WE HAVE A TEMPLE TO BUILD

In the name of God we ask you, the blood-thirsty actors in the tragedy of India, to have done with it. You have had your day. And have played your hellish theme to perfection. The land is littered with too many corpses already. Columns of smoke from fires of hate choke the air. The sun hides his face from this shame. Stars have fled from our sky. The wails of widows and the shrieks of burning children mock the meaning of our national anthem. A thousand wounds bleed. Our hearts bleed. Mother India bleeds. The obscene stench of blood fills her nostrils. Enough is enough. Stop this abomination. For God's sake, stop it. Live, and let live. Live in peace.

God cries over the karmic debt mounting over this punyabhoomi. Life belongs to God. Think you, life or death has a colour: Hindu, Muslim, Christian? Like the rest of us, haven't you heard grandmothers say, "Life is divine. God is the Giver of life, and He its Protector. No man shall take it; for God alone gives it." Kill in the name of mandir and masjid? Whose mandir? Whose masjid? You make a mockery of both. Religion stinks on your lips. The name of God is a scandal in your deeds. Your zeal is blasphemy. Can't you see? Your mandir-masjid, the monument of your mutual malice, silhouettes a tomb for God? Think not He will look at it; for a thousand namaazes and yagnas cannot fool him. He knows you not. Have you forgotten His words:

"Let him be my greatest bhaktha but if he injures a single fellow human being all his offerings I reject. His offerings will be not as made into a homa-kundam but like oblations offered to ashes." You've incensed God with the cries of innocents. Justice belongs to God and He will uphold it. Think you, God is blind? No, He sees. Presume God is deaf? Go and despair, He hears. The cries of babes pierce his ears. Burning bodies singe His mind. Are not those blanched in the grip of terror -Hindus, Muslims, all- His babes? Rest assured, the assuras and kafirs of injustice will have to pay: their backs broken by a crushing karmic debt that Generations cannot expiate.

Oh, stop this sacrilege, won't you, the murder of our mutual trust? With that killed in cold blood in the darkness of your noon, what are we left with? Knives under sleeves? Poison in our wells? Anthrax in our entrails? Shall we then creep in stealth, watching each step; lest we are blown up into smithereens, unawares? What are you achieving in the name of God? A jungle of spite and death where boys roar and range like beasts to slit the throats of neighbours in human sacrifice?

Won't you stop this rape of religion? Or this religious rape? We don't know what to call it: you get us all so confused. Didn't you hear a child ask the other day, "Do their gods have fangs? Do they bite? Drink blood? Eat human flesh? Are houses the pipes they smoke after banquets of bloody brawls?" "You men of petty gods," children plead, "won't you tell us why your gods have hearts of stone?" Why has compassion fled from men and made its home among animals?

They say you want to fight this war of gods to the finish. And see which god wins, and who loses. Who cares? Your gods are below our notice. India is the loser. And we care. What shall it profit us: this victory of vanity that sets fire to our sacred home to spite an ancient rat? The global village laughs over this cat-and-mouse game! Let us, for God's sake, be better than a nation of cats and mice. Go, give it up: this worse-than feline pettiness. We demand: we, the people. A billion people. It is our house that you've set on fire!

Weren't you brothers before you chose to go mad? Won't you be brothers again when sanity returns? When the earth quaked under your feet last year didn't terror melt all hearts alike? Did death and destitution have religions then? Weren't you one in spirit when nature roared and revealed your cowardice? Wherefrom this cheap courage to kill, rape and loot under license? Is this not worse than the old cowardice? Weren't you all neighbours? Who has turned you into killers? Do not tell us it is Ram and Rahim. Try first to erase the foot-prints of Ravan and Satan from the streets of your hate.

Come, all you stand by and watch this immolation. Shed your torrential tears and douse this fire. Let not Bharat Mata burn alive while we have a tear to shed. Yesterday's was a nightmare. Let it go. Let today be a new beginning: a shared dream. Let us rise and build together; for we do have a temple to build: the temple of India where God delights to dwell as love.