I am Ashamed and I Apologize

hemendra:

...am afraid despite the best of intentions all this `appealing` and `urging` muslims and hindus may not work this time...

...the concerned citizens should see to it that, unlike the past, this time legal justice is meted out to the perpetrators of both godhra and gujrat...only when peace and sensibility prevails confidence of the constituents will return...otherwise the fabric of the state and society as we know would be further strained...

rgds,

t

re: the article

I am bored by such articles. Of course, like the author, i am also ashamed such things happen with monotonous regularity in India. Communal riots have happened during the congress rule also. What is different now in Gujarat is that BJP rules that state and is under a microscope so to speak. The best way to respond to such carnage would be to oust the state govt from power. Muslims no doubt have learnt their lessons. They will be vary of any promises BJP may make in future.

Sridhar

This is hilarious. This post magifies the collosal idiocy in both religion and nationalism. I am conviced u people are from a different universe.

Im gonna tell my seeds that there was this place called India in which grown azz men told other adults to ``stop burning eachother.``

Kiddies: Why were they burning eachother?

Drumz: They had different religions?

Kiddies: Whats a religion?

Drumz: A way for insecure people to go to hell together?

Kiddies: Why would they go to hell?

Drumz: Because they believe in religion.

Kiddies: What about patriots?

Drumz: Nuked.

Kiddies: Wow, what did u do while this was going down?

Drumz: Ganja my seeds, Ganja.

A VHP-ite trying to fool people with sophistry and `reasonableness`.

Firstly, What the heck is VHP`s locus standi to demand anything from anybody, much less temples? I havenot designated them to do anything on my behalf as a Hindu. I can also set up an organization with the word `Hindu` in it, throw chairs around and go rioting around the country, then demand something be handed over. Would the author advocate my case too, then? Unlikely. Whats so great about VHP? If VHP `wants` temples, let it talk to Hindus first.

Secondly, I don`t get this about Kashi and Mathura. These are functioning flourishing temples, what is there to hand over? I think its the author`s doublespeak, he means hand over the mosques not hand over temples. Again what does VHP want with mosques? Nothing good. They want to realize their organisational goals, pure and simple. Couldn`t do it with violence, now they are trying deceit.

Thirdly, the author`s arguments are just like some arguments being made by one party in a currently burning international issue. Just give us what we `reasonably` want, you will not have any more trouble from us. Thats called HAFTA VASOOLI or highway banditry. The author is hereby exposed as a true blue VHP-ite. chor chor maro maro :).

Hemandra,
I was very glad to see this writing here.
As a Pakistani-American Human Being type, I donated money (the sum was not large) to the Gujrat Earthquake relief that the TiE Organization
organized in San Jose. Never in my wildest
dreams did I think that I would be reading of Muslims being attacked in large numbers in what
I had thought was a business oriented and somewhat
Progressive State.
I have to admit that I am deeply hurt by this
sad period in Indian History (not that Pakistan has not have such sad episodes too).

Ras

Hemendra, don`t insult the intelligence of your readers with this mawkish sentimental claptrap. The points that you try to make have already been made ad nauseam, and your piece adds nothing new to the debate. Instead of this public act of contrition, how about trying to focus on some of the perceived grievances on both sides? Why are an increasing number of educated liberal members of the local majority community becoming disenchanted with the established order to the extent of condoning what all of us would agree is absolutely unpardonable? This question seems to attract much debate when raised in the context of Kashmir, and only a deafening silence in the matter of Gujarat. Why does the idea that India is guilty of minority appeasement instantly resonate with the student population/liberal intelligensia across the country?

Self-flagellation is good for some.

We who live in the now and here have the luxury of 20/20 vision and can do a post-mortem on what was ?

Did any Verma write on behalf of Chakmas thrown out of Chittagong, or Hindus slaughtered in Sindh by the nobel Arab savages.

The criminals who perpetrated the Gujarat massacres have caused more damage to India in the international arena than any act that Pakistan has perpetrated so far. Hence they should be tried for treason and hanged as a warning to other would be arsonists, rapists and rabble-rousers.

Bringing KPS Gill into the picture is the first step. The Union Govt. should give him more teeth to fight these criminals than just making him advisor.

Ref DRUMZ #: 3

[Im gonna tell my seeds that there was this place called India in which grown azz men told other adults to ``stop burning eachother.`` ]

How about telling them that there is a place called Northern Ireland where people shoot at each other for being Protestants or Catholics?

Or, is that okay because whitey is doing it?

What a complete a$$hole!

We need people like you on both sides of the border.

Asfand Siddiqui

Sacramento CA

``Dey Allah kay naam baba``.

``Bhagawan tere bacchon ka bhala karega. Tu ek paise dega woh dus lakh dega``.

``Uski dua lagaygi tujhe - joh mangega milaga, Malik kay naam kuch to dey de``

``Ek Masjid dey dey baba, arrey ek nahi teen masjid dey dey baba sare desh ki dua lagegi tujhe``

.

.

``Bhench#d masjid deta hai ki nahi.....``

How long before the masks are off Varma sahib?

Divided Indian-Pakistani families suffer on both sides of border under threat of war

Wed Jun 5, 8:06 PM ET

By MUNIR AHMAD, Associated Press Writer

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - When her Pakistani husband died in December, none of Nargas Begum`s relatives from India could come to his funeral in his hometown Multan.



Her parents consoled her by phone, telling Begum that relations between the two countries would be normal soon and promising to come then. But three months later, as her brother lay dying in India, Begum still was not allowed to travel across the border to see him.

With India and Pakistan trading hostile words and intense shelling across the confrontation line in Kashmir (news - web sites), her family must now contend with the threat of war. ``Things are only getting worse and worse,`` said the 47-year-old New Delhi native.

Separated from family members since New Delhi and Islamabad cut off transportation links at the end of last year, thousands of Indians and Pakistanis are suffering doubly because of their cross-border connections — now even more difficult with war looming.

New Delhi severed all train, bus and air connections with Islamabad at the end of December, following an attack on the Indian parliament that it blamed on Pakistani-based Islamic extremists. Pakistan denied the charges and retaliated by halting the links on its side.

Tensions have spiraled since last month`s attack on an Indian army camp in Kashmir that New Delhi again blamed on Pakistani-backed extremists. On a war footing since December, Pakistan and India have now massed hundreds of thousands of troops along the 2,912-kilometer (1,800-mile) border that separates the countries.

The threat of nuclear conflict has prompted the United States, Britain and other countries to urge their nationals to leave India and Pakistan.

Caught in the middle are thousands of families like Begum`s, who have ties on both sides of the border. Many families ended up with members in both countries after the two were carved out of British India in 1947.

``There was darkness everywhere when my husband died,`` she said. ``I am in Pakistan with only a few relatives. Ninety percent of my family live in India. My heart is still there.``

Then in March, ``my brother wrote that he was on his death bed, but I could not go to see him in the hospital,`` Begum said, remembering how she wept at his letter.

From the southern port city of Karachi, Khurshid Ahmad, 43, worries about his 23-year-old daughter, who married a cousin in Bombay, India, last year. His three sisters and dozens of close relatives also live in India.

``My daughter is pregnant, but I can`t go to India,`` Ahmad said. ``We never thought that the two countries would come so close to war.``

Ahmad said he continues to pray for peace even as he fears a war that could kill countless numbers of people on both sides of the border.

In Lahore, Begum Mujtaba, 48, talked of how she used to travel to India two months out of the year to visit relatives. This year, she had to cancel plans. She also worries over her daughter, who married a cousin in New Delhi five years ago.

``I pray every day that there will be no war,`` she said.

Residents of Bhano Chak village on Lahore province`s eastern frontier with India say they have relatives living just across the border, yet they cannot meet with them.

``My elder sister lives in Indian Punjab province and I am worried about her family because they will be the first to face casualties because they live near the border towns like us,`` said Begum Munshi Khan, 62.

It is in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir where the fear of war seems most intense and the familial ties with India are deepest.

``Eighty percent of our relatives live in Indian-part of Kashmir and we know they will be suffering most of the casualties if war starts,`` said Jamil Mir, 29, who lives in a refugee camp after crossing into Pakistan-controlled Kashmir two years ago with his wife and son. ``We are against war.``



http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020606/ap_wo_en_po/pakistan_divided_families_1

In the name of God, stop it!

Was Gujarat a mere aberration or was it a powderkeg waiting to flare? How does the average

Muslim react? There is a sense of betrayal, anger and above all, insecurity. But amidst

all this there is hope in the Constitution, in the country’s secular tradition. DECCAN

HERALD spoke to a cross-section of the community across the country

In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious and Merciful,

Say Oh ye that rejects faith

I worship not that which ye worship

Nor will ye worship that which I worship

And I will not worship that which ye have been wont to worship

Nor will ye worship that which I worship

To you be your way, and to me, mine.

- A Sura in Chapter 109 ``Al Kafirun`` of The Holy Book of Quran

‘5000-strong mob burns 65 alive in Ahmedabad’ - screams a headline; ‘Gujarat burns, innocents die’ - announces another. It’s three months now since communal violence started rocking Gujarat, claiming over 300 lives, and yet there is no sign of a let-up. Gujarat today means no more a land of entrepreneurs, of ambitious and pioneering businessmen, and hard-working traders who have for long personified the the spirit of free enterprise. The state today conjures visions of violence, mayhem and demonic hatred that transformed an ordinary human being into a beast on the rampage. Where has this endless communal conflagration left the Muslims of the nation? How do they feel?

Says Navaid Hamid, Secretary, AI Muslim Majlise Mushawarat, Delhi: “Why are you asking this question to a ‘Muslim’ and not to an Indian? This is not a problem for Muslims alone. It is a problem of the entire civil society to deal with the Fascist forces. I have visited the rural areas of Gujarat and I felt that common people for the first time had become hostile to the Muslims. Particularly the youth seem to be more biased in this regard. Even Muslim youth are talking about taking revenge, but they should restrain themselves and should not allow themselves to be instigated.”

The Gujarat issue can no longer be considered an Indian issue because India is a signatory to several UN conventions, he feels.

Such is the agony of an average Indian Muslim in post-Gujarat times that s/he is unable to even express it. A shocked silence has enveloped the Muslims in Hyderabad as they double lock their doors at night, carefully scrutinise every Hindu face they see, and make discreet enquiries or discuss or mull over the alternatives they have.

Unsafe at home

It is sad but true that religion has started dictating terms, inducing a feeling of insecurity among the Muslims, forcing them to think twice before stating their religion. Perhaps Yousuf, a trader in Bangalore, is right when he says, “Till a few days ago I respected my forefathers’ decision of not having left the country during partition. But now, I don’t. The violence against our brethren in Gujarat we hear about almost everyday is sickening. We don’t feel safe anymore. Today it’s Gujarat. Tomorrow it may be Bangalore. Everyday when I leave home for work I say a silent prayer that I should be back home safe in the evening. It is not at all a nice feeling because all the time you’re worrying whether your family is safe.”

As the feeling of insecurity grips Muslims in Bangalore, many of them have even started thinking on the lines of abandoning their home and hearth to emigrate to a foreign land. “I loved everything associated with this country. But, it hurts to realise that we are not wanted here any more. I will give this tension a few more months. If it still continues, then I will pack my bags and leave to a foreign land. Even there I’m sure I will not be accepted but it is any day better to be a foreigner in a foreign land than in your own home,” says a Muslim on conditions of anonymity.

Many in the community seem hurt by the silence of their Hindu friends. Some even feel cheated. When we have made the conscious decision of accepting India as our motherland, why can’t we be accepted by the people wholeheartedly? Why do they treat us like we don’t belong here anymore? Who are they to decide our fate, our future, they cry out.

Mr M A Hakeem who held several important positions in the Central government and has represented India in international bodies admits to ruing the fact that he consciously chose remaining in his motherland rather than emigrate to a foreign country. Not too long ago he tried desperately to convince his son to keep his Indian citizenship and managed to put it off for six months. Now he wonders if his son was right after all. In the aftermath of Babri Masjid demolition, he personally faxed or mailed dozens of copies of articles written against the demolition, those written in support of Muslims, to friends of his abroad as an affirmation of his faith in India. ``We are born out of this soil and will live here and die here... we were prepared for any sacrifice for this land. If anybody told us we had no right to live here we are prepared to take them on,`` he says. So is it different in the post-Gujarat times? His Hindu friends avoid discussing the carnage, they are either embarrassed by it or support it in the deep recesses of their heart. This hurts even more than the Gujarat carnage.

Mazher Hussain of Confederation of Voluntary Agencies, Hyderabad who has been working for communal peace and harmony for several years now is worried at this silence. The Hindu community should speak up and act against the evil that has gripped Gujarat. ``Where is the secular Indian? Why is he taking so long to react? They seem to have been infected by the if-Godhra-did-not-happen-Gujarat-would-not-have burned justification for the massacre of Muslims. This is the time for Hindus to prove their patriotism. They have to decide what kind of India they want : a land of peace or a country bleeding from all its pores.`` This is the time for every right thinking Hindu, the onus being on the middle and upper middle class, to be proactive, to prevent a reaction from the Muslim community, he says.

Ms J Jameel says nobody among Muslims thought the state would turn against them as it did in Gujarat. ``We are all feeling insecure``, she confesses, especially since rumours are rife in the community that the next Gujarat could well be Hyderabad. Dr Tasneem Ahmed a professional doctor decades in Mysore traces back the virus to 1992, ``For the first time in my life I was made aware of being a Muslim... it was an accusation, as if it is a sin to be a Muslim,`` she says.

Shabnam Hashmi, Delhi-based social activist says, ” I do not consider myself to be a Muslim, I am a non-believer. Gujarat could not be a reaction to Godhra as it was pre-planned. People were trained for a long time. Economic blockade of the Muslims started as early as 1992. The fanatics are using Gujarat as a laboratory, it is fascism at its peak. The only solution is united pressure by secular parties. “

Where next?

“I feel outraged and helpless by the happenings in Gujarat. It is unfortunate that the government we elected is doing nothing to put an end to it. Throughout my growing up years in Bombay I believed Bombay was the safest place to be in. But, the bomb blast in 1992 shattered my belief. In fact the Bombay blast must have served as a wake up call to the government, but the government slept through it. Going by this experience how can I be sure that Bangalore won’t be the next target?” questions Dr Zulfia Sheikh, director, Bangalore School of Speech and Drama, who goes on to say, “But, even today I proudly say that India is where I belong. It is my home, my soil and I have as much right over it as anybody else. Come what may, I will not leave the country.” Dr Zulfia further says that she refuses to believe that the country lacks the expertise and the manpower to control the Gujarat carnage. “What the country lacks is the will power to do it,” she declares, even as she admits that the people of her community are gripped by a fear psychosis, not knowing what to expect. “Things have changed, and definitely for the worse,” she rues, relating how they are now forced to think, much against their secular ideas, that they have to be in a Muslim-dominated area just to feel secure.

Syeda Hamid, Social Activist, Muslim Women’s Forum in Delhi is concerned with this “ghettoisation” of the Muslims. “As a common Muslim I would prefer to live in an area where the Muslims are in majority. This feeling of insecurity is spreading among the Muslims in other parts of the country. But why can’t they live in whichever place they like to stay? Why there should be separate Hindu and Muslim localities? Why can’t we live together? “

It is no exaggeration but many Muslim women have now discarded their burqas, not egged on by the women’s lib movements, but simply because they don’t want to be identified as Muslims in a public place. Says a forward-looking Muslim woman who is also a freelance journalist, “Wearing a hijab is a clear indication that you are a Muslim and that is reason enough for a fanatic mob to target me. Where is the Right to Religion as stated in our democracy when you can’t practise it without any fear? ” The young mother, also the wife of a high ranking officer, confesses to feeling insecure even in the cozy comforts of her home. “We chose to stay back in India during partition because this, we felt, was our home. But now we are not sure whether it was a prudent decision. It is all the more exasperating to note that the nation has no trust in us Muslims as we are not given positions of importance in any defence related organisations. How can they doubt our integrity when we are toiling for our homeland?” she wonders.

Not all feel hopeless. Most have hope, in the centuries old Indian tradition of peaceful co-existence of diverse and even opposing schools of thought, religions, cultures and traditions. A refrain of this school of hope is that the carnage of Gujarat was not replicated nor did it trigger off retaliation in other parts of the country. ``We need to keep the faith, in each other, in India`s heritage of secularism, in Indian Constitution,`` said Justice Sardar Ali Khan, former chairman of the Minorities Commission of India. ``Secularism is the lifeblood of India.. I have fundamental faith in this tradition of India..I am sure secularism and democracy will prevail. Gujarat can only be termed as an aberration,`` he says.

Anwar Moazzam, a retired professor of Islamic Studies in Osmania University, believes that religion-based political parties or agenda or even identity will not succeed in India. ``Hindus have already given their verdict against communal politics including the people of Uttar Pradesh, the land of Ayodhya. They will once again speak up for secularism through democratic means.``

It is reassuring to note that there are a few like Mohammad Moienuddin, chairman, Tipu Sultan Research Institute & Museum, Bangalore who strongly feel this dark phase will end soon. Moienuddin however is shocked by the fact that the ruling party in Gujarat is not trying enough to contain the violence. Quoting the Koran Mr Moienuddin says, “God says - ‘I’ve created religions. If I had willed I would’ve created only one. Now I expect you all to live peacefully’. We have to follow God’s dictates and live amicably. Some day things will settle down, because India is famed for its unity in diversity.”

Ahmed-bin-Sayeed (not his real name) a high-ranking officer who retired from the Army has not so far experienced any discrimination, faced hatred or made to feel that he was anything but Indian. ``I cannot fathom it... I only read about it,`` he confesses. ``The virus of hatred has not touched the Armed Forces; their tradition is too strong to be shaken by such things... in any case, we have been living together and in harmony for 1000s of years... why has it become so difficult now?``

Jeelani Bano, a well-known writer in Urdu, whose works have been translated into several Indian languages, says in a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-lingual society like India rather than religion, it is caste, language and regional loyalties that are more divisive. The bonds between Hindus and Muslims are natural and have been forged by a shared history, geography, culture and traditions. ``These are far more powerful than those of religion. Neither Muslim invaders nor colonial rulers could break them. Today`s politicians too will fail,`` she predicts.

Blame it on the politicians

A major section of the community are most angry with the politicians. According to Sayyad Noori, general secretary of Raza Academy, Mumbai, what happened in Gujarat was not just violence, but genocide of the Muslim community. Muslims have lost faith in secularism, which has remained only on paper. However, there is no feeling among the Muslims that they did a mistake in staying back in India after partition.

Talking of politicians, asks former union minister Arif Mohammed Khan, “do you think my reaction as a Muslim will be different from that of a Hindu who has seen innocent people being roasted alive? What happened in Godhra is not different from what happened in Gujarat. In both cases innocent people were butchered and thus both deserve equal condemnation.”

A leading Muslim activist and lawyer in Mumbai Yusoof Muchawala talks of a sense of anger and desperation. Secularism has completely failed, he says.

With people beginning to wear religion on their sleeves, some are even scared to express themselves. “Please excuse me just this once. I am too hurt to even think about Gujarat, forget expressing my reactions,” says one otherwise articulate writer who was hitherto well known for his boldness in expressing his ideas on communalism! Perhaps this sums up the outrage and anger experienced by the Muslims of today.

Waiting to happen?

Gujarat or no Gujarat, has India been sitting on a communal powerderkeg ready to flare up any moment? Answer to the question is as varied as ever; but a majority of the people veer round to the overriding fact that despite the ‘Gujarat` and its aftermath, India is still a secular country where the minority communities specially Muslims, can still live safely and peacefully. Even while tending to overwhelmingly term the Gujarat happenings a genocide, the Muslim intelligentsia has not lost sight of a crucial fact - the Indian Constitution and a free Press - which have consistently been working as a major check to mindless killings and mob violence. Only if the self-styled conservators-cum-faithfuls of Hindutva could have realised this, India need not have to hang its head in shame to the international community over the ‘affairs` of this prosperous state.

Says Prof Hossenur Rahman, 68, a former fellow in the India Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla,`` ..now the question is whether we want God and His Kingdom or secular democracy, the world and its goods. The decision must be made radically.``

A majority of the progressive people in the minority community feels that there must have been a deep-rooted conspiracy behind the Godhra incident and the government must be more prompt to unravel the mystery beyond the involvement of the Muslim goons. ``India had seen conflicts in the past and to shift responsibility only to one, is in itself biased and discriminatory. The Godhra killings were no doubt, pre-planned as the manner in which the bogies were selected for torching alive 58 people, mostly women and children, could not happen without prior conspiracy,`` contends Syed Muztafa Siraj; but in the same breath, he rues:`` What followed thereafter, is both shocking and appalling.``

Siraj, 73, a Sahitya Academy award winner, echoes Rehman when he accuses the Sangh Parivar of waging a kind of war for annihilating the Muslims from this great land.

Has the Partition played a role in the current escalation in tensions and contributed to the Hindu-Muslim divide? A substantial section of the minority community feels that it has done more harm than good to India. Says Syed Siraj:``Lord Macaulay had quietly included the seeds of division in the syllabi introduced by him and the intention was to spread the message of mutual hatred and mistrust among the two communities down to the grassroot. Unfortunately, in the subsequent years, no concrete measure was taken to correct that situation.``

Partition or no Partition, Prof Rahman points out, “we never wanted to solve our outstanding social problems; we rather always shelved it` despite being aware that it would cause the wound all th`` What we need today is de-sacrilisation - we looked upon it (communal clashes) as a political problem; but it is absolutely on the contrary. Ethics and not religion, will save us from unprincipled and unregulated conduct. What we need today is a wide, awake social conscience rather than negative religious susceptibility,`` explains Prof. Rehman who has authored several books including ‘Vivekanda,Vedanta & Islam`.

While it is a widely acknowledged fact that as a majority community, Hindus ought to have a moral and legal obligation not to take the law unto their own hands, questions are also being raised about the Muslims and how they practise their religion. ``Islam does not teach violence or intolerance,`` answers Md Hamid, a rich and respectable businessman in Kolkata, for whom offering namaz daily at a fixed time is more than a habit. He is not the least hesitant to disclose his glorious Hindu background as a few hundred years ago, his ancestors belonging to Kshatriya Pandit family, were deeply impressed by high morals and righteous living of a Muslim fakir and got themselves converted to Islam.

But the fact which pains Hamidbhai most (also shared by others in the community) is the tendency by the communal parties like the VHP and RSS to label a large majority of people in the minority community to be actively in league with terrorists or treat them with suspicion. ``It is dangerous; if this continues, consequences will be serious. In the end, there`ll be one terrorist each from every family. Will the Government be able to control the situation then?`` Hamidji seriously asks.

However, both Prof Rehman and Syed Siraj, an eminent literatteur himself, have a slightly different view on this score. The famed Indian tradition of tolerance and secular institutions, they rue, have gone to the winds and instead, sectarian institutions and views have seized power where healthy educational and democratic traits have become defunct and a ‘course` on hawkish fundamentalism is being actively pursued. While condemning orgy of violence and ugly face of the Hindutva activists in Gujarat, Prof Rehman has not spared the people in his community either. Muslims flaunt the fact that they are Muslims and this tendency is equally dangerous for the secular health of the country, he says.

Time for reform

At the same time, this nearly-septuagenarian writer does not hesitate to highlight some of the other dark areas of the Muslim community that require immediate correction. Citing an example, he notes how Muslims tend to be ghettoised and do not avail of the opportunities given to them. Not only that, Madrasas where the Muslim children are sent for basic primary education, again lack healthy educational environment; `` they (madrasas) can`t bring the children at par with the modern educated world,`` he firmly maintains and feels that an attitudinal change has to take place in the community in this regard.

The founding fathers of the Indian Constitution, points out Prof Rehman, have gifted the country a very solid foundation for secularism; ``the Constitution demands you be less and less Hindu and be less and less Muslim, but more and more citizen of the country and this citizen has a citizen`s religion. Why can`t we observe that to achieve peace among all the communities ?``

The consequences of a divisive agenda would be harrowing not just for the Hindus or Muslims but for the nation as a whole, as we all know. ``These divisions will once again be a cause of colonisation.. this time it will be economic colonisation,`` warns Ahmed-bin-Sayeed. ``We owe it to our children and future generations to bequeath them a prosperous and peaceful country, not a hate-filled, divided country.``

Perhaps as the saying goes there is light at the end of the tunnel. For, young Akram, an engineering student at a reputed college in the outskirts of Bangalore city, is all hopes of a better day, a better tomorrow. “Tension has always been there. Every now and then it flares up. But I am sure it will settle down soon and things will be back to normal. We just have to wait,” he says.

Perhaps he’s right. Maybe it’s just a long wait before the dawn of a bright morrow.

R Akhileshwari,

Chethana Dinesh,

Prasanta Paul,

Parag Rabade,

Shruba Mukherjee

Deccan Herald, Bangalore

http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/jun02/sh1.htm

Essay

The social engineering of Gujarat

The ongoing violence and its broadening social and geographical base in the state is a consequence of the political recasting of social identities.

by Hemant Babu

The winter moon had already risen over the Taranga hills, when a group of men and women stopped our vehicle on the road from Ambaji to Baroda in the western Indian state of Gujarat. The women were dressed in brightly coloured half sarees, worn in the typically western Indian tribal style. A man in the front was carrying a photograph of Hanuman, the monkey god and lieutenant of the Hindu deity Ram. The light of the full moon bathed the hills on both sides of the road, and the exchange that followed was as pleasant as the surroundings.

“Donate some money,” said a woman from the group. In the tribal districts of Gujarat it is customary to stop passing vehicles and collect money around the time of Holi and other festivals that western Indian tribals celebrate. Only, this was not the month of Holi, or of any other festivity. Queried about the purpose of the collection they replied, “We are collecting money for the bhajan mandali” (the collective singing of hymns celebrating deities). The bright red image of Hanuman that they carried was most certainly not native to their original spiritual repertoire. Neither was the idea of the bhajan mandali, which is a characteristically Hindu institution. The image and the ritual had come from somewhere else. This was in early 1993 when several parts of India, including Gujarat, were burning in the aftermath of the demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya. But, the violence had not yet touched the tribal belts of Gujarat.

A month ago, in the aftermath of the Godhra incident and the subsequent riots, a friend, who sports a vandyke beard, was accosted on the same road by a group of men who live on the gentle slopes of the Taranga hills. But, there was nothing gentle about these men. Armed to the teeth, they snatched his wallet and then grilled him about his religion. He was allowed to proceed unmolested only after he furnished proof of his Hindu bona fides. Newspapers the next morning reported the killing of Muslim highway travellers, who were perhaps fleeing the riots.

An end to the violence of the last two months is not in sight, and, the end of it will not be the last of it either. The first incident of 1993 was not the starting point of a process that culminated in this second incident, almost a decade later. Both events and all that happened in the interim are merely stages in the acceleration and amplification of a process that has been in the making for some decades. In Gujarat, where it is today imprudent to wear a beard and a misfortune to be a Muslim, a pervasive communalisation has been cultivated even among communities marginalised by Hindu society. The participation of tribals in the brutal enterprise of Hindutva is an index of this communalisation. The collection for the bhajan mandali was only the more benign aspect of a development whose logical intent was the killings on the road from Ambaji to Baroda and elsewhere.

The arrival of Hanuman in the Gujarat hills has a cultural and political significance. It is also a mytho-logical metaphor for the arrival of tribals in the militia of Hindutva. The military prominence of Hanuman and his army in the epic, Ramayan, has been understood to signify the martial services rendered by some forest dwellers for a Hindu purpose of the remote past. Likewise, the adoption of Hindu symbols and rituals by the tribals of Gujarat suggests their subordinated absorption, as a regiment of foot soldiers detailed by the Hinduised polity to kill on command its ‘enemy’ of the moment. And as in the mythology, all they get in real terms is an honourable mention for services rendered. In both the myth and the current reality (a distinction that often has no meaning in the recent politics of India), the labours of the aboriginal under-class are directed towards the almost exclusive benefit of the caste-Hindu leadership that commandeers it.

‘Normalcy’ in a normal state

Both the violence and its expanding social base have been commented on at length. What is forgotten in all the rhetoric for and against the politics that engineered it is the historical-political context in which this engineering took place. The context may not be the direct cause of the psyche that produces such extreme forms of violence but it nevertheless merits description, if only because it may help identify and explain the direct cause, besides dispelling misconceptions about both Gujarat and the riots that seem to have found purchase in the media.

Ever since the outbreak of violence, there have been frequent expressions of surprise that such events could ever happen in the “land of Gandhi”, in a state that is the most industrialised after Maharashtra, in a society with such a “strong mercantile mentality”, and in a polity that has seen such “stable governments”. These vaunted attributes are not a necessary impediment to organised violence and in any case this is not the first, worst or longest riot recorded in the state. In fact, any or all of these factors could cohabit with or even produce such violence. Perhaps the idea of riots in Gujarat will be less bewildering if it is kept in mind that during a riot organised under an extremely stable government with resources garnered from industrial and mercantile sources among others, the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, founded by Mahatma Gandhi, no less, shut its gates and turned its back on Muslims fleeing certain death. If the political process can so easily erode the historical legacy of ahimsa in the ashram in which the concept was elaborated, optimistic assumptions about the restraining influence of Gandhi, commerce and industry do not place Gujarat under a special compulsion to be less violent than any other state in India’s degenerating polity. As Achyut Yagnik, the well-known social worker and researcher from Ahmedabad, notes: “Gujarat is as normal as any other state.”

A sign of this normalcy is the number of incidents of communal violence in the state as recorded officially. Judicial commissions of inquiry, the Justice Reddy Commission and the Justice VS Dave Commission, were instituted after two major riots, of 1969 and 1985 respectively. Both commissions referred in some detail to Gujarat’s history of communal violence. The Justice Dave Commission traced the history of communal violence in Ahmedabad as far back as 1714 when a bloody riot was sparked off during the Holi celebrations. The city then was still under Mughal control. Subsequent riots broke out in 1715, 1716 and 1750. The Marathas, who succeeded the Mughals in Gujarat, were described by the Commission as being “instrumental in creating a riot in Ahmedabad” after the city was occupied by them.

Hindu-Muslim violence continued in the centuries that followed, with the pace and intensity picking up in the second half of the twentieth century. When communal riots broke out in 1941, curfew had to be imposed for over two-and-a-half months. The Justice Reddy Commission identified as many as 2938 instances of communal violence in the state between 1960 and 1969, that is, an average of approximately three riots every four days during this ten-year period. It is perhaps more than just a coincidence that this was the period when the Jan Sangh, the first overtly political front of the Rashtrya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), and the organisational precursor of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which by all accounts is responsible for sustaining the current riots, became active in the state. During this period, riots began to spread over a much wider geographical area of the sate, affecting towns like Veraval, Junagadh, Patan, Godhra, Palanpur, Anjar, Dalkhania, Kodinar and Deesa, all of which have been hit by the ongoing violence.

Immunity of social conscience

Violence of the communal variety staged in urban and semi-urban venues, besides rural violence directed against agricultural labourers, particularly dalits, was thus as routine an aspect of Gujarat as it is of most other states in the country. But violence of a different, more systematic and sustained order was inaugurated in 1969. The Hindu-Muslim riots of that year mark a major break with the hitherto prevalent pattern of steady if unspectacular social conflict. More than two years of hectic Muslim and Hindu fundamentalist activity preceded the outbreak of these riots. Communal violence in the state acquired a more organised form against the backdrop of the India-Pakistan war of 1965. The Jana Sangh stepped up the level of patriotic mobilisation and secured a toe-hold among the urban middle class. This mobilisation cashed in on the shelling of the area near the Dwarka temple in Gujarat by the Pakistan Navy, and the death of the incumbent Congress chief minister of the state, Balwantrai Mehta, when his plane was brought down by the Pakistan air force.

Muslim mobilisation too was simultaneously taking place. The Jamiyet-Ulema-e-Hind tried to rally Muslim support, perhaps with the tacit consent of the Congress Party, which was then going through a phase of organisational and political crisis. In June 1968, the national convention of the Jamiyet was organised in Ahmedabad. Though it professed to be a nationalist organisation which supported the Congress, the convention showed very clearly that the Jamiyet was drifting towards communal politics. Its firebrand leaders, Maulana Asad Maad and Yunus Salim delivered provocative speeches. A booklet called The communal riots and the harm that they have done to the country and Hindu religion, authored by the president of the Jamiyet, Maulana Aqualak Husain, was circulated during the convention. The booklet gave grossly exaggerated accounts of atrocities on Muslims in communal riots elsewhere in the country. This spurt of Islamic activity prompted the Jan Sangh to found the Hindu Dharma Raksha Samiti. It also brought the RSS chief MS Golwalkar to the city. At a rally in Ahmedabad in December 1968 Golwalkar attacked Muslims as invaders who the country could not tolerate for too long. The idea of Muslims as invaders has been repeatedly used by Hindu fundamentalists to a point where it has become the received wisdom, all cogent arguments to the contrary notwithstanding. The riots that ensued in 1969 left some 1500 people dead.

A riot of this magnitude, unprecedented in both scale and duration, had a foundational significance for the politics of the state and the techniques of mobilisation and orchestration that increasingly came into use. The discrete and scattered violence of the preceding period can be presumed to be manifestations of everyday class, caste and community struggles arising from socio-economic conflicts of a more or less local nature. To that extent, their individual histories and repercussions were confined to the respective localities of incidence. The 1969 riots had the critical mass that lent it state- and nation-wide visibility and gave it a prominent place in the historical inventory of community grievances. This riot could now be invoked at will, not just in Gujarat but wherever else tension had to be engineered. In effect, this was the first explicit politicisation of both communalism and public violence in the state.

Most importantly, the riots of 1969 took Gujarati society past the psychological threshold of normally tolerable public violence, and this not just of the communal variety. Once the barrier to the use of violence in inter-party conflicts was crossed, its repeated use acquired a tacit legitimacy as the social conscience became gradually more immune to the incremental doses of it that the polity administered. The two instances of extended public ferocity that Gujarat witnessed after these riots, the 1974 Nav Nirman movement, launched by the opposition parties to oust the Congress state government, and the 1981 riots against public policy designed to benefit lower castes, involved a high level of violence, including in the latter instance, the burning alive of dalits. Both these instances of extra-parliamentary ‘politics’ were remarkably successful in their objectives. Violent street politics had made an impressive debut in Gujarat and presented itself as a model worth investing in and emulating.

Making of a pattern

There were two aspects to these agitations that had long-term social and institutional consequences. One was the induction of middle class youths into a form of politics not normally associated with them. The other was the emergence of the incipient social and financial networks that sustain prolonged violence. The issues involved in both the 1974 movement and the 1981 riots, though they affected a much larger segment of the population, were articulated most vigorously by the middle class through its traditional channels. But the urgency of the objective, particularly in reversing affirmative state action in favour of the lower castes, caused dissent to spill out of the traditional channels. Middle class, upper caste youths played a leading role in the anti-reservation riots, and the focus of conflict here belonged solely to the matrix of Hindu social relations and its hierarchies of caste. A middle class, consisting predominantly of caste Hindus who saw themselves as the true repositories of merit, was defending its privileged access to professional education and government service. The high level of violence was justified as a legitimate expression of thwarted merit and one more barrier to muscular Hindu middle class street politics was crossed. The BJP was active in the 1981 riots as were its professional front organisations, notably the university and secondary school teachers associations. The classroom, the family and many other institutions which crucially shape social and political values had succumbed to the pressures of protecting the elite monopoly of state privileges and public resources.

The 1981 riots were replayed in a more drastic form in the 1985 anti-reservation movement. In many ways, this sequel marked the beginning of a new phase. Although it partook of features of all the antecedent riots, it also had a novel dimension. The roots of Gujarat’s radical communalism can be detected here. Methodical violence from now on became a more regular instrument and expression of electoral politics, recurring with increasing frequency and refinement of technique and exhibiting remarkable similarities of character. Soon after it commenced, the riot of 1985 was annexed to the exigencies of the BJP’s political constituency-building drill. The seemingly undirected ‘riot from below’ was given a purposeful leadership by the present dispensation in the state, notably the current Chief Minister Narendra Modi, acting then in his capacity as a senior functionary of the RSS. By 1985, the Hindutva cadres had acquired considerable experience in disruptive politics, many of its leaders having participated in the ’81 agitation.

The BJP’s active influence on the 1985 agitation explains many of its more curious features. The riots began on 19 March, the day after the newly-elected Congress government assumed office, and was directed against a policy measure declared more than two months prior. In January, the Congress government had announced an increase in the quota of jobs in government and seats in public educational institutions reserved for backward castes. The riots lasted six months, much after the policy had been revoked by the government. The fact that a riot could start two months after the cause that provoked it, and end as suddenly as it started, points to a high level of coordination by an existing command structure. It cannot be a mere accident that the violence extended beyond Ahmedabad to smaller towns and villages, particularly in those areas where the BJP had acquired influence, notably in central Gujarat and some tribal belts. South Gujarat, which had previously been unaffected, now found itself on the riot map of the state. The social base of the violence expanded to include gangsters, bootleggers and professional killers. Various reports of the period quote doctors who described the stab wounds they attended to as the work of trained hands. The agitation finally degenerated to a point where sections of the state constabulary abandoned their uniforms and relin-quished their responsibilities to join the riots.

The beginnings of social engineering

But there is another compelling aspect of this riot that overshadows all others. The 1981 riots sharpened the conflict within the ‘Hindu’ community, between the upper and lower castes, the victims being primarily dalits. By contrast the 1985 agitation, though initially directed against caste-based affirmative action, transformed itself very quickly into a gratuitous attack on the Muslim community, which had nothing to do with the reservation policy of the government. In the final reckoning, an extended riot led by upper caste Hindus that succeeded in revoking a policy that benefited lower caste Hindus eventually managed to inscribe itself into the social memory as one more gory episode in the deteriorating history of Hindu-Muslim relations. Perhaps the danger to a conceptual and potential ‘Hindu’ unity from a conflict internal to the community was being minimised by quietly diverting the focus of the agitation. If its similarities with the Sangh Parivar’s current modus operandi are anything to go by, then the 1985 riot was the real crucible of Hindutva politics in Gujarat. A kingpin of that agitation is the kingpin of the current spate of pogroms; the only difference is that today he officially rules the political roost with a popular mandate of 55 percent.

There are many crude calculations in the social engineering formulas of the RSS, but the last 15 years have proved that, given a polity degenerating in the appropriate manner, these calculations can yield the desired outcome. From 1990 on, Gujarat has witnessed riot after riot, varied in scale, but similar in character and equal in significance for the BJP’s rise to political power. The late 1980s witnessed an escalation in the tempo of the Ayodhya movement and this furnished the climate for the orchestration of events that would culminate in the party’s emphatic electoral victory in 1995.

The pattern of the first riot of 1990 is interesting, though not necessarily symptomatic. LK Advani’s rath yatra from Somnath in Gujarat to Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh came in the immediate aftermath of widespread and violent upper caste agitations across north India against the affirmative action principles in favour of backward castes, adopted at the national level by the United Front in New Delhi. These agitations had intensified socio-economic conflict between upper and lower castes at a time when the plural constituency of a potential Hindutva was being assembled through the politicisation of Hindu symbols and myths. This was the period when imagined grievances, culled from an imagined history, were being assiduously broadcast, accompanied by the shrill denigration of parties which allegedly indulged Muslim treachery. The rath yatra did manage to rally large numbers, particularly from the lower castes, and the arrest of Advani en route to Ayodhya provoked riots in many states, including Gujarat.

Gujarat again witnessed riots in 1992 when the disputed Babri Masjid at Ayodhya was razed to the ground a few hours after kar sevaks stormed the monument. Surat experienced intermittent disturbances over a six-month period. In 1993, more riots followed, after the blasts in Bombay, allegedly masterminded by the Muslim underworld. Perhaps these riots were attempts at forging a Hindu unity that, on the face of it, seemed impossible. Whatever the intention, there is no denying that the rath yatra precipitated a political crisis in which the existing intra- and inter-party equations began to break down. And, there is no getting away from the fact that, though not uniformly successful across India, the BJP from the 1991 general elections has secured more than 50 percent of the votes cast in the state. Remarkably, for three years following its assumption of office in Gujarat in 1995, the state was free from communal riots. The BJP was clearly living up to its boast of ensuring a riot-free administration, prompting critics to cite this as proof of the party’s monopoly of organised public violence. At any rate, this peaceful interim was part of the established pattern of violence erupting and subsiding according to the clearly discernable designs of politics. The inference, therefore, that violence had become a crucial raw material of electoral politics controlled by a cartel is unavoidable.

New tribe of kar sevaks

The brief interlude of social peace came to an end in 1998, with the attacks on Christian missionaries and establishments in the Dangs, a forested tribal belt on the southern edge of Gujarat bordering Maharashtra. This was a new theatre of conflict in terms of both the region and community involved. This was the first instance of organised violence after the BJP came to power and the context once again is instructive. Cracks had developed in the carefully crafted socio-economic balance in the BJP soon after it came to power in the state. Hindutva once again confronted a crisis of caste. An influential segment of backward castes in the BJP legislature party had revolted against its upper caste leadership, on the lines of what was subsequently to happen in the Uttar Pradesh unit too. Social engineering had failed in the face of an old caste conflict and a substitute social group had to be found to take the place of the departing backward castes. Tribals make up 14 percent of the states population. Christians, who are largely concentrated in the tribal districts, add up to less than 1 percent of Gujarat’s population. Even in the Dangs, they do not exceed 5 percent.

On the night of 25 December, under the auspices of an RSS front organisation called the Hindu Jagran Manch (HJM), churches, educational institutions and houses were attacked in Ahwa, Subir, Jamlapada, Gadvi, Divan Temrun, Madagkhadi and Padalkhadi. Over the next four days attacks spread to other tribal areas in Bharuch, Surat and Vyara districts of south Gujarat. This orchestration of violence by the HJM had been preceded by a decade-and-a-half of patient mobilisation by another RSS front organisation, the Samajik Samrasta Manch, founded in 1983 to assimilate those segments of society marginalised by Brahmanic Hinduism. Whatever else the RSS fronts have been doing, it is clear that within four years of those attacks, tribals from both north and south Gujarat have been recruited in large numbers as kar sevaks for both the construction of the Ram temple and the destruction of the Muslim community.

The similarities between the broad context of the riots is striking. Any crisis internal to Hindutva inevitably leads to violence against well-defined ‘enemies’. If the 1998 violence was necessitated by the social crisis of Gujarati Hindutva, the present and continuing violence comes on the heels of a comprehensive political rout of the BJP across several states in India. Gujarat is its last bastion, and reports and analysis in the media indicated that defeat stared the party in the forthcoming elections in the state. The prominence of tribal participation is the common element between 1998 and the ongoing violence. Perhaps, in the social engineering calculus of the RSS, a fresh massacre of the old enemy by new recruits will add to the prowess of Hindutva, enrich its folklore, expand its social base and thereby forestall a defeat in the nursery of its politics. A tribal population of 14 percent is electorally significant enough to justify the slaughter of several hundred Muslims.

Secularism and silence

Clearly then, from the mid-1980s political violence in Gujarat had become more organised and more numer-ous, had increasingly begun to manufacture its own provocations, and was directed at minorities, particularly Muslims. This last development coincided with the BJP’s Hindutva agendas in a period when the party was systematically cultivating overarching Hindu nationalist sentiments. In 1985, the Congress party was at the peak of its electoral strength, enjoying the support of 55 percent of the electorate. By the 1991 general elections, the BJP had secured 55 percent of the vote and in 1995 rode to power in the state with an overwhelming majority. In this violent ten-year period the Congress Party, which ruled the state for most of the past four decades, had crumbled and out of the ruins of the existing polity the BJP had emerged triumphant.

There seems to be a prima facie correlation between the violent politics of the state and the BJP’s rise to power. Numerous studies, by the Centre for Social Studies, Surat, by the sociologist Ghanshyam Shah, the historian Jan Breman, the political scientist Atul Kohli and many others, have chronicled some of the micro-level processes in the party’s rise to power. But there has not been any real synthesis of explanation, based on these studies, that describes the precise mechanics at a state-wide level. Perhaps, that exercise is precluded by a lack of uniformity, and even an organic unity, in the strategies of the RSS and its offspring. The intricacies of refabricating a complex socio-economic demography may well require multiple, even mutually contradictory, local strategies within an overall climate of communal strife.

But even if there are not too many identifiable and overt statewide strategies, barring of course the assault on minorities, the BJP’s success has been statewide and not all of it can be attributed to just the ingenuity of the party’s political techniques. After all, identical experiments by the BJP in other states have not fetched the same dividends. It would seem therefore that conditions specific to Gujarat’s history, society and politics have facilitated the cultivation of Hindutva politics. These specific circumstances may help penetrate the air of inscrutability that surrounds the BJP’s covert strategies and successes, if only by questioning many well-meaning but untenable secular-ist assumptions about Gujarat and the riots, which actually impede an understanding of Hindutva’s politics in the state.

In the secular intelligentsia’s description of the gory events of the last two months, communal violence is the handiwork of a violent minority of fundamentalists. In this view, the secular majority is silent and can only watch helplessly as the state administration actively abets the Hindutva lumpens. This is not an entirely accurate description of the reality. True, there are many who have actually gone to the aid of the victims and prevented more unspeakable brutalities than have been committed. It is also true that there are many localities where irreproachable community relations, fostered by shared concerns of a more fundamental and material variety, have ensured that provocateurs have been unable to incite murderous passions. But it is equally true that there are many others who silently approve of the carnage. The violent minority and silent majority of Gujarat do not constitute separate and distinct social fragments. The silence of a sizeable part of the silent majority is not the speechless shock of numbed bystanders. It is the conspiratorial silence of willing spectators, remote witnesses to a Roman holiday, whose public silence is a private roar of approval that is clearly audible to the architects of the violence. There are those who cannot speak and those who will not speak.

How else are we to explain the seeming paradoxes of the riots in Ahmedabad? We have seen educated girls and boys from middle and upper middle class families who do not actually participate in the killings but follow in the wake to loot Muslim establishments. We have seen couples on two wheelers bring home consumer durables scavenged from the debris of retail outlets. The cell-phone wielding rioters are not isolated elements who have taken control in a social vacuum. They roam about so brazenly because they know they have a silent social mandate. This is the clear conspiracy of silence among many of the so-called silent majority and it has many manifestations – the son of a bureaucrat who gets away with murder, a government official who demands bribe, the worker who looks at unions as an instrument of personal gain, the trader who cheats at one go the marginal producer and the small consumer. We have seen the faces of this silent majority at various places. Sometimes they are at a safe distance behind the rioting mob, sometimes they are in the air-conditioned cabins of newspaper offices. They are always there where it matters and they are always silent when it matters. We have seen them outside Gujarat too, in 1984 in Delhi when Sikhs were being butchered, in the 1992 Bombay riots, in the Dangs, in Orissa, in Madhya Pradesh, in Uttar Pradesh and many other places too numerous to be listed. And now we are told that the VHP in Ahmedabad has a team of 50 lawyers who will, without payment, legally defend the Hindutva rioters. Secular optimism should not blind us to the reality of communalism’s expanded social base.

Anatomy of a Hindu state

Gujarat is a visibly Hinduised state today, and not just because of the 55 percent that voted the BJP. Even if that 55 percent were to vote in other ways, the ideology of Hindutva that has sunk roots will continue to pervade society. What this means in effect is that even if the Congress were to return to power, it will have to mould itself more openly to the agendas of Hindu politics. In fact, it is more than likely that the state Congress unit has itself already been Hinduised. Reportedly, Congress-run municipalities have extended infrastruc-tural and other assistance to the rioters, particularly in destroying evidence of demolitions. Even casual observers of politics have noted that the Gujarat Congress has been less than tepid in its response to the riots, being more keen to defend Sonia Gandhi’s credentials than to protect Muslim lives. The state administration has been so extensively contaminated that even if a Congress government were to allow some residual secular instinct to surface, it is unlikely to get much support from the bureaucracy. This is the most impressive achievement of fundamentalist politics – that it has recast even the opposition in its own image.

Some traces of how a caste-divided state can achieve an overarching Hindu unity, even if only briefly and at extraordinary moments of stress, are to be found in aspects of the state’s social, political and demographic history. Gujarat came into existence in 1960 after the States Reorganisation Act of 1957, which carved out states on a linguistic basis. Two broad regions – mainland and peninsular Gujarat – make up the territory of the state. Peninsular Gujarat consists of Kutch and Kathiawad, now known as Saurashtra. Prior to Indian independence, numerous kingdoms, principalities, and jagirs dotted the territorial landscape of present-day Gujarat. Saurashtra alone had 499 political units. Kutch was a princely state while parts of mainland Gujarat were directly administered British territory incorporated into the Bombay Presidency. In 1948, all these units were consolidated and Kutch, Saurashtra and the mainland were added to Bombay state in 1956, where they stayed until 1960 when, through linguistic division, the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat were created.

This territorial consolidation gave the future politics of Gujarat several institutions, forms, values and characteristics that made it easier for Hindutva to take hold. Among the more useful heritages was the myth of the Somnath Temple. The temple complex is located in the port town of Veraval on the southern coast of Saurashtra just a little below Porbandar, were Gandhi was born. The myth of Somnath left Gandhi untouched. But it excited many others who formed the cream of the Congress leadership in Gujarat, mainly because in AD 1026, Mahmud of Ghazni (in Afghanistan) raided the temple of Somnath and broke the idol. The temple was situated inside a fortress in which wealth accumulated from the brisk maritime trade of ancient and medieval Saurashtra was stored. Before Mahmud’s raid, this amassed wealth had attracted the notice of many other rulers, some of whom, like the Chudasama, Ahiras and Yadhavas, had attempted to make off with it. But the attack of the Mahmud from Ghazni has been singled out for special attention and presented as proof of Muslim insolence.

Eminent historians like Romila Thapar have argued very eloquently against simplified narratives of the Somnath raid. But the matter long ago passed from the hands of professional historians and into the arsenal of practised politicians such as Rajendra Prasad, the president of India in the 1950s, Vallabhai Patel, the first union home minister, and KM Munshi, a senior minister in successive union cabinets. Among the Congress leadership, Somnath was a Gujarati preoccupation. It was only the objections of Jawaharlal Nehru and some of his secular colleagues that prevented the repair of the temple under state auspices, but that did not stop the president of India from participating in the ceremonies of the privately funded restoration.

Somnath was the Gujarat Congress Party’s gift to Hindutva and is an early example of the politicisation of temple related trauma. Such is the pedigree of the Somnath myth, and the extent of its popularity in Gujarat, that it was absorbed and given prominence in the politics of the Ayodhya myth. Thus it was that the rath yatra that symbolised the spiritual conquest of India by vaishnavite Hinduism began its journey from this shaivite monument.

Shackles of faith and caste

The appeal of such religious themes is not difficult to understand in a society permeated with strong orthodox vaishnavite traditions. The absence of a serious bhakti movement in Gujarat’s history is perhaps a reflection of and reason for this potent institutional vaishnavism. Mythological religiosity has been an integral part of Gujarat society and continues to be fostered by bardic performances. Kathakars, who recite stories from the Ramayan, have an important role in collective social life and in recent years have been active in the BJP’s political cause. According to Ghanshyam Shah, in the 1991 elections kathakars like Morari Bapu were involved in the party’s campaign and “attracted a cross-section of society both in urban and rural areas”.

Mass politics right from the Gandhian phase has been unable or unwilling to break the shackles of this public religiosity. In fact, as the historian David Hardiman points out, Gandhi and his followers were themselves not above using the idioms of caste and religion in political mobilisation. As early as 1920, Gandhi was to appeal to fellow members of his bania caste to, as good ‘vaishnavites’, abstain from courts and schools run by the British government, whose rule he likened to ravanraj. Patel, likewise, played on caste traditions, and laid stress on themes like kshatriya martial virtues. It is not surprising at all that Gandhi should have harped on ramrajya as a political ideal. Vaishnav, kshatriya, ravanraj, ramrajya, all popular currency in the BJP’s rhetoric, have a long and respectable history in the mass politics of Gujarat. The state did not really witness the emergence of a politics that seriously tried to purge the public arena of its religious inflections.

As is to be expected, orthodox faith and values were nurtured within the bounds of an entrenched caste system. The mass politics that emerged in Gujarat could not escape the dynamics of caste and so chose by and large to be confined within it. Although caste divisions did not fully coincide with class divisions in the state, socio-economic power was predominantly in the hands of a few castes, i.e. patidars, brahmins and baniyas – and to a much lesser extent the kshatriyas. Caste associations, some of them active in party politics, are a common feature of Gujarat’s public life. They include the Gujarat Kshatriya Sabha and the Gujarat Kshatriya Sangh, the Patidar Yuvak Mandal, the Khedut Sangh and the Khedut Samaj, which are basically patidar organi-sations, the Prajapati Mandal and numerous others. These caste associations, besides undertaking welfare measures, function also as lobby groups seeking to influence politics in addition to manoeuvring for control of resources. Of these organised castes, the most powerful are the patidars, who in much of the state practically control the rural economy. Brahmins and baniyas, though insignificant as a proportion of the population, are economically and politically powerful by virtue of their dominance in professional services, industry and trade.

The politics of Gujarat has been based on the alliance between castes. The Congress party’s near monopoly of power was based on a patidar-brahmin-baniya leadership that brought together under a broad umbrella the dalit, tribal and Muslim electorate. The weak opposition in the state in the early period, the Swatantra Party, was primarily a kshatriya enterprise, allied to the leadership of dissenting patidar groups. Through the 1960s, the state legislature was dominated by a highly organised Congress party well-versed in the practice of an accommodative politics that did not fundamentally affect the socio-economic structure. As an efficient organisation that functioned both as a civic institution and a political machine, it perfected the technique of herding a large electoral constituency without altering the overall status quo. The patidars, brahmins and baniyas continued to dominate the economy while the dalits, tribals and Muslims continued to vote the Congress.

The moment of accommodation

In 1969, by the time the Swatantra Party was beginning to make inroads into the state legislature, the Indian National Congress experienced a nationwide split. The two groups that emerged were the Congress (Organisation), which inherited the party’s organisation, and Congress (Requisition), which had Indira Gandhi and a large part of the influential ‘left-lean-ing’ leadership of the parent party. A new political alli-ance slowly emerged, with the Swatantra Party and the Congress (O), both with orthodox social and economic programmes, align-ing with the Jan Sangh, which had no real policy to offer other than Hindu Rashtra. The split in the Congress is that moment when the public accommodation of Hindutva politics by the larger polity begins. The existing caste-political equations also began to break down. The two numeri-cally significant castes that were politically influential, the patidars and the kshatriyas became internally divided along political lines.

Over time, both the Swatantra Party and the Congress (O) disappeared, having merged, along with the Jan Sangh, into the Janata Party during the period of unstable politics that followed the split in the Congress. With the political opposition uniting against it and itself lacking any real organisation to combat the trend, the Congress, under Indira Gandhi, adopted a populist economic and political course. While that helped secure a wide base for the party at the electoral level, the lack of an organisation meant that the Congress was unable to deal with the growing forms of extra-parliamentary agitations that commenced with the Nav Nirman Movement of 1974. That movement unseated the Congress government and brought the combined opposition, including the Jan Sangh, to power. Hindu politics had tasted office for the first time in the country in the company of like-minded organisations.

The Congress returned to power after the Emergency of Indira Gandhi, once again without any real organisational structure, but with an infusion of new lumpen cadres. The caste-leadership of the post-Emergency Congress changed hands as the kshatriyas became more dominant. A peculiar aspect of kshatriya politics in Gujarat is that in the course of political mobilisation it redefined itself to include a large backward caste component, notably the kolis. This was to be of some significance in the nature of Congress politics, which in turn influenced to some extent the rise of Hindu politics. By the 1980s the Congress social alliance was based on what has come to be called the KHAM formula, ie an alliance of kshatriyas, harijans (dalits), adivasis (tribals) and Muslims. (see page 24) Through the period that the Congress held power this was the combination that gave Gujarat its gov-ernments. And through the period that these gov-ernments were in power the patidars, baniyas and brahmins continued to control the economy and some crucial nodes of the public sphere, such as the various levels of the state administration. And when the Congress, as part of its ‘welfare populism’ went through the motions of announ-cing measures that would benefit its socially and economically mar-ginalised constituency, the real managers of the economy and the public arena drifted towards an opposition that was gradually being dominated by

the BJP.

This was the period that the agitational politics mounted by social groups increasingly backed by the BJP, left the Congress governments in a state of political crisis. Organisational weakness obstructed substantive civic response on the part of the Congress to these agitations against benefits directed towards backward castes. As a consequence, the government simply retracted its policy measures. Welfare populism antagonised the elite. Its retraction and failure disillusioned the dispossessed. The Congress could not herd its own constituency. That constituency was now available to be politically recruited, at a time when the flavour of Hindutva was being systematically imparted to the society and polity by the hydra-headed Sangh Parivar, through its numerous organisations.

The Gujarat polity had been in an organisational vacuum from the time of the Congress split till the rise of the BJP. The seeming stability of Gujarati politics was to a large measure based on a stable sub-stratum of caste networks. That stable network which enabled the Congress Party to recruit its caste base also enabled the BJP to recruit its constituency. Welfare populism had given way to spiritual populism, the crucial difference being the latter’s level of organisational capacity. The BJP, through the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, had created a dense complex of agitprop organisations that could engage in sectional caste-specific propoganda and simultaneously season it with the larger Hindutva ideology of the caste-Hindu leadership of the RSS and the BJP. The process by which a tribal population of 14 percent is conscripted into Hindutva’s ranks also renders an 8 percent Muslim population completely dis-pensable to an electoral politics many of whose rules have been redrafted by a vaishnavite orthodoxy. When reluctant Hindus become majoritarian enthusiasts, minorities too large to be ignored and too small to make a difference have no place under the protective umbrella of competitive politics.

In the 50 years after Indian independence, Gujarat has been transformed. It has been the laboratory of Gandhian politics, of civic institutions, the cooperative movement and the Hindutva campaign. It has become more urbanised, more industrial, has seen more social mobil-ity, and become more prosperous. It has also seen the re-emergence of an organised mass politics. The earlier phase of that organised politics, under the Congress, consciously divided the polity of the state along caste lines. The second phase, under the BJP, consciously divided the polity along communal lines. A state predominantly of Hindus had become a state predominantly of Hindutva. In 50 years a ‘Hindu unity’ had been engineered in a caste-divided state, and Muslim life had become as dispensable as the Muslim vote. The map of Gujarat in 1947 and the map in 1991 tell a chilling story. The price, paid and yet to be paid, cannot be counted.



http://www.himalmag.com/2002/may/essay.htm

The enemy within

The terror in Gujarat is a South Asian calamity. It is also a reminder of the calamities of the past and a forewarning of manmade disasters ahead. The restraints of civilisation are sometimes all too thin. The targeted mass killings of Muslim children, women and men is an expression of the violent urge that can be stimulated in a mass of people who have been systematically reared to think of others as less than human.

Everywhere in South Asia, there are people who nurture the desire to conduct pogroms and wipe out of existence those who are supposedly different. The energies and urges of such forces are generally kept in check by the weight of law and social sanction. But every now and then, they spring out through the cracks and contradictions of civil and political society. That is when the lives of others are consumed to settle imaginary scores with history. When the beasts prowl among citizens, communal riots and sectarian killings happen – be it in Nellie, Surat, Bhiwandi, Bhagalpur or Bombay.

It is possible to douse the communal flames quickly when the state is willing. The worst conflagrations occur when the exclusivist ideology takes control of a government – as has happened in Ahmedabad – and the state then becomes a killing machine.

South Asia condemns the car-nage on the Sabarmati. No barrier of nationality and citizenship can keep us from denouncing the killing of innocents on the basis of religion. In humanitarian empathy, the citizens of Karachi, Calcutta, Colombo, Madras, Dhaka, Kathmandu and Guwahati, equally abhor what has happened in Godhra, Ahmedabad and elsewhere in Gujarat.

Atal Behari Vajpayee, prime minister of a billion-plus souls, said before the Muslim refugees that Gujarat had shamed India before the world. Before his tears were dry, he went to Goa and shamed India and South Asia before the world. “Wherever they are, Muslims do not want to stay peacefully,” was among the ideas he shared with an apparently appreciative audience of his ruling party.

This was the moment of heart-stopping realisation. Not that it showed Mr Vajpayee for what he apparently is, but that he speaks the mind of a good portion of India’s population by generically lumping all Muslims (of India, of the world) into one malevolent category. In the psyche that is emerging, are all Muslims to be merged into one monolithic community that acts with singular purpose?

“Why did they carry out that massacre in Godhra?” is the refrain in the households and bazaars across north India, as if the torching of the train bogey full of Hindu devotees was a design of all Indian Muslims. It is this mindset – this forced ascription of a unitary agenda to all the Islamic faithful – that one encounters again and again, in railway sleeper-cars, family dinners or neighbourhood cafes. This mindset can rip India apart, with unfathomable consequences for the whole Subcontinent.

To repeat, everywhere in South Asia there are individuals capable of the slaughter that in this instance overtook Gujarat. All our communities have, at different times and under dissimilar circumstances, come under threat from the inner barbarism that does not flinch from clenching its fists, thrusting the dagger, or hurling the bomb. Everywhere in the Subcontinent, there are killings underway, Gujarat’s distinction being a government’s macabre acts of omission and commission against innocents.

While the elite establishments in each of the other countries of South Asia wear their anti-Indianism on the sleeve, there is unstated confidence in Indian democracy and secularism as a role model. If New Delhi begins to let go of the credo that has been the glue for India, then the repercussions will buffet not only its own regions, but all South Asia. Reactionary elements – of all hues and not just ‘Hindu’ – will take advantage of the message that is emanating from Ahmedabad and New Delhi and crawl out of the woodwork to continue with what Gujarat has started.

When the Sangh combine screams its exclusionist ideology in the north and west of India, it gives fillip to reactionaries in the far corners of the Republic and across the expanse of the Subcontinent. When the checks and balances are off the Indian state, extremists everywhere in South Asia feel free to exploit the primal emotions churned up by the appeal to religion and nationalism.

It is for South Asia’s largest and most populous country to rediscover the traditions of tolerance it has officially nurtured over the last many decades. India’s plurality is too vast to be contained in the restrictive formulas of sectarian politics. The peril to India lies within, but not in the places they are looking to find it.



http://www.himalmag.com/2002/may/editorial.htm

Letter from Ahmedabad

The contradictions of modern Gujarat

Writing this letter takes me back to when I first came to Ahmedabad five years ago and fell in love with the city. Gujarat, the fourth most urbanised and second most industrialised state of India, contributes 6.6 percent of national production and 11 percent of the national industrial output. The average quality of life in the villages of Gujarat is much better than what I had experienced in the tribal belt of Bihar in eastern India, where I had worked earlier. I was told that the mercantile Gujarati community assimilates outsiders like water absorbs sugar. In less than a year, I too was assimilated and acquired the true Gujarati spirit.

Trouble, however, was on its way. In 1999, the monsoon failed for two consecutive years and many parts of Gujarat suffered acute drought. Kutch, Saurastra and north Gujarat faced severe shortages of drinking and irrigation water. Government and voluntary agencies reached out to the people in distress and helped them emerge from the crisis. But there was more in store. In the cold winter of January 2001, a devastating earthquake killed thousands of people and left many more homeless. Once again, voluntary agencies and government assistance poured in to help people in distress. The Gujarati spirit survived.

The question now, however, is whether Gujarat will survive the present crisis – of division of the people along communal lines. This is a crisis that has divided society so deeply that one newspaper headline said that the only person who could feel safe in a beard is Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat. Gujarat is not an isolated event in the cyclical history of violence that has gripped South Asia and the world in different forms. Whether it is ethnic violence in Sri Lanka, fundamentalism and its fallout in Pakistan, the assault on minorities in Bangladesh or the Maoist insurgency in Nepal – violence seems to be the order of the day. However, what is most surprising about Gujarat is the changing perception of violence and its acceptance by Gujaratis. How can a predominantly vegetarian community that espoused the values of non-violence values and nurtured both Jainism and Gandhism for years justify killings on the grounds of religion? How could a society in which killing animals and non-vegetarianism are seen as dreadful acts even today tolerate such extrodinary brutality? Does only lack of monsoon showers or the rumble of seismic tremors arouse compassion for people in need? Let me point out some of the contradictions of modern Gujarat that exist side by side.

The Godhra incident was first reported on one of the 24-hour TV news channels in the mid-morning of 27 February 2002. The news initially came in bits and pieces, and even till evening one could not gauge the gravity of the situation from television. However, that evening I visited the market on CG Road in Ahmedabad and could sense that something was appallingly wrong. Gujarat is known for its peaceful nightlife and it is common to see women and men on the road even at midnight. But on that particular evening the streets were deserted. The shops were closed and there was a perceptible tension in the air. Later I learnt that the Vishwa Hindu Parishad had announced a Gujarat Bandh for 28 February.

At that moment, I could forsee what was going to unfold in the coming days. What followed from 28 February onwards is a nightmare without respite. The televised ‘riots’ showed the ugly face of Gujarat to the world – attacks on innocent lives and property and the rest of the rampage of the rioting mob. Today, thousands of people are still living in relief camps in major urban and rural clusters after their houses were burnt and their basic means of livelihood destroyed, leaving them at the mercy of others.

What makes the recent riots different from Gujarat’s earlier disturbances is the participation of dalits, adivasis and middle and upper-middle class Hindus in the riots. Much of this can be accounted for by the history, sociology and realpolitik of Gujarat today. The partial success of industrialisation in many areas of Gujarat created pockets of development, the fruits of which are visible in Gujarat’s golden corridor stretching between Mumbai and Mehsana. The bulk of this land falls in the agriculturally and industrially developed northern and central parts of the state that are under the communal cloud today. The KHAM (khatriya, harijan, adivasi and Muslim combine) politics of Gujarat, a legacy of the Congress regime, partly transferred power from the erstwhile Brahmin-Baniya-Patel combine to the more prosperous strata of lower castes and adivasis. This transfer was not without its problems, as the riots that rocked Gujarat in 1981 and 1985 demonstrated. However, politicians took note of this division of Hindus along caste lines and crafted a common Hindutva strategy to unite the majority community against Muslims. The dalit identity gave way, in the face of urbanisation and sanskritisation in Gujarat, making the state a breeding ground for communal hatred. The loss of identity assisted this assimilation process by building up an aversion to Muslims. The post-Babri Masjid riots in 1992 accelerated this process and changed the social geography of urban Gujarat, creating increasingly sharp distinctions along communal lines.

After 1990, India underwent globalisation and experienced dramatic increases in middle class incomes, primarily fuelled by the industrial and financial sectors. The Fifth Pay Commission hiked government salaries, creating the necessary surplus liquidity for the market to expand. Places like CG Road underwent a remarkable transformation, with large departmental stores and neon lights. In the last three years alone, four multiplex theatres have come up in Ahmedabad screening new Hindi and English movies. However, these new up-market amenities are the exclusive priviledge of the affluent. The general public’s access is regulated in various ways, including economic restrictions. A cinema ticket that costs more than INR 100 is beyond the reach for the majority of Gujaratis. Lower-middle and middle class citizens can only gave in envy, unable to enter these islands of sparkling capitalism. The recent riots included televised images of people from the middle and lower-middle classes looting these stores, bridging the yawning gap between the aspiration and the reality. The phenomenon is important and cries for sociological analysis.

The other part of the story includes the assimilation of Muslims into the mainstream Gujarati economy through changes in income levels. Many of the Muslims have been successfully self-employed in hotel and motor mechanic businesses and the larger process of integration was just beginning. Targeting these business establishments pushed the Muslims back into the very misery that breeds hatred and antagonism.

However, in these times of extreme distress, many people stood out in divided Gujarati society to prove that humanity still survives. Virsinh Rathod, who lives next to the Muslim locality in Naroda, risked his life and brought 20 Muslim families to his home, from where they were later escorted to relief camps. Virsinh helped also 2000 others to reach nearby relief camps in trucks he hired specially for the purpose. The 20,000-odd inhabitants of Ram-Rahim Nagar of Behrampura in Ahmedabad also showed the harmony that could potentially exist between the two communities. They have lived together for years and survived the riots of 1969, 1985, 1990 and 1992. They maintained constant vigil to prevent outside mobs from inciting violence in the area. At the centre of the slum, the two communities have built a temple and a dargah facing each other as a symbol of communal co-existence.

These signposts of secularism rooted in the social fabric of Gujarat bring hope and suggest a glimmer of light at the end of the terrifying tunnel. It gives one hope that, as with other calamities, Gujarat will survive the man-made disaster created by communalism. More than a century old, the bhajan of Saint Narsinh Mehta, which was adopted by Gandhi, still says it all:

“Vaisnav Jan To Tene Kahiye Je Pir Parayee Jane Re” - Vaisnavs (humans) are those who understand the agony of others.

http://www.himalmag.com/2002/may/letter_from_ahmedabad.htm