Diwali should be a British Festival
The victory of Rama over the evil Demon King Ravana, who abducted the Princess Sita, is the moral core of the Diwali story. Known to the wider world as the festival of light, Diwali has the power to share the truism of the triumph of good over evil to a divided world. The symbolic power of light as representative of goodness and purity and, metaphorically, as a moral force over evil generates a simple narrative that all decent, honest, and good people can identify with as virtuous.
Yet in the world that we live in today, it can be all too difficult to find examples of ‘good over evil’ in practice. Only a few days ago, I was profoundly affected by the awful image of an anguished Kurdish woman, weeping over her much too recently deceased daughter who could not have been older than 8 years old. Earlier this month, in Halle (Germany), The Halle Synagogue was besieged by a right wing extremist with anti semitic views who shot and killed two people on the festival of Yom Kippur. And earlier this year at Easter a, now largely forgotten, series of bomb attacks in Sri Lanka's Negombo, Batticaloa and Colombo resulted in the death of 290 innocent Sri Lankan Christians. As Christians around the world rejoiced in the feast of the resurrection, the poignant image of a bloodied and stained Christ in benediction sobered us all to the reality of human evil.
In the wake of these and other dreadful attacks on the lives and liberties of good and decent people, it is hard to conceive of a future in which Britain and the world can move forward with a clear sense of optimism in the goodness of humanity.
However, after attending an Diwali event at the Home Office organised by the Civil Service Hindu Connection one clear message prevailed. Despite the evil, and the cruelty, and the rancour, and the hatred that so often characterise modern life, there is one crucial point that we must remember if we are to recover any sense of optimism for the future. We must put our faith and our hope into our collective humanity.
Much divides us, and much should. We are all individuals with a variety of priorities. Progress takes place when we have free, open and robust debates about those issues. But when all is said and done, whatever differences remain, however passionately they are held, we remain a collective species and a collective humanity. This, I believe, is also the message that Extinction Rebellion Protestors are also trying to communicate. While they may be misguided, ill informed, and politically motived, they remind us that our collective humanity has the power to draw attention to the wider issues and crises that exist in the world. Rather like the lights that guided Rama and Sita home, the protestors are reminding us that we are better at facing crises together.
In 1972 the then dictator of Uganda, Idi Amin, expelled over 80,000 Ugandan Asians from the country. Among those 80,000, were members of my entire family. In response to that crisis the then Foreign Secretary Sir Alec Douglas Home said in the House of Commons that, “Care for the plight of the Asian refugees and their property must be our first concern.” In addition to this he made a live, televised broadcast promising to welcome and settle those 80,000. It is for this reason that I have never been allowed to forget Alec Douglas - Home as a central figure in the narrative of my family’s exodus story. A man who took the Diwali story to heart.
A man who was expelled was Lord Dolar Popat, who has written a book entitled, A British Subject: How to Make It as an Immigrant in the Best Country in the World. He is now the Trade Envoy to the Country that expelled him over 47 years ago. At the Home Office event he described the British Conservative Government in 1972 as having embraced the ideals and morals of the Diwali story. Offering him light and hope from the darkness of Amin and his evil Ugandan dictatorship. His story, and others, prove that Diwali underpins Britain’s modern multicultural values and that fundamentally, Britain will always champion good over evil.
So where we find evil in the world, as individuals, as communities, as a university, and as a nation, identifying with Rama and Hanuman in the Diwali story cannot be an ineffectual template. We must always strive to defeat evil wherever we find it and recall the words of the great Mahatma, “You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; even if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.”
Written by Keval Nathwani