[Reader-list] inside gujarat's 'heart of darkness

[Mukul Mangalik]

this is the unedited original of my 2-part article
published in the hindustan times recently

Inside Gujarat's 'heart of darkness'--mukul mangalik
 
> More and more people, young and old, of different
> skin
> colours and cuts of face, believers and
> non-believers,
> speaking as many different languages as this country
> has to offer, need to get on to trains heading for
> Gujarat. We should go alone or in groups, whenever
> we
> can, for as little or great a while as possible,
> again
> and again, over at least the next one year.
> 
> 
> No matter how much we may already know about the
> systematic savaging of the lives of our Muslim
> co-citizens, it is when you step into the theatres
> of
> destruction, the arenas for the obscene celebration
> of
> barbarism, into the worlds of victims and
> survivors, most with nothing but their lives left to
> protect, the sun screaming murder, no water to
> drink,
> flies and the stench of urine and shit all around,
> it
> is then that the hugeness of the tragedy that
> Narendra
> Modi, the BJP, the RSS, the VHP and the Bajrang Dal
> have wrought in Gujarat, blows a hole in the solar
> plexus and hell into your being.
> 
> 
> Rage, at every bit of this horror having been
> scripted
> and conducted by the states in Gujarat and at the
> centre in deliberate, open violation of equal civil
> and democratic rights guaranteed every citizen by
> our
> Constitution, engulfs you. It becomes very clear
> that
> this time round the successful, unrepented onslaught
> on Muslims is also the definitive beginning of the
> guillotining of the ideas of citizenship and
> democratic freedoms that are the life-breath of
> modern
> India.
> 
> 
> Relentless journeys into Gujarat by lots of us,
> confidently carrying on ourselves all our glorious
> differences, a refusal to talk, behave and 'be' in
> Gujarat as the hegemons there may want us to be, is
> one urgent small way of our saying 'no', to Gujarat
> or
> any other part of this land doing whatever and going
> any which way they like. Destruction of Muslim lives
> and work has been so severe in Gujarat, the
> abandonment of Muslims by the state and civil
> society
> so near complete that there is no end to the amount
> of
> work that needs to be done among the
> victims. Volunteers need to get to Gujarat, make
> their
> own assessments and buckle down to the tasks at
> hand,
> or simply plug into the work already being done by a
> handful of overstretched NGO's, individuals, Muslim
> leaders and philanthropists.
> 
> 
> ===================
> 
> 
> Udit, Ditee, Nakul and Arindam, students from Delhi
> University, threw in their lot with Anandi and
> worked
> in the relief camps at Halol and Godhra. They played
> with kids, helped them paint, took classes with
> them,
> conducted need-assessment surveys for adults and
> children and helped organise marriages between men
> and
> women from different camps, marriages which could
> wait
> no more for the return of an ever elusive
> 'normalcy'.
> They travelled to the neighbouring village, Boru and
> listened to stories from the people of Delol, where
> 37
> Muslims were massacred.
> 
> 
> The camps at Halol and Godhra were sheltering
> hundreds
> of people from villages such as these in the
> Panchmahals, where death had ruled, homes, crops and
> livestock had been plundered and devastated, and the
> air was thick with threats of more murder and mayhem
> should Muslim survivors attempt a return. In some
> cases they were being invited back provided they
> forget and forgive and surrender their iman, their
> Muslimness. Arindam too, escaped the potential wrath
> of young Bajrang Dal goons lurking in the alleys of
> Godhra one night, whereupon Udit, a god-fearing,
> spirit-scared, janeyu -wearing Brahmin lad from
> Assam,
> sick of it all, freed his torso of the sacred thread
> and chucked it in the garbage. It was his way of
> "registering a resounding silent protest". It was
> great seeing the four of them at work, and the
> affection and regard that they had come to command
> among camp inmates without themselves resorting to
> convenient populism. Arindam spoke of how he gently
> and successfully challenged ideas of vengeful,
> retaliatory communalism which he encountered among
> some young male Muslim survivors of this pogrom.
> 
> 
> Talking, discussing issues threadbare, is difficult
> and dangerous work that is being undertaken by
> concerned citizens and activists all over Gujarat.
> Anandi in the Panchmahals and Action-Aid's
> aman-pathiks in Ahmedabad are trying, among other
> things, to encourage Hindus and Muslims to re-invent
> their neighbourhoods by dialoging with each other
> and
> crossing communal 'borders' that have come to divide
> Ahmedabad, for instance, since the late '60s. Drops
> in the ocean, stray strands of hope, these efforts
> need
> huge shots of imaginative and energetic help, if
> Ahmedabad, Gujarat and, I daresay, large parts of
> the
> rest of this country are not to go the way of
> Northern
> Ireland, Beirut and Palestine.
> 
> 
> ====================
> 
> 
> Seven of us, six students and I, stayed in Ahmedabad
> between May 5 and 12 while the other four were in
> the
> Panchmahals. After four days of calm, the dhamaal
> kept
> its date with the city, breaking out on Sunday the
> 5th
> like it had on every other Sunday during the past
> few
> weeks since the toofaan got going, at exactly 2pm,
> "after people had had a good night's rest, an easy
> morning, a good lunch and then set out for
> 'time-pass', looting, burning and killing." A
> 3-wheeler
> driver, a Hindu, stated the last bit rather
> matter-of-factly about some of his co-religionists.
> 
> 
> 3-wheeler drivers in Ahmedabad are rather stingy
> when
> it comes to indicating which way they wish to go --
> a
> mere twitch of the relevant toe suffices -- but
> their
> tongues wag generously. stumped by the argument that
> Krishna may have tutored Arjun to war with members
> of
> his own family, but only with warriors, not with
> non-combatants, another driver who had been singing
> praises of Modi, the BJP and all that they had been
> doing, suddenly did a somersault and said, "Yeh
> Gujarati log gaandi chhe."
> 
> 
> During the week that we were in Ahmedabad, people,
> mainly Muslim labourers, venturing out fearfully to
> try and earn a day's wages, were being burnt alive,
> hacked to death, their skulls smashed to bloody
> pulp.
> Muslim bastis on the periphery of the old city were
> torched and firemen had struck work for a couple of
> days because some of them had been beaten up in
> Khaadia, a den of the Hindu right-wing in the heart
> of
> the old city. The RAF was present everywhere except
> where it was most needed. No one with any sense of
> old
> and industrial Ahmedabad, both lying east of the
> Sabarmati, could be sure about what might happen
> where
> and when.
> 
> 
> "Jaan rahi to kal milenge," is how Rais Khan would
> say
> good-bye each time we parted. Raisbhai was a godsend
> for us, our guide and companion through the charged
> and unpredictable world of Ahmedabad. He showed us
> huge and ugly gouged-out, blackened and broken-up
> swathes within the city which had been 'finished'
> simply because they belonged to, or had something to
> do
> with, Muslims. We saw ruins at the Ambika Mills
> basti,
> Mariam ki chaali and Sundaramnagar that spoke of
> irreparable wounds inflicted by cylinders exploding
> on
> a deadly double charge of LPG mixed with massive
> doses
> of virulent anti-Muslim venom that in this country
> only the RSS can spew, and so effectively spread.
> 
> Inside a shell that must have been a house in the
> Gulbarg Society, we backed away in shocked silence
> from
> the remains of a schoolgirl's notebook that
> fluttered
> open to a page on which she'd written of the pride
> she
> felt being Indian. The light breeze stirred up
> ashes. I
> shuddered remembering a Muslim friend in Delhi
> telling
> his wife, "Ab kafan ki kya zaroorat, Musalmanon ko
> bhi
> jalaa rahein hain." Death hung heavy in the air.
> 
> 
> Nobody who has ever stepped by and paused to look at
> these and so many other cadavers of Muslim life and
> work in Ahmedabad, is likely to disbelieve stories
> about Kausar bano and Naroda Patiya, Ehsan Jafri and
> the Gulbarg Society, the enormous trishul and
> sword-wielding, lust-filled tolas of Bajrang Dal and
> VHP men ruling the streets of Ahmedabad, out to
> rape,
> maim and teach Muslims the lesson of their lives,
> put
> them in their place as unequal beings in Gujarat's
> 'Hindu Rashtra'. To be in Gujarat now is to be face
> to
> face with the nightmarish will of the RSS-BJP
> unsheathed, to see with blinding clarity the
> enactment
> of their terrifying visions and dreams for state and
> society; to resolve to do all that is possible to
> fracture these visions, and instead imagine worlds
> in
> which everyone may enjoy life to the full.
> 
> 
> The week we were in Gujarat, Muslim refugees were
> dealt the umpteenth body blow in less than three
> months. Robbed of almost everything but their lives,
> forced to take shelter even in graveyards, unsafe in
> huddles bursting at the seams called relief camps,
> salt was rubbed deliberately into wounds as
> compensation cheques, some as low as 300 rupees
> started coming in. The little camp in the shadow of
> the Jhulta Minar, the long and narrow overcrowded
> general railway compartment-like Pathri Masjid camp,
> the living among the dead Chartoda Kabristan camp,
> open to the elements and to attacks by fascist
> thugs,
> most depressing of them all, the Sundaramnagar camp
> --
> everywhere we went people would latch on to us and
> talk, flood us with stories, each one dying to be
> heard even when they knew that we'd come just to be
> with them, to meet them, to share with them a few
> moments of their devastated lives.
> 
> 
> I was really glad Divya and Emma were there because
> the women mobbed them and spoke. In the midst of it
> all Emma would steal a grimace at some children, and
> invariably, before they knew it, children were
> coming
> out of the woodwork as it were, had displaced the
> women, and were at play with Emma and Divya,
> squealing
> and laughing with abandon. Alberuni who has a way of
> attracting kids to himself, remained in supporting
> role while Banajit, thin and tall, would look on,
> rubbing
> his chin, flashing the odd smile, the loss of his
> spectacles hardly seeming to matter. During
> playtime,
> the simple impromptu games that were played were
> watched and enjoyed by almost all camp inmates.
> Divya
> and Emma would suddenly become like performers of
> old,
> the madaari or the jaadugar enchanting children not
> with the khel they performed for them, but with the
> khel they played with them. For that precious slice
> of
> time when everyone played, I think everyone forgot
> where we were, forgot all that can never really be
> forgotten, all that must never be forgotten. It was
> a
> moment of lightness, of refreshing collective
> amnesia,
> 'Jaise beemar ko bevajah karar aa jaaye.' I feel we
> need to go, all of us, 'Jinhe naaz thhaa Hind pe,'
> wherever they may be, if not to help out with all
> that
> the state has reneged on, then for a little while,
> to
> lend people a ear, and give children our time, to
> simply listen and play, hold a hand or give a hug.
> The
> vast majority of non-Muslim, largely Hindu Gujaratis
> couldn't give a damn, at least right now, for the
> fate
> of Gujarati Muslims.
> 
> =================================
> 
> 
> In Ahmedabad, west of the Sabarmati, modern and
> largely Hindu, with only a pocketful of prosperous
> Muslim households and businesses, most of which had
> been successfully targeted and burnt to skeletons,
> life carried on with gusto. The young on 2-wheelers
> were loud, fast and cocky. Law Gardens was the cool
> evening hang-out after the torrid heat of the day.
> Rose-faluda and kesar lassi with ice-cream were
> always
> irresistible, the sidewalks very charming, late into
> the night. All very well, but for our growing
> realisation that most west-side Ahmedabadis, tacitly
> or openly, approved of the beating that Muslims were
> getting. Large-scale nonchalance or even a feigned
> ignorance may have been acceptable, but this open
> glee
> over bestial Muslim bashing was sickening and
> terrifying.
> 
> 
> With each passing day we felt increasingly unsafe
> and
> oppressed living and walking in 'safe Hindu'
> Ahmedabad, simply because we were not 'Hindu' enough
> for the Navrangpura-Naranpura Ahmedabadis. We were
> visiting relief camps for Muslims and meeting with
> non-camp Muslims, labouring people, Hindus too [not
> that this would redeem us in the eyes of the
> west-side
> Ahmedabadis], many of them migrants from eastern UP
> and Rajasthan, whose work and lives had spun down
> black holes. We were meeting with families such as
> the
> Jawhers, who were living in Paldi, professional and
> secular to the core, dazed, shocked and sad at
> feeling
> forced to take refuge among people as different to
> them as heaven from hell, but people who happened to
> be of their religious kind.
> 
> 
> Rizwan's face flashes by as I write. "Mukul bhai,"
> he'd said in Delhi, handing me a copy of his
> 'Alienated in one's homeland', as does Saleem's when
> he had wondered aloud, for the first time ever, in
> early March, whether he needed to think seriously
> about where he should live in Lucknow! I'd stood
> there
> as if struck by lightning, 'Lucknow' echoing in my
> head with the force of a thunderclap, but let me get
> back to Ahmedabad. We were going in for hearings of
> the concerned citizen's tribunal and were sometimes
> in
> the company of people like Father Cedric Prakash and
> 'maulana' Girishbhai Patel. All this, it became
> rapidly clear to us could invite retribution, as
> could
> the language that some of us spoke, liberally laced
> with janab, aadaab, khuda-hafiz, shukriya, farmaaen
> and all that poetry which consciously Sanskritised
> Hindi, simply kills. Throw in the men's long hair,
> Divya's laughter and our couldn't-care-less
> dressing,
> and by the fifth day we just didn't feel free to be
> the way we were. Fifteen minutes before we boarded
> the
> Ashram Express for Delhi on May 12, I remember
> bursting the dam, showering unstoppable, intense
> verbiage on Danny, letting off steam, and feeling
> much
> better. The insecurity must have persisted like a
> bad
> hang-over because I was actually relieved to see men
> of the Rajasthan Police board our compartment once
> we'd crossed the border out of Gujarat. I felt we
> were
> in 'safe' hands, perhaps one of the few times I've
> felt safe with the police.
> 
> 
> In January 2000, a few months after the Kargil war
> and
> immediately after the Kandahar hijack, when
> relations
> between India and Pakistan were at their worst in
> many
> years, I travelled with students into Pakistan.
> Despite the paranoia before the trip, all of us felt
> at ease there. This is certainly not something that
> any
> of us can say about our trip to Gujarat.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> =====================================
> 
> 
> The Godhra burning, communal, repulsive and
> criminally
> punishable was not the reason why the rest of
> Gujarat
> went up in flames; nor was it the reason why
> Muslims,
> especially women and children have been hunted down,
> humiliated, forced to look on as family and friends
> were gang-raped, cut up into pieces, blown apart
> like
> bombs, the survivors castaway to fend for
> themselves,
> being dared to re-build their lives, their work.
> Godhra was simply an occasion, the excuse for what
> has
> been happening in Gujarat for four months now, just
> as
> Sept. 11 was not the reason but the occasion for the
> launching of the 'international war against terror',
> the projected threats from Pakistan and China were
> not
> the reasons why we had Pokhran-II, Dec. 13 and May
> 14,
> are not the reasons, but excuses for beating the
> drums
> of war against Pakistan. Godhra was an excuse for a
> butchery binge against Muslims just as faltering
> secular practices and the only partially attained
> goals for education and democracy, have become
> excuses
> in recent years for launching into a slaughter of
> secularism, democracy and education themselves.
> 
> 
> The only way we can begin to make sense of Gujarat,
> as
> of the rest of the filth that we in this
> subcontinent
> are being thrown into, including possibly the
> nuclear
> abyss, is to look hard, long and clearly at the RSS
> family. All other explanatory variables -- the
> longterm worldwide economic slowdown, the collapse
> of
> Ahmedabad's 64 textile mills, disrupting 1,60,000
> working lives, the expansion in Gujarat as also on a
> world-scale of informal labouring practices,
> 'footloose labour', as Jan Bremen calls it, with all
> its attendant everyday insecurities, the class,
> caste
> and patriarchal anxieties of the privileged (the
> Brahmins, Patidars and Banias, for instance)
> perceived
> to be stemming from KHAM alliance politics and the
> spread of reservation, their desire to stay on top
> and
> be seen and heard within India and internationally,
> the historical absence in modern Gujarat of strong
> anti-caste or autonomous lower caste movements,
> emancipatory women's movements, as also a
> significantly powerful and autonomous labour
> movement
> -- all these arguments are absolutely necessary, but
> not sufficient for understanding what we are
> confronted with in Gujarat today. It is not even
> enough to argue that Gujarat happened the way it
> did,
> because the state collapsed or allowed it to happen.
> 
> 
> The dangerous singularity of Gujarat 2002 lies in
> the
> shameless self-righteous abandon with which the
> anti-Muslim pogrom has been unleashed and justified
> by
> the state, right to this date. This, to a large
> extent, explains the scale and the extreme
> viciousness
> of the continuing violence as also the cold terror
> that is gripping Muslims in Gujarat and in other
> parts
> of the country. The state, not just through the
> practise of its partisanship, but through a
> rationalisation of this practise, is saying, more
> loudly and clearly than ever before since 1947,that
> everyone is not equal before the law. It is saying
> openly and blatantly, that it is for the state, not
> for our republican constitution to decide who shall
> live and how in this country, if necessary by
> hounding
> and savaging the people of this land. Today it is
> the
> Muslims and other religious minorities who are at
> the
> receiving end of the state's arbitrary brutality,
> tomorrow it can be anyone who is seen to be a thorn
> in
> the flesh of the wilful exercise of power by the
> Indian state. The danger lurks not just for Muslims,
> shameful and impoverishing as this itself is for all
> of us. The terror that Muslims are living today,
> their
> deep everyday fears, can become the terror that all
> of
> us may face tomorrow, a threat to our collective
> democratic existence as citizens of this land.
> 
> 
> This dangerous singularity of Gujarat, with all its
> grave implications, may not have come to pass had
> the
> RSS not been in command politically and
> ideologically.
> No other organised force in this country hates
> Muslims
> as deeply and pathologically as the RSS. No other
> force could have demonised Muslims, projected them
> as
> being less than human and deserving of unimagined
> cruelties, the 'enemy' that must be exorcised from
> 'our' midst if 'we' are to live in peace and
> harmony,
> as effectively as the RSS. No other force could have
> so shamelessly raided our past, abused and twisted
> it
> beyond recognition, played, untiringly over many
> years, on popular prejudices about 'minorityism',
> and
> shaken up all this and more into a potent,
> anti-Muslim
> potion. No other force could have revelled in
> offering
> up this poison as a simple 'solution' for all kinds
> of
> problems facing all manner of people in these times
> of
> multiple crises. Only the RSS with its single-minded
> hellish hatred of Muslims could plunge itself into
> the
> lives of Adivasis and Dalits, OBC's and Brahmins,
> Patidars and Banias, scratch their multi-sourced and
> differentially complex insecurities and get them to
> come together as the 'Hindutva' god's army straining
> to go to war, fangs bared, eyes dripping blood, and
> mouth poison against the 'enemy Muslim outsider',
> imagining this to be the final battle for the
> deliverance of the Hindu religion and nation. Only
> the
> RSS with its relentless vilification of the Muslim
> as
> enemy, could have forged this alliance between the
> dispossessed and the propertied, hurling them in a
> violent offensive against the imagined 'other',
> looting, plundering, and in the process subverting
> challenges to existing social hierarchies, steering
> minds and energies away from battles concerned with
> making our earth a better place to live on for all.
> 
> 
> The poor, the wretched of the earth, are armed
> against
> each other, as the first move in arming the state to
> disarm all citizens of this country of our political
> rights. Gujarat 2002 comes straight out of the RSS'
> 'heart of darkness', as clear a warning as we may
> want
> about what it means to 'Hinduise India and
> militarise
> Hinduism', the foundational, and still the core
> desire
> of the RSS, its supreme dream. Take the RSS family
> away and the Gujarat carnage 2002, the Ayodhya
> movement, Pokhran-II, and the rapid downward slide
> in
> relations with Pakistan, a second war, possibly
> nuclear, within 3 years staring us in the face, may
> have all remained faraway fascist dreams, not our
> immediate nightmares.
> 
> MUKUL MANGALIK
> 
> 33 Anand Lok, New Delhi - 49
> 
> safar1957 at yahoo.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

> ATTACHMENT part 2 application/msword
name=Gujarat.doc


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