learn they are on the wrong
side of the history.
To China, who today
is talking of the rights of Kashmiris and their freedom, would do well to
remember that it is her own people who are longing for freedom and justice.
Rajat Mitra
Psychologist and
Author of ‘The Infidel Next Door’
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