[Reader-list] Redress Alienation in Gujarat Now (Farah Naqvi)

[Harsh Kapoor]

The Times of India
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2002
EDITORIAL
LEADER ARTICLE
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/articleshow?artid=25993353

Compromised Citizenship
Redress Alienation in Gujarat Now

FARAH NAQVI

Now that the debris in Gujarat has temporarily settled (or has it?), 
and cameras turned away from scenes of violence (at the moment 
they're trained on the triumphant glow of Indian democracy in 
Kashmir), let us finally count the dead. In terms of lives lost, we 
know estimates range from 2,000 to 3,000. But what about the living 
dead? The scores of Gujarati Muslims who exist in the twilight zone 
of silence, painfully adjusting themselves to life in no-man's land 
for they are no longer treated as equal citizens of India.
What rights of citizenship the burnt and looted Gujarati Muslim had 
have finally been stripped. When my house is razed, children killed 
and women raped, I naturally head to the police station. I seek 
justice through the legal system. I may have little faith in the 
system to deliver, but I do it still. Because that is my right. That 
is the law. The idea of legal recourse and entitlement of citizenship 
is powerful enough to override the reality of tedious legal 
processes, and low conviction rates.
In troubled times we invoke our citizenship rights; we get solace 
from it. But in Gujarat the natural entitlement of citizenship is 
over. In its place has arrived alienation, a word used often in 
decades past to describe the mood in Kashmir. Kashmiri Muslims were 
alienated from the Indian nation, we were told. We needed to bring 
them back.
So today, as we bask in the democratic revival in Kashmir, let us 
worry for Gujarat. For, in Gujarat, alienation has taken root. It's 
been coming for a while. Not just in Gujarat, but elsewhere too. The 
140 million Muslims of India, no less than 12 per cent of the 
population, have never had more than 5 per cent of representation in 
state assemblies or Parliament.
In the services (IAS, IPS and IFS) Muslims range from under 3 per 
cent to 3.5 per cent. In the private sector, the number of Muslims in 
executive posts ranges from zero to perhaps 5 per cent. More than 
half the urban Muslim population lives below the poverty line.
The facts are endless, the intent clear, the sum total spells 
alienation. And now, there's Gujarat. I've been back to Gujarat 
several times in these past seven months as part of a women's 
fact-finding team, as an activist, as a concerned citizen. In 
district after district, Muslims are living lives of humiliation.
It's called samjhauta, compromise; allowed back into their towns and 
villages on condition that they will not file police complaints, not 
name those who committed violence against them. Step out of line and 
you will be hounded out.
A father in Anand district looks at me, eyes pools of deadened pain, 
and describes the rape of his daughter. He saw them but there is no 
police case. No names. No justice. I have to live here, he says. But 
he no longer has any citizenship rights.
In another village in Dahod district, a group of women huddle 
together in the glow of a solitary kerosene lamp, looking 
suspiciously at the bindi on my forehead, and say nothing happened 
here. A fellow activist encourages them, "You can tell her, she's 
Muslim?". They look at me with new eyes, and slowly words start 
tumbling out. How they were raped, how they ran -- it is an 
avalanche, there are so many, I lose count. They know the rapists. 
But they are not filing any cases. Like many others in Gujarat, this 
too is a compromise village.
I am pained that they trust me not because I am human, but because I 
have a Muslim name. That too is alienation. In the few villages where 
Muslims have dared to seek legal redress, their economic survival 
stands threatened -- their businesses boycotted, their services 
shunned. Still they hang in there teetering between survival of the 
flesh and survival of the spirit. That's alienation.
Meanwhile the sangh parivar thunders on about minority appeasement. 
Appeasement. How did we allow it to become such a dirty word? I 
looked it up in my dictionary. Among other things, it also means 
propitiation to admit a fault and, by trying to make amends, to allay 
hostile feelings. Do it, for the sake of India. Make amends to the 
Muslims of Gujarat before their alienation turns into another 
bleeding Kashmir-like wound.
Take away the Haj subsidy if need be, but give them back their 
citizenship. But then that's the last thing that elements of the 
sangh parivar want. They want open wounds. So Narendra Modi is 
allowed to ride atop a gaurav rath. Hurl invectives at miyan 
Musharraf, keep alive the Pakistani threat. It should surprise no one 
that people like Bal Thackeray are against troop withdrawal from the 
border. The enemy must be kept alive inside and outside.
For the Gujarati Muslim, it will mean a life of terror and the tag of 
a terrorist. Small mercy that when push comes to shove, he will not 
be allowed to really die. Because there is truly nothing more useless 
than a dead enemy. So what if it also means killing the idea of India.
(The author is a freelance writer and activist)