Black lives matter, so does the life of Hindu Sadhus

George Floyd walked into one of the shops he frequented on the evening of 25^th May to buy a pack of cigarettes and handed a 20-dollar bill as payment. The employee at the shop suspected it to be a counterfeit bill and following protocol dialed 911 to report the incident. Little did George Floyd know then that this would be the last pack of cigarettes he would ever buy.

The cops showed up to make the arrest and while anyone in this situation would be worried about an investigation and paying a fine, the fear of death under police custody never crosses the mind and now maybe it should. Derek Chauvvin, the cop who made the arrest forced a resisting George Floyd who had complained of claustrophobia onto the street, making him lay face down, handcuffed before continuing to kneel down on his neck for an agonizing 8  minutes and 46 seconds while George Floyd struggled to get the words out to spare his life as he couldn’t breathe. For six minutes, Floyd struggled, begging for the right to breathe, and the next two minutes that followed, he lay there, lifeless, unresisting with only the memories of his screams to haunt us as the police officer finally decided to remove his knee from Floyd’s neck.

The video captured by bystanders went viral. People were heard screaming to just check the man’s pulse and for the cop to get up but what speaks the loudest is Floyd’s desperate struggle to just keep his life.

The world didn’t just watch this happen. The next day, the internet was filled with uproar and people demanding justice. All of the social media wore slogans that said ‘Black Lives Matter,’ ranging from The United States of America to our own country, India. Celebrities, influencers, and netizens took to their social media platforms, voicing their thoughts on the issue, appealing to the humane side of everyone to stop with the discrimination and for the first time in a long time, the entire world united to speak against racism that had come to light.

Flashback to the cold night of 16^th April 2020 where two sadhus – Akhara Sadhus Chikne Maharaj Kalpavrukshagiri (70 years old) and Sushilgiri Maharaj (35 years old) along with their 30-year-old driver Nilesh Telgade were traveling to attend the funeral of their Guru Shri Mahant Ramgiri in Surat. They were traveling through the interior roads of Palagarh, not knowing then that their own funerals were not far away.

While passing through the Gadchinchale Village, their car was stopped by a forest department sentry at a local checkpoint and were forced out of their car. Dressed in orange robes, owning no weapons or bad intentions, the sadhus and their driver fell prey to a vigilante group of people who attacked them with sticks and axes, mistaking them for thieves who had come to harvest organs of the village residents. This rumor spread like wildfire and soon, the sadhus were captured on video by bystanders, begging for their lives whilst narrating their innocence. Police did try to intervene but were helpless when it came to stopping the mob from dragging the sadhus away to brutally beat them to their deaths.

While arrests were made and this video too went viral, the internet was quiet. Social media was silent and the celebrities, influencers, and netizens spoke no words on this matter. In the silence of that night, three innocent lives were lost and in the silence that followed after, so was our opportunity to address the problems in our own backyard.

A country as diverse as India is an ideal breeding ground for racism and casteism. For every George Floyd in the world, there is double the number of discriminated people in India, begging for equality; begging for a place in the society and begging for their lives and somewhere in our silence when we had to become their voices, somewhere in our negligence to address what’s happening at our home front, we have let another person become a victim for no fault of theirs.

Black lives do matter but so does the life of every citizen in our country who has seen the pointed end of the knife called ‘Racism and Casteism.’ While we’re all citizens of the world, we are also the children of our motherland and now that we’ve witnessed the power of social media, it’s high time we also begin to address the issues in our own backyard with equal severity.