I have a Dream…

As communal forces entered the social scene and a dear friend was killed while resisting them in the university elections, the tragedy of Hyderabad's descent into the poisoned pit of partisan politics and religious discord broke the heart. Here is a deeply sensitive first-person account by a 'classless, casteless, secular doctor', dreaming an Indian dream unfinished

K Srinath Reddy Delhi

Reddy was not part of my name when my father registered me for school, as he wanted to free me from a caste identity. An overzealous school clerk made it my patronymic, picking it from my father's name, when he was forwarding the registration forms for the school-leaving public examination. As the school board certificate was a required submission for all later courses, the caste label continued. The mind, however, remained oblivious to caste, thanks to family values.

Growing up in a truly cosmopolitan Hyderabad of the 1960s also meant that religious and regional identities were never seen as barriers to understanding other human beings. Even as diversity was accepted as a natural phenomenon, the overwhelming similarities that bound people together were celebrated in a spirit of bonhomie. Festivals of all major religions were occasions for joint celebration by friends, not merely as a polite gesture of tolerance but in a sincere spirit of shared joy. It was only in the late 1960s and early 1970s that the separatist Telengana and Andhra agitations brought up the bitterness of 'us' versus 'them' for the first time, in a sub-regional context.

Later, as communal forces entered the social scene and a dear friend was killed while resisting them in the university elections, the tragedy of Hyderabad's descent into the poisoned pit of partisan politics and religious discord broke the heart.

Since then, the years that passed added more pain, whenever and wherever regional, linguistic, religious and caste divisions arose, not only to separate people but to pit them against one another. The malaise seemed to grow when these prejudices manifested not only as sporadic violence stoked by vested interests but also permeated into private thoughts and influenced personal interactions on a daily basis. Even as India geared itself for accelerated economic growth, mouldy mindsets that canonised caste, creed, religion and region seemed to take a stranglehold on our social and political life. The tragedy has become even more terrible as Hyderabad, in recent times, has had many victims, and some perpetrators, of terrorist attacks.

Apart from a core commitment to the ideal of a casteless, classless, secular and truly egalitarian society, my work as a doctor also reinforces my conviction that human beings are essentially similar. The way patients react to the distress of disease and the way their family members rally round with collective social support, emphasise the commonality of human behaviour in such periods of vulnerability. As their faces light up with relief after days of anxiety, or cloud over when hope turns to despair, the universality of those deep human emotions obliterates any superficial differences in the way people dress or speak.

If I do not pre-diagnose a disease on the ground that the patient is a Hindu, Muslim, Christian or Sikh, how can I pre-judge a person's character on similar grounds? If I prize human life as precious, because every death in the hospital causes anguish and seems to diminish me as a person, how can I remain unmoved by the wanton wastage of lives, especially of the young and innocent, in communal conflicts or sectarian strife?