Hate is a virus. Those who discriminate against others on the basis of religion, language, culture and ethnicity are so carried away by their own grievances that they do not realise that hate does not discriminate against anyone. It infects everyone equally.
For instance, you might direct your hate only at a section of a particular religious community, but sooner or later, the virus of hate will seek other victims, on religious, linguistic, cultural and other grounds. What Hindi-speakers experienced in Gujarat recently is, in that sense, sadly connected to what some other kinds of minorities have experienced in India too.
Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani rightly sought to reassure Hindi migrant workers by saying, “We are all children of Mother India, be it U.P. or Gujarat.” He put the blame for the violence in his State on those in the Opposition. This might or might not be true, but the fact remains that the general political discourse in India — and many BJP leaders have contributed to it, along with some leaders from other parties — has turned angrily accusatory. It has become too easy to make hateful remarks about entire groups of people because they are different in some ways. More than that, it has become fashionable and ‘smart’ in many political circles to evoke hate by suggestion, ridicule and innuendo.
At the edge of life
When I say it is important to see hate as a virus, I am not using this only as a literary metaphor. Despite the fact that one cannot spot hate under a powerful microscope, it works exactly as a virus does. The one basic factor about a virus is that you cannot really define it as living or dead. As even Wikipedia will inform you, “Viruses are considered by some to be a life form, because they carry genetic material, reproduce, and evolve through natural selection, but lack key characteristics (such as cell structure) that are generally considered necessary to count as life. Because they possess some but not all such qualities, viruses have been described as ‘organisms at the edge of life.’”
Hate is also an organism at the edge of life: it is dead, in the double sense of deriving its ‘justification’ from a real or imagined past and of leading to deathly violence in the present, and it is alive because, like a virus, it can only replicate inside living organisms. Again, like a virus, hate is very good at mutating and recombining. You might think that your virus of hate only afflicts those of a particular kind of religion, but, alas, that virus will mutate, and in another person, it might come to afflict those who speak a different language or have a different skin colour. The only way to destroy hate is to destroy all kinds of hate by simply refusing to harbour hate, for one cannot destroy hate in others, one can only destroy it in oneself.
In this sense, hate is worse than a virus, perhaps because it has no body. You can create vaccinations to destroy viruses in others, but alas with hate any such attempt only leads to more hate. Because to claim to destroy hate in others is the same as hatefully destroying others: after all, hate, unlike a virus, has no physical presence apart from that of its host. Hence, the only way to destroy hate is to destroy it in oneself. No one knew this better than Mahatma Gandhi.
There is also another way in which hate is worse than a virus. Even though viruses can be deadly, they also serve a vital evolutionary role: viruses are an important means of horizontal gene transfer. All of us contain bits of genetic material that have not been inherited but transferred to us from other organisms via viruses. This, scientists note, has been an important evolutionary source of genetic diversity.
Hate is exactly like a virus in its ability to break up bits from our prejudices and attach them to social ‘genetic’ codes elsewhere, so that your hatred for Muslims or Christians will sooner or later mutate in some other part of India into hatred for Bengalis or Biharis, villagers or farmers, women or homosexuals, and so on. But hate is unlike a virus in the sense that such ‘horizontal transfer’ does not create greater diversity. As the only result of hate is violence, it leads only to an endless cycle of death and devastation.
Choosing to be infected
So, actually, I am unfair to viruses when I claim that hate is a virus. For, if hate is a virus, then it is one that is uniformly deadly, which not all viruses are. Hate, unlike a virus, cannot be seen at all (except in action, where it is monstrously visible as violence) and it cannot be destroyed in others (except by destroying them, which is the only aim of hate and hence an act of hate). Hate can be destroyed only in oneself (by refusing, again and again, to harbour it). This also means that, unlike a virus, hate cannot infect you unless you choose to be infected.
All of us need to bear this in mind before we point an easy finger of accusation at some scapegoat or the other. And politicians of all parties need to be reminded of this again and again.
