By Deepa Majumdar
A refugee is one who seeks refuge. Although separated by centuries, Christ (and the holy family, whose flight to Egypt was chronicled by Matthew) and HH the fourteenth Dalai Lama (who left occupied Tibet for India in 1959) are among our most famous refugees. India has a long history of granting refuge to those persecuted in other nations, with the Dalai Lama among the most recent of such refugees. Others include ancient Jews and Zoroastrians. If CAB granted refuge to all fleeing persecution in India’s neighboring countries – not just Hindus – it would be more in tune with India’s illustrious history of compassion.
In the twenty-first century, refugees seek refuge in the literal sense of safety from threats to their freedom and lives. Not all immigrants are refugees. The difference between the economic immigrant and the refugee could not be greater than in our times. To be footsore, desperate, homeless, fearful, raped, maimed, and sorrowful – after seeing loved ones killed – is surely an ultimate test of human resilience and the power of faith. Many refugees set out with little more than a GPS and the name of God.
Modern refugees are not only stellar examples of resilience and family values before a narcissistic-materialistic world where families break up over trivial issues – they not only test our capacities for charity and generosity – but in the ultimate, they challenge our powers of self-knowledge. For modern man – who can ford the deepest rivers and climb the highest mountains – does not know himself. Relying on identities, instead of his inmost immortal highest universal Self, he knows himself through group monikers that scaffold his frail ego – thus belying the very purpose of modernity – which is to forge the “I” out of the amorphous “we.” When fleeing en masse to a foreign nation, refugees can unwittingly threaten, through demographics, prevailing identities in the host nation.
Yet, nobody with common sense should depict the flooding of a nation by desperate foreign refugees, whether legal or illegal, as an “invasion” – as Mr. Trump does, almost daily, in reference to Honduran and other refugees from the Latin south of the US. To a survivor of PRC’s invasion of Tibet, such a depiction is an affront to the dignity of those who suffered armed conquest and torture. Where conquerors possess weapons, using violence to subjugate the nations they invade with unparalleled sadism, refugees arrive destitute and in despair – seeking the bare minimum.
Almost all ordinary politics and certainly all identities are byproducts of lack of Self-knowledge. Moreover, they are laden with heavy psychological sub-texts. Yet, like opioids, identities, which constitute slivers of the mosaic of the ego, lend us a false but necessary comfort. To stand on the same ground where our ancestors stood for centuries, to till the same land as they did, to practice traditions handed down by generations – all this lulls us before our terror of death. Whether religious or secular, identities offer false comfort in a modern existence that strips us of all nooks of comfort, leaving us staring helpless at the stark precipice of Death.
To experience this legacy of modern mortality, all one has to do is visit the contemporary west, where the “I” stands alone – sans family, community, and congregation – yet internalizing these in the form of the ego enwrapped in a cohort of identities. This angry unholy solitude of the western “I,” lost in wrappings of undue privacy, is the total converse of the holy meditative solitude of the true hermit. Therefore, the real other of the modern west is neither the Islamic world, nor the former colonies, but the indigenous community, for which it harbors a secret fascination – perhaps because this other opposes modernity by its very nature – so that it is, for the west, the only legitimate escape from modernity.
From the standpoint of rescuing individuality from the “we” of the traditional community – the New World, especially America, should be understood as historically necessary to the purpose of modernity – which is to hone the “I” out of the “we.” As bastions of modernity, these new nations made up of immigrants, strip us of ethnic identities – by immersing us in melting pots from which we emerge as individuals. Notwithstanding racism, they have, in the past been generous to a fault towards immigrants. Since conscience can be practiced only by the individual – not the group (except in the case of a group of conscious individuals capable of dissent) – the “I” created by the New World is essential for our moral development. The fact that Americans actively protested President Trump’s policy of family separation for southern immigrants, is living proof of the moral imperative and efficacy of this “I.” One might therefore say that even immigration, which helps hone further this mundane “I” – a faint echo of the universal Self of all selves – serves the purpose of modernity.
But besides our existential insecurities hidden beneath the rubble of identities, there is the question of human rights. When refugees fleeing terror en masse threaten the demographics of the host country, we must ask ourselves which is more urgent – the human rights imperative to assuage the pain of the refugee, or the right to preserve the identity at stake in host nations? We must also note that the refugee never intends any malicious and deliberate demographic conquest of the host nation.
To anybody with conscience the answer is straightforward. Obviously human rights should take precedence over threatened identities. After all the individual does not become extinct when an identity withers away through the annals of history. But the refugee can die from untended wounds (mental or physical), starvation, etc. We can live without ephemeral identities or even external culture. But we cannot live without medical care, food, shelter, and safety. Besides, those with abundance ought to share with those without. For, the glowing words of St. Francis Assisi – that it is in giving that we receive – apply not only to individuals but to communities and nations. If, from a human rights perspective, the refugee should be prioritized over the ordinary immigrant – so also, the needs of the refugee should be prioritized over needs of identity.
Yet, fear of extinction is palpable in the minds of those who have not yet understood that they are neither European, nor American, nor Chinese, nor Indian – but the glorious universal Self of all selves. This fear ought to be taken seriously, for most ordinary people rely morally on the external culture of a civilization that has trickled down over the centuries to bestow upon its constituents the values and teleological principles significant to their historical destiny.
Added to this, our modern context of the refugee crisis is complicated further by legitimate fears of terrorism and human traffickers, who exploit, with utmost cynicism, the refugee groups they infiltrate for their own nefarious purposes. Leaders of nations therefore have difficult decisions to make. Even with the most sophisticated technology at hand, how does a border official distinguish between a genuine refugee and a potential terrorist? Of all modern refugees, the tragedy of Muslims fleeing to Europe is perhaps the most ironic – because the terrorist who infiltrates them may claim the same religious basis.