Few days back a huge Human Chain brought life in Tamil Nadu to a standstill. With many VIPs joining, this was a part of the ongoing protests against the Sri Lankan Government’s apathy to the plight of Tamil refugees or innocent Tamil in Sri Lanka today in view of the SriLankan Government’s military drive against the LTTEs. But this protest is confined only to Tamil Nadu alone. It is the politicians from Tamil Nadu primarily who are trying to build consensus at the national level.  Others are just fence sitters!

When the interests of the North Indians and primarily the Biharis are being compromised in Maharashtra and Assam, it is again the Biharis who protest in Bihar and elsewhere. Others condemn but remain the fence sitters.

When the farmers commit suicide unable to bear hardship due to poor crop , poor price or  credit burden and agitate or the displaced masses protest against eviction in  incidents we just witnessed at Singur or Nandigram in West Bengal , we turn Nelson’s eye to such incidents unless we see Brinda Karats, Medha Patkars or Mamata Bannerjees  support  the agitation  just the way Sharukh Khan  endorses ICICI Bank  saying I keep money in ICICI Bank , why not you ! We are fence sitters again and do not react unless we are directly affected.

Take the case of Tata Nano.  Mamata Bannerjee succeeded to move this prestigious project away from Bengal because of a large Singur population and people interested in the project remaining fence sitters. Most of them thought, it was the headache of the left front Government to control Mamata’s agitation or the Tatas cannot any way leave the project in view of the significant investment they had already made there.  Now these same people formed a Nano Bachao (save Nano) Committee and are making desperate but futile efforts at various levels in the state.  Wish they had directly joined the Pro Nano movement a few weeks back instead of remaining the fence sitters.  May be in that situation Bengal could have retained the Nano project in Singur.

Did you ever see any protests in Tamil Nadu protesting against the plight of displaced Pundits in Jammu and Kashmir? Who cares? After all I am on the other side of the country!

What I interpret is that such ethnic clashes or community clashes  in our country fail to get the status of a national problem like earthquakes or Tsunami when we all jump together to provide whatever assistance we can . In a country like ours full of diversity this signals a great danger.  Identity of our ethnicity or community is much larger than our existence as human being. We hardly bothered about the Godhra incident where several Hindus were burnt or the Sikhs who were killed in 1985 Delhi riots unless we belong to Sangh Parivar or are Sikhs ourselves.  Why? Because we are all fence sitters and do not move unless the hit is directly on us.

Fence sitters do not play the game, they can never be the game changers in history .Can we try to become good human being first before establishing our ethnic, religious or community affiliation?