On April 21, a series of bombs - some detonated by suicide bombers - went off in three Catholic churches, three hotels and at two other sites in Sri Lanka, killing 321 and injuring more than 500 people. Barely a month has passed since the carnage in two New Zealand mosques and now this! Like the shooting at people in Friday jumma prayer in Christchurch mosques, here the bomb attacks were carried against devotees of Easter Sunday. Apparently, Christians were the target of the attacks in Sri Lanka, although 36 foreigners of different religious persuasions including a Bangladeshi died. The point is terrorism knows no religion, caste, ethnicity and borders. While expressing our solidarity with the Sri Lankan government and people, we express our heart-felt condolences for the victims and sympathies to the bereaved families.
Now that the Islamic State (IS) has taken the responsibility of the brutal attacks, it corresponds to the Sri Lankan government's earlier indication that the carnage may have been the handiwork of an international network. Wherever such tragic incidents take place, they should be condemned because human life is precious. At this moment of great anguish, the world community should stand by Sri Lanka. Regionally, the South Asian countries can fight terror together. Prior intelligence of such attacks can be shared among the government in order to pre-empt such attacks. Clearly, there was a lapse in security measures in the case of Sri Lanka attacks, which is unfortunate. Governments everywhere should learn a lesson from this.
It is confounding that society is riven by contrary or misinterpreted precepts and ideas often between and among groups of followers of the same faith or of different faiths. At a time when progress in science and technology has surpassed all limits, mental retrogression also has been taking a heavy toll on human civilisation. Rising religious intolerance is causing the humanity to bleed. It is not economic disparity and exploitation alone but also thorough brainwashing of young minds that is to blame for pushing society to edges. The malaise is deep-rooted.
Such attacks on unsuspecting people can serve no purpose. The insanity working behind those is stupendous and it must be stopped at the source. The root cause has to be found out and cured before it poisons much of the world. In fact, materialistic aspirations and acquisition have gone berserk and unless those are tempered with modest living and shared joys and sorrows, there is no hope of bridging the many forms of divisiveness keeping communities and peoples apart. There is an unbridgeable mental chasm - in between - that has to be overcome in order to know each other better and mend the fences. Inter-faith culture of co-existence is the answer.
