[Reader-list] One Week in Aman Chowk (Part 3)

[bhrigu at sarai.net]

One Week in Aman Chowk (Part 3) 

The one thing that took up most of our time and attention at Aman Chowk was 
the children. The first day we arrived, we went to the camp office and made an 
announcement. Jo bachhe drama aur painting karna chahein, khelna chahein, voh 
manch par aa jayein. This was a large, elevated platform right next to the 
camp. A wave of about 200 children arrived from various parts of the camp. We 
played simple games involving clapping, sound and movement. Many of the adults 
from the camp gathered around to watch and smiled and laughed with us. I think 
there may have been a note of relief. Here was someone who did not want to 
take any photographs, was not officiously noting down things in a pad and did 
not want them to tell their stories for the hundredth time. (Outsiders making 
quick, short visits, or 'tragic tourists' as they have come to be called, will 
often come back and say, "People are dying to tell their stories". This need 
not always be the case at all. Quite often people from the camps are fed up, 
having narrated incidents over and over again). Afterwards, many of the 
children wanted to sit with us, talk, hold our hands and show us around the 
camp.

Gradually we learnt their names. Firoz was the boy who would catch hold of my 
finger as soon as I arrived and not let go until I left. His younger sister 
Ruksaar and their baby brother Taufiq respectively adopted the other two from 
our group of three visitors to their camp. Niloufer was the girl who always 
had a baby on her arm. Sabeer was the boy who would ask me, at least five 
times, at the end of each day - "Kal Aaoge?" and then add "Roz Aana", again 
five times, extending the 'o' each time, till he was tired with the effort. 
Fatima was the girl with the angelic smile who would wreak havoc in the 
singing sessions by singing loudly and out of tune. Rahim, Munin and Hassan 
were the bigger boys, who would often help us out during our sessions with the 
younger kids. A couple of them worked at nearby chai shops. Two days before we 
left, they bought each of us a small gift from money they had saved up and 
collected over the past few days. Many of the kids lived in the houses in the 
surrounding area, but spent the day playing in and around the camp. Some of 
the houses, such as Hasan's, had bullet holes and marks on the walls from the 
police firing. For the first couple of days no one brought up the dhamaal. 
Perhaps they were protected, I thought. They lived far away and their parents 
brought them here under the cover of the night. This turned out to be further 
from the truth than I could have possibly imagined. After a couple of days, 
Firoz, though he didn't talk about the dhamaal was quite insistent that we 
come to visit 'his' Dargah. He also wanted to show us where he used to live. I 
presumed that it would be at some distance, which would mean going with him in 
an auto-rickshaw or a bus. This worried me a bit because I wasn't sure if his 
mother would approve of our taking him away like that. In this I was wrong 
again, his house was a two-minute walk from the camp. Barely a kilometre away, 
left from Aman Chowk is a row of erstwhile kuchha and pakka houses that used 
to comprise Manilal ki Chawl. What remains now is only piles of black soot, 
some bricks and an occasional remnant of a wall. One of these spaces used to 
belong to Firoz and he comes to look at it everyday. Further down the road is 
the dargah, one of the many that was ravaged in this part of the city. The 
front entrance is still standing, which is surprising given the ferociousness 
of the attack with which the rest of it is marked. Further inside is a canopy 
without a head. What removed the head was an LPG gas cylinder, the top half of 
which is still inserted firmly into the base of the structure, so firmly that 
they haven't been able to take it out. Its sturdy red frame still retains some 
of the apocalyptic energy from the days it first found its place there - it 
jumps up and attacks you as you enter the dargah.  

Just beyond the area that used to be Manilal ki Chawl is a line of trees on a 
small, shady patch at the top of a hillock. If you climb the hillock you can 
look down into the Lal Bahadur Shastri Stadium, the largest public space in 
this part of Ahmedabad. Several important political leaders have addressed 
rallies in this stadium. The hillock continues onto a plateau where there is a 
small park for children with swings and a few slides. Further down is another 
green patch, another Dargah (also in ruins) and then finally the main road. 
This area, prior to the dhamaal, used to belong to the children. On another 
evening, Mushtaq recounts his own childhood, now almost two decades back, 
based in this same space. The early part of the evening would be neeche in the 
stadium, playing cricket. Late evenings, he would climb the hill, come to the 
small park and sit in relative privacy further away from the swings where 
other children were playing, and study, because there were too many 
disturbances at home. On Sundays the stadium would be full, like a mela. Five 
or six cricket matches on simultaneously, ice-cream, cold drinks, chaat and 
other snack vendors, toys, some clothes and other knick-knacks for sale. In 
late February many of the children spotted the stadium filling up with a 
different kind of crowd. Numbers vary depending on how intensely the story is 
being told but a reasonable guess would be between three or four thousand 
people, armed to the teeth. Muslim residents from the area gathered on the 
road above the hill to try and create a line of defence. Police vans arrived 
in large numbers and began firing at this line of defence. Their subsequent 
retreat behind the first row of houses to take shelter from the police firing 
opened up the space for the first wave of two thousand to enter from the 
stadium and begin some preliminary arson. Some of the children hid and watched 
their houses being burnt. Here we are two and a half months later, standing at 
exactly the same spot, surrounded by soot and rubble. The remaining crowd in 
the stadium waits in anticipation for the first wave to return. This crowd is 
well looked after. Water tankers, food stalls, sweets and other goodies dot 
various parts of the stadium. In one corner alcohol is served, further off a 
puja is held. We walk up the hillock to take a bird's eye view of the stadium. 
On the road behind us, a police jeep passes and for a moment, no one speaks. 
Rahim points to a gate in the distance. Vahaan se Hindu log aaye the. On the 
last day before leaving, I tell him, Main Hindu hoon. He thinks for a bit, 
looks a bit shocked, then tells me, Shayad sabh Hindu log ek se nahin hote, 
kuch achhe bhi ho sakte hain. Munin remembers a number of trucks with 
loudspeakers, repeatedly making announcements, occasionally throwing taunts at 
the retreating line of defence. Kaccha Chawal Kaccha Paan, Mullah bhago 
Pakistan. Firoz remembers other sounds, helicopter blades, bulldozers banging 
against walls, blasts and screams. More announcements, Yahaan dhamaal hone 
vali hain, Yahaan se bhaag jao, Rehna hai to Hindu ban ke raho. 
Videos are circulated among the people of Bapunagar, gifted to them by the 
attacking tolas. These contain footage from the previous few days of violence 
at Naroda-Patiya, one of the worst hit areas anywhere in Gujrat. One night, 
back at Xavier's, police footage from Naroda-Patiya was screened in the common 
room. I have been to the archaeological site at Pompeii in Italy. In one of 
the houses there, just next to an ornately decorated wall, you are startled by 
the presence of a contorted body, as if it were sculpted with coal black 
putty. An artwork of horror, perfectly preserved over centuries by a sudden 
burst of lava from Mt.Vesuvius, the shock still registered on its face by a 
mouth wide open, screaming. The body is almost 2000 years old, but if you look 
at it, you can still hear the scream. The Naroda Patiya video had many such 
bodies and let it suffice to say that Mt.Vesuvius was much, much kinder. I 
could spend the next two paragraphs describing what I saw in the five minutes 
that I could bear to watch the video. Worse, I could describe what I saw on 
the faces of those left to salvage the remains of bodies and entrails, faces 
covered with hankies, tears streaming down their eyes. But I set out to write 
against terror, not to describe it in its grisly, corporeal detail. The 
morning after they screened the video at Xavier's, I woke up bathed in sweat, 
got out of the room and brushed my teeth, crying. 

After roughly four or five hours the first wave of attackers returns, the 
second wave, waiting in the stadium takes over. This passing of the baton, 
wave to wave, continues for 36 hours and the tola spreads to various parts of 
Bapunagar. In this time every Muslim of any social standing in the area is 
calling every influential person they know but phone after phone is off the 
hook. When they do get through, they are told, 36 ghanton tak hamare haath 
bandhey hue hain. In areas of recurring communal violence, communities have 
their own networks of 'protection'. In this case that network had been 
systematically and successfully disabled. How did these waves finally stop? 
Perhaps the attackers got tired, or they thought their work was done. Perhaps 
they moved on to other areas, to join their colleagues elsewhere. According to 
Rahim, military ne aake hamein bacha liya, nahin to voh andar Aman Chowk tak 
bhi pahunch gaye hote, sab kuch khatam ho jaata. 

Another evening we were walking down the same road, past the same hillock with 
Mushtaq. Further down the road was a small, blackened shop without a door. A 
man came out of it. Namaste, mera naam Radheshyam. Mushtaq gave him a friendly 
pat on his back, his grim expression unchanged. Is bechare ki dukaan galti se 
jal gayi. Unhone socha yeh mussalman hai. We walked on ahead and visited other 
shops and houses. It was getting late and we needed to be back in time for our 
evening meeting at Xavier's. We cut through the park and another wooded patch 
and emerged on the left side of the stadium to be confronted by a small, mud 
hut with saffron coloured walls. This was a street corner Mandir, like many 
others on street corners all over India. On the wall of the Mandir was a 
hand-painted local hybrid version of Durga with a trishul. A middle-aged woman 
came out with a thaali and a diya, she had just finished performing arti. We 
kept walking. Mushtaq spoke. Champabhen, bade din ho gaye mile hue! He went up 
to her and she smiled. Arre Mushtaq! Kaise ho? Following him, we walked up to 
the temple as well. Arre, jao jao, andar jao. Abhi prasad chadha hai, Mushtaq 
told us. I walked in and almost automatically, I bent down, touched the base 
of the statue and folded my hands. Champabhen gave me some prasad, a fraction 
of a laddoo. Mushtaq and Maksood took some as well, with their right hand, 
left hand cupping it from below. Later as we waited for a bus Mushtaq told us, 
Yahaan ke Hindu logon se hamari koi ladayi nahin hai. Voh to Police aayi, 
bahaar ke log aaye, tabahi machaa ke chale gaye. During a previous period of 
violence in 1992, following the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Mushtaq had 
hidden Hindu families from Bapunagar in his house for over a week. Back at 
Xavier's we heard stories, very different ones. Neighbours, close friends, 
long-term area residents participating in the murders of people they had known 
for years, celebrating the destruction of houses they had visited, bloodying 
spaces they had inhabited together.     
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In liberal, secular or humanist narrations of violence it is customary to end 
on a note of hope. To find some story, however small, which stops us at least 
some length short of dystopia. There are things I can say about Aman Chowk, 
which would be suitable for such an ending. There is the owner of Mushtaq's 
factory, Jayantibhai Patel, whom he calls 'kaka', who sent him a machine, so 
that he might continue to make plastic folders from his own home. Champabehn, 
a taluka panchayat delegate and Lalsingh Thakur, a landowner, both from 
Haldervas, hid a large number of Muslim families in their fields and houses 
and called up Taufiqkhan, who went with trucks to fetch the families to Aman 
Chowk. I hope there are more such stories. I do want to be able to speak of 
hope - to write about the NGOs, the volunteers coming in from all over the 
country, the local people, both Muslim and Hindu, working tirelessly to 
restore some sense of stability - and say that things will improve. But hope, 
these days, is increasingly scarce. 

What continues to frighten me about Gujrat, is not so much the violence that 
has occurred but things as they presently stand. Newspapers regularly inform 
us that Chief Minister Narendra Modi has become "the most popular leader among 
the Hindu community in the state." Forget the actually existing 'truth' behind 
such a statement. Just for someone to be able to say such a thing without 
being called ridiculous, without being labeled a reprobate liar, is in itself 
a shocking commentary on the state of affairs in Gujrat. Having said that, let 
us also be clear about one thing - it is not that if it weren't for the BJP or 
the Sangh Parivar, 'ordinary' people in Gujrat would live in a static and 
blissful state of 'communal harmony'. A condition somewhat endemic to ordinary 
lives in South Asia is mutual suspicion over various kinds of difference - 
class, caste, religion, region, language etc. In Gujrat and other places all 
over India, there are areas and times when lives become particularly 
polarised. Despite this, the traces that party politics has left on everyday 
lives over the previous decade have been different, new and extremely 
frightening. We know quite well that the BJP and the Sangh Parivar entered 
mainstream politics by zoning in on what has possibly been our weakest and 
most fatal vector of difference - religious identity, the dependable 
divisiveness of which has facilitated centuries of domination of various 
kinds. In many parts of India, we have watched the BJP and the Sangh Parivar 
tap, harness and mobilize histories of hatred and successfully create fresher, 
more painful wounds. In Gujrat, this experiment has come to fruition. They 
have transformed an existing mythology of suspicion into systematic and 
efficient machinery of destruction. In the process of creating a set of 
enemies, they have helped large populations discover the evil they have 
imputed to these 'aliens', and unabashedly mimic the savagery they have 
imputed. 

What sort of understanding - what sort of speech, writing and construction of 
meaning by any mode - can deal with and subvert that? Whatever it is, we need 
to find it fast. 

What terrifies me even more is this - what next? What are the other places 
where similar processes are being put in place? Where else are ordinary people 
gradually moving towards a state of communalisation, the real extent of which 
we will only realize after the next apocalypse? Over the past few months I 
have listened to discussions of politics on the streets and in the drawing 
rooms of Delhi with increasing concern. The story goes that India and its 
Hindus have been passive for too long, be it against external or internal 
enemies. It would seem that the tide has turned. They are now baying for 
blood. This with a government creating, fuelling, renewing this hatred, slowly 
installing machinery whose existence we are as yet unaware of. A government 
that has shown that it is willing to pave the way for this aggression to turn 
into organised action. We are steadily heading for the kind of violence that 
will make the partition of 1947 look like a minor blemish in the history of 
South Asia. That followed by daily lives of constant terror, sudden suicide 
bombings and a culture of suspicion and surveillance. What shames me at this 
moment is my failure to find any way to write against this impending terror, 
my inability to speak of healing and hope. 
                                                   
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When the muezzin died, the city was robbed of every call. 
The houses were swept about like leaves
for burning. Now every night we bury 
our houses - and theirs; the ones left empty. 
We are faithful. On their doors we hang wreaths. 

O pardon me thou bleeding piece of earth - 

The sky is stunned, its become a ceiling of stone. 
I tell you it must weep. 

After such knowledge what forgiveness? What defence?  

(Lines from the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali)