Backbiting is one of the negative personality traits which almost all the humans suffer from. It has of late assumed the proportions of a social epidemic affecting the core of our materialistic minds. It is rape of fame through wicked tongue lashing. Why blame the tongue, it is the sick mind that drives it to pollute the serenity of human existence. It is a weapon of the weak and the low, enjoying a transient phase of make belief credibility.
Backbiting in our service has been the traditional play field of a few high-fly socialite tattlers. It has also been the prerogative of egotist seniors notifying themselves, through comparisons with their predecessors and contemporaries, as the only privileged repository of ultimate wisdom, expertise and integrity. For a few upstarts, it has been a crude megaphone to blow their own trumpet deafeningly into the ears of their likes, in an ideal meeting of shallow minds .
Backbiting, which is a demolition drive aimed at bulldozing the target, ends up in self-demolition. The snake devours its own tail. Some of our colleagues unleash backbiting as a weapon of mass destruction of the service through character assassination, with detestable mental fascism to emerge the sole surviving victors in the arid wilderness that they may ultimately cause.
Backbiting against service colleagues to outsiders, such as journalists, politicians, businessmen etc., who may solicit and entertain some of us for their own vested interests, is still more harmful to the service. Backbiting the service colleagues amongst themselves is undoubtedly obnoxious, but not fatal to the service, because the listener, howsoever supportive he may be, knows about the backbiter and the motives behind his utterances. He also knows that one day, he himself could be his target. However, most of the journalists, fed by backbiters, do not hesitate to publish unverified trash or to sensationalize trivialities, because like ‘a man biting a dog’, a man biting a man is also a news.
Allah has said: “And spy not, neither backbite against one another. Would any of you like to eat the flesh of his dead brother?..”
Journalists contemptuously dub the service as ‘Babudom’ and address a service officer as ‘Babu’ in print, and yet, most of them seek a privileged personal audience for all they wish to have. Suddenly the ‘Babu’ becomes a ‘Sir’ and ‘Sahib’ and what not. We have lent them so much strength through internal bickering and backbiting that even a kid (introduced as cub) reporter considers his birthright to intrude into anyone’s official schedule at will without a decent notice or may as well intrude the privacy of even personal lives and get away unethically with such legal alibis as ‘ it is alleged’ or ‘it is heard’ or ‘it is widely known’, or ‘it is widely believed’ or ‘it is learnt’, or ‘according to reliable sources’ and so on. For no verification, the explanation is really amusing – i.e ; ‘could not be contacted despite a number of attempts’. Such attempts are either not made, or they are made a number of times in quick succession in a span of half an hour even though one is out of station or attending a cremation or marriage of a member of the family ! It may be an innocuous call to test your memory at 9 pm, regarding some facts quoted by a backbiter pertaining to one of the hundreds of files you might have dealt with a few years back. If you cannot answer, you are accused of having ‘refused to comment’ or ‘being evasive’ or ‘having fumbled for words’ ! (As if a journalist would instantly remember and respond to what his paper carried in column 11 of Page 18 on March 11, 2001 or whether it was a holiday for the newspaper !)
A politician may have a terrible compulsion to project himself to every voter down the street through the media, and let the media men exploit his compulsion to the hilt. Is’nt it sufficient for us to focus on the human values and humanity as a whole and not respond to the urge to play to the gallery through the media , much less to supply it ammunition out of backbiters’ arsenal to fire at our own colleagues in particular and the service in general? Is’nt it better to make the benefits of good governance flow naturally and systematically to the neglected man down the street, rather than to bamboozle him through ‘carpet-bombing’ of media mis-information, disinformation and false information?
Some of our own colleagues stoop exceptionally low to backbite and whisper carefully woven webs of falsehood into the ears of the politicians, or their gullible wives or sons; spreading canards to the wrongful detriment of service colleagues, even hiring the services of such specimen of humanity who do’nt deserve a candid mention for considerations of public morals and decency. The cat’s whiskers amongst us happily couch themselves between a crocodile’s jaws, without realizing that it has a taste for their blood too !
I have highlighted the relevance of the subject of backbiting to the present service scenario because I ought not lose sight of the fact that I am writing for the Association Newsletter. Needless to emphasize, it is universal in its application to those who have an urge to develop themselves into better human beings. Allah has said: “And spy not, neither backbite against one another. Would any of you like to eat the flesh of his dead brother?..”. Islam further exhorts us :’Do you have no human tenderness, no sense of kinship, that you sink your teeth into some innocent person to whom you are tied by numerous links of brotherhood? Do you have no intelligence that you bite into your own limbs with your teeth, in such a senseless fashion?’
Bahai’s swear by the same gospel. “… Backbiting quencheth the light of the heart, and extinguisheth the life of the soul.” (Bahá’u’lláh: The Kitáb-i-Íqán) “For the tongue is a smoldering fire, and excess of speech a deadly poison. Material fire consumeth the body, whereas the fire of the tongue devoureth both heart and soul. The force of the former lasteth but for a time, whilst the effects of the latter endureth a century.”
Guru Nanak Dev said : “Day and night we talk ill of others, we are full of malice and sins. Do not slander anyone, and thereby pick up a quarrel” The Fourth Master reiterated : “He, who slanders is known as such, his actions will go in vain. He, who backbites loses his own credit; the slanderer only exposes himself. He, who slanders others, cannot face anybody without shame. All hail to the great God, who listens not to the backbiter. He, who talks sweetly in one’s presence, and talks ill at one’s back, Is evil of heart and has been separated from God”. The Fifth Master observed : “The slanderer is cured not of his affliction, try as well as we may”.
One of the greatest Hindu spiritual laws is saucha kriya, doing good. Backbiters produce mean vibrations. It requires discipline to control the mind. Hence the need for unflinching intellectual honesty. Honesty, arjava, one of the most important Vedic restraints, gives stability and strength to be just and fair.
So does the Christianity call upon the believers : “ And should a Christian make his tongue the instrument of the accuser of the brethren, to do his work against each other? Backbiting teaches others to backbite. Your example invites them to do the like: and sins which are common, are easily swallowed, and hardly repented of. Men think that the commonness justifies or extenuates the fault’.
Shoe away the backbiters, and do not encourage them by lending your ears to what they blurb. Remember the proverb : “The north wind drives away rain, so does an angry countenance a backbiting tongue.”
Let us sincerely promise to each other not to slander a man at his back, while smiling to his face.
*Sarvesh Kaushal is an Indian Administrative Service Officer
