I met YS.Rajasekhara Reddy on a flight a few years ago. The few minutes I was with him, I was kind of very affected with his seemingly incredible self confidence. His body language reeked of that of a go-getter and the way he spoke made me feel that he wants to do nothing short of conquering the world. I am not much into politics and I don't really know how great a leader or a man he was but I truly was impressed by his dynamism and I remember thinking that it would be very interesting to see how high he will end up in the next few years and as fate would have it, in just a few years after that meeting, he ended up far higher than what I expected. He ended up dead.
I find it incredible that a man of his popularity, the most favourite blue-eyed boy of the Congress high command, supposedly worth thousands and thousands and thousands of crores could just die such a lonely death in the middle of nowhere in a jungle getting his mangled body battered with rain for nearly 24 hours and all perhaps because of a pilot misreading the weather or a weather-man's misreport or YS insisting on taking off in spite of the weather report or a mechanical failure on the chopper's part. Whatever the reasons might be they seem very simplistic in view of the power and the strength and resources of the man. Lakhs and lakhs of people came after he died and no one was there when he was dying. The greatest technology came into work in the form of ISRO planes and satellite tracking systems to find him and the irony is that he himself didn't pay heed to the simplest of technologies - that is of listening to a weather report. But to be very fair, how many of us do really listen to such things as weather reports. It's pretty common knowledge how erratic they are.
But what I would really like to know is whether God had anything to do with his death? I don't believe in God, but I would like to ask the people who believe in God to answer me these very simple questions.
To start with, God made his chopper crash and didn't tell anyone about it. While lakhs of people were praying at temples all over the state for his safe and well-being, God was playing hide and seek with their minds on whether YS is safe or not. And when the rescuers finally managed to spot the crashed chopper God presented them with a nice gift of the severed, burnt and charred body of YS.
I am shocked that the believers didn't even bother to ask Mr.God why he hated YS so much. If YS has reportedly done so much for his love for the people of the state and lakhs of those people also reciprocated that love for him in their grief to the extent of some 144 of them committing suicide, then what the hell was God thinking he was doing when he was killing YS?
Unknowing to us, if YS was actually a bad guy as per God then why did he let him win with such a thumping majority and did a disservice to the people, and also why did he put so much heartache in so many people who are not aware that God thinks so bad of YS or is it that God thinks even the people who voted for YS are bad too?
What I find amazingly and truly incredible is that there was not a single person among the so-called believers in God and followers of YS who were upset and angry with God for what he has done to YS.
Initially before they found his body, for nearly 24 hours his followers kept on confidently repeating again and again "God is with him and nothing will happen to him" and then when God finally broke that myth and gave them the dead body of YS, they said "May his soul rest at God's feet". It beats me why anybody will want to rest at the feet of someone who gave him so horrible a death.
The basic truth is that the believers are too scared of God to disbelieve him or distrust him or question him or to be angry with him. Apart from making up conspiracy theories they would blame the chopper, the manufacturers of the chopper, the weather reporter etc but they would not do the same with God in spite of ironically they themselves claiming that God is the sole force responsible for every emotional, intellectual and physical activity that happens in the world.
On the other hand for the lack of any other sensible explanation if the Karma theorists say that YS has been punished by God for the sins in his previous birth then my question to them is why is God punishing the followers of YS also along with him when they don't even know what YS has done in his previous birth or is it that the followers also committed as many sins as YS. Also I want to ask the Karma theory proponents on why the hell should God keep it a secret on what sins one has done in one's previous life. Doesn't it make lot more sense if he just comes straight and tells "this is a sin" so that the chances of one not repeating that sin are that much more? Just imagine the stupidity of a justice system where a man is never told why he is being punished.
The real, actual reason why nobody questions God is because he is the only hope in an otherwise incomprehensible world. If you don't like the company you are working for, you can change the company. If you don't like the government that is governing you, you can vote against it, but if you don't like what God is doing you can't change the world you are living in. That's why the believers will stay mum and keep praying in fear, confusion and desperation.
Well, since YS is dead and incidentally he himself was an ardent devotee of God, and hopefully by this time he would have reached the feet of God by the grace and the strength of the prayers of his followers, at least now since I can presume that he would be in a right position to answer, I would like to ask this question of mine directly to YS himself now.
"Why YS? Why did God kill you?"
-
Ram Gopal Varma
