Moral Catastrophes and Immoral Reasoning

This essay is directed at, rather than against, the refined quietness of large sections of the literate upper-middle-class-and-above population of this country on the dreadful carnage in Gujarat: the silence that informs ordinary conversation among friends and acquaintances, the silence of large chunks of the regional written media, the silence of influential men and women in public affairs, the silence of academic institutions which one might have expected to serve as 'natural' sources of principled and intellectual opposition to wrong doing.