[Reader-list] Re:Harsh Kapoor /Redress Alienation in Gujarat Now (Farah Naqvi)

[Dr. Reyhan Chaudhuri]

                                   IMPLOSION
Gujarat burnt
but  were refugees really retrieved ?
Can State Presiders & prime poets be believed
As salvage offers and camp closures
are indefinitely spurned.

 Rather than raise a stink
One can only think ,
of one's own skin and ofcourse the kin.
Not to forget above all the darling children.
Forget the future , world, peace and harmony.
Fobbing the mob could be the best alimony.

A well wisher seriously suggested:
Don't wear the name tag on way to work,
keep it in the bag to say the least.
The driver maybe chauffeur tested
and your route may well be upper crusted
But this is India my dear friend
you never know who turns beast instead

The mob have no faces you know
they leave no trace as they go
The number which the individual replaces
The sane timbre unrest displaces.
Is swift and unrelenting
Even at the judicial hustings.

All this may sound repetitive
So very spitty & sordid
As anyway the bullish,
you see lord it
And fiends fiercely fjord it

Prayers are namby pamby
Literacy is exclusive and comely
The arts are easily distorted
Talk and therapy could be contorted
Even Music can be candied

So that leaves us just
With heightened feelings
Deadened , distanced dealings?
When some serious spirited action
and judicial phenomenal traction
Could make unmistakable reparation;


Must we mask and shade
 the shame?
Dismiss the ravage & rape;
 Encumber grievances,
enflame the blame.
Must we always incinerate
To mute the implosion?

Yours worriedly,
R.Chaudhuri


----- Original Message -----
From: "Harsh Kapoor" <aiindex at mnet.fr>
To: <reader-list at sarai.net>
Sent: Wednesday, October 23, 2002 5:29 AM
Subject: [Reader-list] Redress Alienation in Gujarat Now (Farah Naqvi)


> 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)
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