India ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: L'Inde

Nalini Taneja, People's Democracy, October 29, 2006

THE CHANDRAPUR INCIDENTS

WE are witnessing today a pragmatic collaboration of forces that defend ‘moral’ policing in the name of protecting ‘Indian’ culture, justify trampling on democratic rights of citizens on grounds of suppressing ‘naxalism’ in thought and deed, and prevent circulation of books and performances because they ‘hurt sentiments’.

There is a need to unravel this pragmatic collaboration, and see it for what it is: how it serves ruling class interests in general and the politics of the two major ruling class parties in particular.

‘Moral’ policing, attacks on ‘undesirable’ books, performances, and persons as well, is part of this collaboration and is aimed directly at those who represent popular interest, particularly the working class and the peasantry. The automatic branding of all kinds of people engaged in democratic activism as naxalites, and by definition criminals, is also part of the counter activism of the Indian state and its shift in the ‘right’ direction to accommodate the pro-imperialistic policies and alignments, anti-people measures, and the politics of neo-liberalism. The attacks on minority rights and secular expression are part and parcel of this shift to the Right.

WHAT HAPPENED AT CHANDRAPUR

The recent incidents in Chandrapur involving arbitrary confiscation of books from the Daanish Books stall at the Chandrapur Book Fair and the subsequent illegal detention, harassment and interrogation of Ms Sunita Kumari by the Chandrapur police must be looked at in this context.

Ms Sunita Kumari is owner of Daanish Books, a reputable publishing house of progressive literature and a member of the Independent Publishers Group (IPG). The bookstall was at Deekshabhoomi, as part of the book fair being held to commemorate the golden jubilee of Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism.

On October 15, a contingent of 70 armed policemen surrounded the Daanish stall for over three hours; made a list of some 200 books which they found ‘objectionable’ and ‘anti-national’; but after intervention of superintendent of police, Mr Ravindra Kadam, seized 41 titles. Later, after registering an offence under the dreaded Illegal Activities Prevention Act against her, Sunita Kumari was questioned for over 14 hours by the Chandrapur police. Along with her, Vijay Vairagade, a local social activist, and his 17-year-old son were also questioned. Sunita was allowed to go after her 3-day ordeal on the condition that she will have to present herself as and when police wanted her. This was only after protests at the local as well as national and international level, and a final intervention by Brinda Karat, who phoned the home secretary of Maharashtra and demanded immediate stop to her harassment.

‘DANGEROUS’ BOOKS (!)

It may be noted that none of the books seized by the police --- among them those written by Clara Zetkin, Bhagat Singh, Che Guevara, Baburam Bhattarai, Li Onesto, Anand Swarup Varma, Vaskar Nandy, Jai Prakash Narayan—is banned or declared offensive by any state agency. They are books which are publicly available everywhere, and which civil society in any country with secular ideals should justly be proud of.

As an e-mail circulated by Daanish Books elaborates: "The books seized by the police for containing dangerous , anti state material include books like Marathi translation of the Thoughts of Bhagat Singh, Ramdeen Ka Sapna by B D Sharma, Jati Vyavastha: Bhartiya Kranti Ki Khasiyat by Vaskar Nandy, Monarchy Vs Democracy by Baburam Bhattarai, Nepali Samargaatha: Maowadi Janyuddha ka Aankhon Dekha Vivaran (the Hindi edition of eminent American Journalist Li Onesto’s celebrated book Dispatches from the People’s War in Nepal, translated by Anand Swarup Varma), Daliton par Badhati Jyadatiya aur Unka Krantikari Jawab, Chhapamar Yudhha by Che Guevara and books on Marxism-Leninism and people’s struggles." In short, these are books critical of monarchy and the caste system, those promoting revolutionary thought and action, and even those of Bhagat Singh. Needless to say, many of these books would be available at many other stalls as well.

The police raid clearly smacks of arbitrariness, barbarism and is a denial of the right to free speech and the propagation of ideas. In no democratic country can the police usurp the right to decide what will be read or published by people, and the fact that the police of Chandrapur has got away with it without any censure from the political leadership in the state of Maharashtra or from the officialdom is a cause for major worry. The incident obviously raises pertinent questions about our rights vis a vis the State, as an individual citizen of a ‘free country’, as publishers and finally as readers.

It also causes huge worry on account of the manner in which a secular activist could be whisked away, illegally confined and interrogated simply by being branded a ‘naxalite’, as if after that the State did not require to give any explanation or be accountable to the individual concerned or be obliged to give information under the RTI Act; that all this could be done without registering a case or FIR, in POTA like fashion.

PLAY BANNED

Similarly, the performance of a Hindi play, ‘Cotton 56, Polyester 84’, dealing with the history of Mumbai mills was forcibly stopped in Nagpur and the theatre group harassed. The play was stopped by the police on technical grounds citing “improper licensing” as the reason. Ramu Ramanathan, the playwright, told at a press conference that the troupe was followed by two armoured police vehicles and plainclothes policemen who also tore down posters announcing the play in the city. The Nagpur police commissioner did not meet the theatre group. The theatre group has also clarified that the play has been cleared by the censors and has already been performed over 30 times in Maharashtra and even in Bangalore. Clearly the contents of the play have not been found palatable by the Indian state, although its agencies have not been able to find anything in it to be able to formally ban it. The actors included famous names from the stage, Nagesh Bhonsale and Charusheela Sable.

Vigilantism by the right wing groups is common in BJP ruled states and those where they have a strong presence: Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Orissa. In all these states tacit or open support is being provided to them by the state agencies.

LACK OF DEMARCATION FROM SHIV SENA

In Maharashtra the Shiv Sena has a clear history of suppressing democratic and secular expressions, including the burning of books, forcing a ban on books of history, especially those critical of Shivaji, and ransacking of research libraries on grounds that their staff has collaborated with scholars who project “anti-India” or anti-Maharashtra views. As in Gujarat, the Congress and the NCP in Maharashtra have not been able to demarcate themselves from the BJP and the Shiv Sena, and many of the police actions abetting or actively supporting right wing Hindutva groups have taken place during times when there has been a Congress-NCP government in power in the state. When they have not been in power its leaders have not dared to question or oppose Shiv Sena actions or the Hindutva reading of Indian or for that matter Maharashtrian culture. They have been complicit in creating and maintaining a hegemony for the forces of Hindutva, in creating adverse conditions for Muslims, in the unequal trajectories of the judicial inquiries into Bombay blasts and the Bombay riots against Muslims, in ensuring that while the Bombay blasts accused are dealt with firmly, those found guilty in the Bombay riots against Muslims go scot free.

While the Maharashtra police ignore all leads pointing to violence on the part of Hindutva forces, it is more than usually active in suppressing secular-democratic expression by trade unionists, writers, theatre persons, writers and artists, including our most well known artist, M F Hussain. There is never an apology or sense of accountability on the part of the bourgeois political parties or the officialdom presided over by them, leave alone protection against harassment.

CURTAILMENT OF RIGHT TO FIGHT

Characterising these disruptive actions as ‘moral policing’ somehow gives the impression that all this is simply a matter of culture, linked with long-term educational efforts and to be settled through the battle in the realm of ideas alone. It also gives the impression that our society is becoming revivalist and conservative, and that given this thrust towards conservatism, for whatever reasons, such incidents involving ‘some sections’ of people are bound to take place.

Such a valuation ignores the links of such ‘backwardness’ with a modernity that is intrinsic to right wing politics and economic projects, and shies from naming and blaming the networks and organisations that perpetrate violence and endanger democracy, minority rights and the livelihood of those they choose.

All this not only spells danger to the free exchange of ideas and the freedom to read, write, publish and perform, but is a serious curtailment of the right to work for a better society. It involves infringement of the right to propagate ideas and to organise, and it curtails political activity and participation in the workings of democracy. There is a need, therefore, to also be alert to the dismissal of such denial of political rights as simply the work of fringe elements. There is a need to be aware that these ‘fringe’ elements are quite mainstream today, and have the might of the state behind them. The UPA government at the centre has, on its part, been unable to guarantee democracy or even impartiality; there are too many ruling class threads that bind it to the politics of the BJP and its Parivar. The centre has not collapsed in India; it has simply shifted Right.

Yoginder Sikand

Bias against Muslims is deeply-rooted in large sections of the Hindu-owned media in India, even in influential sections of the English press that prides itself in its claim of being ‘secular’ and ‘progressive’. Two ongoing controversies—the Vande Mataram affair and the Malegaon bomb blasts—suffice to confirm this argument.

Some weeks ago, Indian newspapers were awash with reports about Muslims protesting against the suggestion that all children studying in schools be forced to sing the Vande Mataram song, which, numerous Hindu-owned newspapers, television channels and politicians declared, was India’s ‘national song’. Refusal to sing this song, they claimed, was a thoroughly ‘un-patriotic’ act, suggesting, thereby, that Muslims, by definition, were ‘anti-national’. Consequently, Muslims were forced, as they often are, to prove their patriotic credentials, and the overall result of this sordid controversy was to only further reinforce deeply-rooted anti-Muslim feelings among many non-Muslim Indians.

Media projection and coverage of the Vande Mataram controversy was cleverly contrived to put Muslims in the dock and to defend a certain vision of Indian nationalism that is framed in ‘upper’ caste Brahminical Hindu terms, in which Muslims, Dalits and other non-’upper’ caste Hindu communities have little or no space for their identities, aspirations and interests. Few ‘mainstream’ Indian papers cared to mention crucial facts of the history of the controversial song. The Vande Mataram is part of a novel, the Anandmath, which reeks of anti-Muslim hatred and is the rallying cry of Brahminical Hinduism that is premised on an unrelenting hatred of Muslims. The was the novel written by Bankim Chandra Chatterji, a late nineteenth century Bengali Brahmin, a major cult figure in Hindu ‘nationalist’ circles.

The crux of the novel is an ardent appeal to Hindus to rally against and slaughter Muslims and drive them out of India. The Vande Mataram, sung as a war-cry to rouse Hindu mobs against Muslims, exhorts Hindus to do all this for the sake of the Mother—India deified as the Brahminical goddess Kali or Durga. Curiously enough for a song that is projected by its advocates as the emblem of Indian nationalism, the novel ends with the hero welcoming the British take-over of India. ‘Now the British have arrived’, the hero exclaims with ill-concealed glee, ‘and our wealth and lives will be safe’. ‘The subjects [Hindus] would be happy in the English kingdom’, he goes on, ‘[…] [so] refrain from waging war with the Englishmen […] Your mission has been successful—you have performed [sic.] well-being of the Mother—the English reign has been established’. Now that the Muslims have been killed and driven out and their place has been taken by the British, the hero concludes, the Hindus should accept the British as their ‘ally’.

Hardly the stuff that one would expect from a song that is bandied about as the herald of Indian nationalism and anti-imperialism. Even more curious in this regard is the fact, which the ‘mainstream’ media probably has deliberately sought to conceal, that Bankim Chandra Chatterji was hardly the ardent ‘nationalist’ that he is made out to be. In 1858 he was appointed to the post of Deputy Magistrate by the British, the first Indian to enjoy that dubious distinction in the immediate aftermath of the failed Indian Revolt of 1857. When he retired from that post he was conferred with the titles of Rai Bahadur and Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire by the British, an ‘honour’ reserved, of course, only for pro-British toadies.

From the very start, when Brahminical revivalists in the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha began insisting that the Vande Mataram must be made India’s national song, Muslims and other non-Hindu communities angrily protested. There was no reason, they argued, why non-Hindus should be forced to worship a Hindu deity, even if in the form of ‘Mother India’, suggesting that the equation of Indian nationalism with Brahminical Hinduism was aimed at excluding non-Hindus from the definition of the ‘national mainstream’. The Muslim argument, which has been repeated ad nauseum and highlighted in the Urdu press in the course of the recent controversy, is that the novel of which the song forms a part is clearly anti-Muslim and, furthermore, the Vande Mataram’s appeal to prostrate before to and worship the Mother, in the form of Durga incarnated in the guise of India, is forbidden in Islam, a fair enough point that any non-Hindu would make.

However, in the heat and din of the recent controversy, the ‘mainstream’ Indian media, some notable exceptions aside, shamelessly shed all pretensions of ‘secularism’ and made it out to be that by refusing to sing the song Muslims were demonstrating that they had no love for India and that they were ‘anti-national’. The point of how a mere song could be the test of Indian nationalism, the issue of the political context of the song, the clearly anti-Muslim thrust of the Anandmath and Bankim Chandra Chatterji’s own collaboration with the British, were all carefully glossed over. Nor did the ‘mainstream’ media raise the obvious point that forcible extraction of demonstrations of ‘patriotism’ by Muslims unwilling to sing the song were pointless and completely farcical. And the fact that the mounting insecurity and threats to their life, property and identity that many Indian Muslims face today at the hands of the votaries of the Vande Mataram, a situation that is hardly conducive to promote passionate demonstration of love for the country, was completely lost on the ‘mainstream’ media, which was awash with stories of Muslims singing or not singing the song.

It is not that both the Congress, votary of ‘soft’ Hindutva, the hardcore Hindutva lobby and the ‘mainstream’ media were unaware of the fact that appealing to or forcing all Indian school-going children, including Muslims, to sing the song would be stiffly opposed by most Muslims, for there has been a long history of Muslim opposition to this. In fact, it appears that it was hardly the intention of the ardent advocates of the song to promote patriotism by advising that all school-children sing it. Rather, it seems obvious that the brouhaha about the song was simply yet another stick for Hindutva fascists to beat Muslims with, to force them to accept their diktats and to terrorise them with threats of being expelled from India simply because of their refusal to sing a song that even most Hindus do not know and which fewer Hindus know the meaning of, being in highly Sanskritised Bengali. But this, of course, was a point that few ‘mainstream’ newspapers refused to point out, thus clearly revealing their underlying anti-Muslim bias and the fact that their perception of Indian nationalism is firmly within the framework of Brahminical Hinduism.

Another glaring instance of clear anti-Muslim prejudice in large sections of the ‘mainstream’ Indian media is the coverage of the recent blasts outside a mosque in Malegaon that claimed almost forty Muslim lives. While the Mumbai train blasts this July hogged the headlines for days, the Malegaon tragedy has received relatively little attention, probably because the victims in this case are Muslims. The identity of the perpetrators of the Mumbai train blasts is yet to be ascertained, but police, intelligence agencies and the media are insistent on what they claim, was an ‘Islamist terrorist’ hand. Consequently, hundreds of Muslims were arrested in the aftermath of the blasts. The contrast with the Malegaon blasts could not have been more striking. While it is entirely plausible that they could have been the handiwork of Hindutva activists and while the likelihood of Muslims being behind them extremely remote, if not impossible, the media is awash with stories that argue the unlikely thesis of a hidden ‘radical Islamist’ or Pakistani ISI hand behind the blasts and the theory that they could have been the fallout of intra-Muslim sectarian rivalries. It is as if Hindus could never commit such an act of terror, the hundreds of anti-Muslim pogroms in India which thousands of people have lost their lives in recent decades notwithstanding.

That probably explains why it is that, in contrast to the massive wave of arrests and harassment of Muslims in the wake of the Mumbai train blasts, the police have not deemed it necessary to arrest or question rabidly anti-Muslim Hindutva activists, who may possibly have been behind the blasts, on any significant scale in Malegaon and thereabouts. Nor is the ‘mainstream’ media demanding this. Instead, the Malegaon blasts appear to be fast disappearing from the screens and pages of the ‘mainstream’ media, being replaced now with stories about the court cases relating to the 1993 serial bomb blasts in Mumbai in which some Muslims are said to have been involved. Even here the reporting is obviously biased and skewed, for few newspapers have cared to view these blasts, as they should be, in the backdrop of the widespread anti-Muslim violence in large parts of India just a year before in the wake of the destruction of the Babri Masjid, in which thousands of Muslims were slaughtered in cold blood by Hindu mobs. Needless to say, the non-Muslim Indian media, by and large, is supremely unconcerned about justice to the families of the several hundred Muslims slain by Hindu gangsters in league with the elements in the police and the administration in Mumbai itself just weeks prior to the serial blasts and which must have provoked the perpetrators of the blasts to do what they did. Nor is the media talking about justice for the almost three thousand hapless Muslim victims of the state-sponsored massacre in Gujarat in 2002 and their relatives, and the victims of innumerable other such bouts of bloody anti-Muslim violence that do not seem to deserve any more than passing mention, if at all, on television screens and in obscure corners of some odd newspaper.

So much, then, for the ‘secular’, ‘patriotic’ pretensions of the Indian ‘mainstream’ media.

The author works with the Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, and moderates an online discussion group called South Asian Leftists Dialoguing With Religion
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/saldwr/

Ajit Bhattacharjea, Hindustan Times, October 12, 2006

Four Octobers ago, a well-known Kashmiri journalist, Iftikhar Gilani, was in Tihar jail facing indefinite incarceration on concocted charges. He had been jailed after a cursory trial on June 9, 2002 and was abruptly released after seven months when the charges were withdrawn. Gilani had a rough time, but was relatively fortunate. As chief of bureau of the Kashmir Times in Delhi, he had many journalist friends and others who campaigned for his release. The charge against him under the Official Secrets Act was found to be fabricated.

The primary evidence produced by the police was a document on the hard disk of Gilani’s computer with details of the number of Indian security forces in Kashmir. But this was not secret information. It was, as he pleaded, a paper by one Nazir Kamal already published in the journal of the Pakistan Institute of Strategic Studies, Islamabad Papers, and taken from their website. Offers to demonstrate this by securing other copies of the paper or contacting the website were ignored. Gilani’s copy was doctored to make it appear secret. These and other details of the frantic efforts of the prosecution, and the officials behind it, to frame Gilani are detailed in his book, My Days in Prison. Fortunately, the patent failure of justice became impossible to justify and he was released on January 13, 2003. But for the influential friends who pursued his case, he may still have been in jail. The maximum sentence prescribed for an offence under the Official Secrets Act is 14 years.

I recall Gilani’s case because My Days in Prison indicates why the sentencing of Mohammad Afzal Guru to death by hanging has evoked passion and disbelief in the Valley. It documents the devious lengths to which investigative agencies are willing to go to be seen as saviours of the nation. Kashmir is familiar with stories of people being framed, of militants claimed killed by the security forces turning out to be innocent civilians, of young men disappearing without trace. Suspicions are reinforced when it is found that in Delhi, intelligence agencies are not above fabricating or distorting evidence to get credit for catching persons painted as threats to national security. In Afzal and Gilani’s cases, evidence of fabrication surfaced during hearings.

With stories concerning national security certain to get headlines, intelligence agencies try to exploit mediapersons to substantiate their charges and embarrass the defence. Hints are dropped about activities that further damage the suspect’s reputation or weaken his case. In the Gilani case, a newspaper reported that he had confessed his guilt, which he had not. In the Guru case, his counsel was quoted as suggesting that he preferred death by lethal injection to hanging, an implicit admission of guilt. He denied admitting any such preference. Intelligence personnel are keen on publicity. Arrangements to be filmed or photographed with a ‘catch’ are part of the routine; presumably with an eye on a reward.

Gilani’s account of his ordeal is detailed and credible. It contains names and designations. A copy of Afzal’s letter to his lawyer from jail has been circulated. It makes more painful reading, with descriptions of torture and extortion, but does not have the imprimatur of a published document. Even so, Afzal’s account of inadequate facilities for defence, the circumstantial nature of the evidence and other trial inadequacies seem sufficient to provide the scintilla of doubt about his guilt required to merit presidential clemency. It will be too late to make amends if evidence to the contrary is found after he has been hanged.

Justice must be seen to have been done especially in a case involving an attack on Parliament House. The Supreme Court did not find any evidence in the charge that Guru was a member of a terrorist gang or organisation. He was not directly involved in the attack or the planning, which was masterminded by three persons in Pakistan. Even if guilty as a conspirator, the view taken by the court raises more questions than it answers. The following is an extract from the judgment: “The incident which resulted in heavy casualties, has shaken the entire nation and the collective conscience of the society will be satisfied if the capital punishment is awarded to the offender. The challenge to the unity, integrity and sovereignty of India by these acts of terrorists and conspirators can only be compensated by giving the maximum punishment to the person who is proved to be a conspirator in this treacherous act. The appellant, who is a surrendered militant and who was bent upon repeating the acts of treason against the nation, is a menace to the society [and] should become extinct. Accordingly, we uphold the death sentence.”

Ajit Bhattacharjea is a former Director,Press Institute of India

Gujarat 2006 is deadlier than 2002. Because Hindutva has manufactured a new DNA beyond the Indian Constitution

Prashant Jha, Ahmedabad, Hard News Media

Short, stocky, and balding, Babubhai Rajabhai Patel can pass off as a normal, middle-class trader. Only, he isn't one. Babu Bajrangi, as Patel likes to be called, says he runs an NGO, Navchetan Sangathan. Sitting in his 'office' in Ajanta Ellora Complex in Naroda in Ahemdabad, Bajrangi is surrounded by images of RSS ideologues KS Hedgewar and Guru Golwalkar, a map of Akhand Bharat, and his own photographs, with politicians or in public meetings.

Bajrangi claims to be a social worker. "I rescue Hindu women who are lured by Muslims. I hate such marriages." As soon as Bajrangi gets to know of any such union, he kidnaps and sends the girl back home; and beats up the Muslim boy. "It's fun. Only last week, we made one such man eat his own shit thrice," he says. Bajrangi's operation is ruthless and effective. He claims to have 'saved' 725 Hindu women this way. And what about the law? "What I do is illegal, but it is moral. And anyway, the government is ours."

Perhaps that is the reason that Bajrangi, chief accused in the Naroda Patiya murder case (during the Gujarat carnage), is out on the streets and not behind bars. "People say I killed 123 people," says Bajrangi with a grin. Did you? "How does it matter? They were Muslims – bloody Pakistanis. They had to die. They are dead."

“The government is ours.” Few will doubt Bajrangi's claim. Not Muslims for sure, for they know Bajrangi might be more extremist than most, but he represents a mindset that is widespread: the mindset of the Gandhinagar government’s ministers. The mindset of several Hindus, from the waiter to the auto-driver and the middle-class, across Gujarat.

The discourse among Muslims has a striking unity. There is no one who speaks for us. This is not our government. This is their rule — Hindu rule. What do we do? As an elder in Shah Alam, a Muslim area in Ahmedabad, puts it, "Our crime is we pray to Allah."

The emotions of Muslims across Gujarat revolves around alienation, helplessness, and anger. Understandably so, large sections of the Hindu society, led on by the BJP government, ensure that Muslims remain second-class citizens.

And that is the story of Gujarat 2006. A tale of a society that is sharply polarised and prejudices about the 'other' deeply entrenched, and a state that happily engineers everyday hatred. In its wake, lies a community that lives in fear. The Gujarat of today is in some senses more dangerous than the Gujarat of 2002. For here, the violence is invisible. It operates systematically, as well as subtly, at the establishment and social level.

The truth is, the Gujarat government has seceded from the Indian Constitution. It did so in 2002, when the state sponsored mass violence against Muslims. And contrary to what many think, it has consistently done so and flaunted it since then. It has tried to completely subvert the process of justice for 2002 victims, from distorting FIRs and ensuring faulty investigation, to letting the accused get away free. With office-bearers of the Sangh Parivar affiliates doubling up as public prosecutors, it is little surprise that only 13 out of the 345 cases decided so far have resulted in convictions.

Even as it fulfils its promise that no harm should come the way of rioters, the government continues its campaign to harass innocent Muslims. The fact that the UPA government in Delhi did not ban the draconian legislation, Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), retrospectively has meant that those charged under that law in Gujarat before 2004 remain in jail. This effectively means that the secular UPA government, backed by the Left, is playing Narendra Modi’s game.

Maulana Omarji's house is, ironically, on the Station Road in Godhra. But he doesn't live there. Along with others accused of hatching the conspiracy and burning the train compartment at the Godhra railway station on February 27, 2002, he stays some distance away – in Sabarmati Jail in Ahmedabad. Omarji was arrested one year after the incident took place – a period in which he was active in organising relief camps for Muslims, and petitioning national leaders who came visiting about the injustice meted out to minorities in the state. Clearly, someone powerful did not like that. A well-respected man and community leader against whom there is no evidence, Maulana Omarji is charged with POTA.

His young and articulate son, Saeed, is quite frustrated. "What is the fault of Muslims in India? I am so angry with the system here, including the judiciary." Everything is stacked up against Muslims in India, feels Saeed. "I am an Indian and will never be disloyal to my country. But I feel our parents and grandparents made a mistake by staying on here. We should have gone to Pakistan." It is a striking comment, revealing the manner in which a fascist state is pushing people into a corner.

Half-an-hour from Godhra lies Kalol -- a site of major violence in 2002. This reporter met Mukhtar Mohammad at the Kalol police station. Active in organising relief camps, Mukhtar has been working to get justice for the victims. Something that did not go down too well with the state authorities. Framed under, what by all accounts, is a false ‘rape case’, he is stuck making rounds of police stations and magistrates and has to spend occasional nights, and at times, extended periods in jail. He says, "They want to break any kind of leadership that emerges among the Muslims, especially those who are moderate, and want to fight politically, constitutionally and legally."

Indeed, there is a pattern in which the Gujarat government is acting against Muslims. The Hindutva forces have no problems if the influence of the Muslim conservative religious organisations increases because it helps strengthen their stereotypes about Muslims. What they do not want is an articulate, liberal voice among Muslims that speaks the language of democratic rights and claims equal citizenship.

The regime targets innocent Muslims not just by framing false cases. Discrimination is spread across all realms. Juhapura is the largest Muslim ghetto in Ahmedabad with more than 300,000 people. Yet, it has no bank, state transport buses take a detour to avoid crossing through it, and there are no public parks or libraries. OBC communities among the Muslims in Gujarat find it difficult to get certain certificates. The saffronisation of the bureaucracy and local power structures, points out scholar Achyut Yagnik, has meant that panchayats, co-operatives, agrarian produce markets and government schemes have become sites for discrimination against Muslims.

What is more alarming is the fact that this discrimination has larger social sanction. There is pride about the 2002 toofan among many Hindus – we taught them a lesson, crushed; the world should learn how to deal with miyas from us, are oft-heard remarks. And the increasing distance between the two communities, both in the minds and physically, has not helped matters.

Most cities and towns in Gujarat are completely divided into Hindu and Muslim areas; a street corner, a divider in the middle of the road, a wall, or just a turn acting as borders. If it was difficult for a Muslim to find a house in Hindu areas before the killings, it is impossible now.

Sophia Khan is a well-known woman activist in Ahmedabad. Her office was in Narayanpura, an upmarket Hindu area. A month ago, when neighbours in her office complex got to know of her faith, they asked her to vacate immediately. Putting up a fight was no use in the face of constant harassment. She has now shifted to Juhapura. "My house is in a Muslim area. My office is now in a Muslim area. My Hindu employee is being pressurised by her family to resign, because they don't like her coming to a Muslim area. And my work revolves around Muslim women. This is how they want to push an entire community into a corner," says Khan.

The segregation has spread to other realms as well, leading to absence of contact and interaction between the two communities and breeding stereotypes and intolerance. The most visible realm is the fewer number of mixed schools in Ahmedabad which have a fair number of Hindus and Muslims. Discrimination on religious lines, coupled with the desire of parents to send children to schools where there are 'more of our people' has further boosted this trend. Pankaj Chandra, professor at Indian Institute of Management, is worried. Brought up in the composite Ganga-Jamuni culture of Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh, he says, "My children may graduate from school without knowing a single Muslim. Imagine how easy it will be to build stereotypes then."

When this reporter, with his long, unkempt beard, walked into an elite government colony in Ahmedabad to meet a senior official, three kids parked their bicycles right in front. One screamed aloud, “Terrorist.” Why? “Because you are a Musalman,” he responded. So? “All Muslims are terrorists. My father is a judge. He will call you terrorist in court.” Really? “Yes. And get out of here. This is a Hindu area.” Sauyajya is 12-year-old and has not met a single Muslim in his life. No one knows how many Sauyajyas are in the making in Gujarat.


The writer is Assistant Editor, Himal Southasian, Kathmandu.