Jaswant, Jinnah and Ghost of India’s Partition
Ram Puniyani
Jaswant Singh’s latest book on Jinnah (August 2009) has rekindled the debate ‘who did it’ of partition. The storm created by this work can be gauzed from the fact that BJP, the party of which Jaswant Singh has been the founder member and for which he has been working from last three decades, was expelled him from the party. The basic point Singh is making is that Jinnah was a secular person, he has been wrongfully demonized in India, that Nehru and Patel rather than Jinnah were responsible for partition of India because of which there was gory violence and that Muslims are being treated as aliens in India.
To take the last point first. One concedes that Muslims have and are being treated as aliens in India. One of the major political parties which has targeted Muslims and, whose aggressive anti Muslim campaigns have resulted in their present plight, their exclusion from social and economic space is BJP, itself. The question is what has Mr. Jaswant Singh been doing when BJP has been asserting the concept of Hindu nation, has been part of processes which have relegated Muslims to the status of second class citizens? One is not arguing that the maltreatment of Muslims is only due to BJP. The major factor has been the subtle penetration of RSS ideology in the social and political arena of Indian life. While Jaswant Singh does not come from the RSS shakhas, he has been part of the party, which is the political vehicle of RSS. In this case his cry of ‘alienation of Muslims’ looks like shedding crocodile tears!
As far as Jinnah being secular is concerned, it is ironical that a party, which Jinnah headed with ‘brilliance’, had the name Muslim League! If that does not clarify the communal evaluation of a person what else will. Jinnah despite his exposure to the Western culture, despite his being part of the Indian National Congress for initial part of his life, did become the ‘sole spokesman’ of interests of Muslims, i.e. Muslim elite, in due course of time. One agrees that the individual attributes of the Qaed-e-Azam of Pakistan were remarkable, but that does not make him secular. Secularism essentially stands for relegating religious identity to private realm to one’s life, while Jinnah chose to lead Muslim League, where the religious identity was the base of the national identity.
There were people like Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan, Rafi Ahmad Kidwai and others who chose to be part of National movement for composite Indian nation. Majority of poor Muslims continued to support and follow Mahatma Gandhi and national movement. There were even Muslim religious leaders, and seminaries like those of Barelvi and Deoband, which stood for composite Indian Nationalism. On the other hand Muslim League, initially a product of the politics of Muslim Landlords and Nawabs and later joined in by section of educated and affluent Muslims, kept talking of interests of ‘Muslims’ and kept labeling Congress as Hindu party, despite its secular policy of Indian Nationalism.
The language of Interests of Muslims, leading to the notion of ‘Muslims are a separate nation’ was quiet akin and parallel to the concept of Hindu nation propagated by Savarkar-RSS, of India being a Hindu Rashtra, Hindu Nation. Do all Muslims have similar interests as asserted by Jinnah? What was the similarity between the interests of Ashraf and Arjal Muslims? What was the similarity of interests between the interests of rich landlord, businessmen Muslims and the poor artisan Muslims? Savarkar and RSS talked of the interests of Hindus, which layers of Hindus were these? Essentially the same layers which as Muslims were the beneficiaries of Muslim Leagues’ articulation, i.e. landlords, clergy and a section of middle classes.
Jinnah’s enticing 12th August 1947 ‘secular speech’ notwithstanding, the whole Muslim League predominantly consisted of those communal elements, who did want to convert Pakistan into a Muslims Nation, which they did in due course. And it was the same Muslim League under Jinnah’s leadership, which called for a separate state for Muslims, Pakistan, in 1940 Lahore resolution. Just because Jinnah was a non-practicing Muslim and a Westernized person does not make him secular. One’s association in politics should determine one’s characterization.
As far as role in the partition of the country is concerned, most of the debate is generally focused at superficial level, Muslim League, Congress, Nehru-Patel. Most of the debate is in the language of Heroes and villains, the deeper processes which gave rise to the political streams, which believed in religion based nation state, the role of British in creating such a situation is missing in the debate. While in Pakistan a large section will blame the intransigence of ‘Hindu Congress’ for partition, in India, Muslim League, Jinnah are blamed for the same. The source of ‘Hate politics’ in India, the RSS ideology, holds Gandhi also as a major culprit. According to the RSS-Hindu Mahasabha thinking expressed in so many ways, most clearly in the speech and action of Nathuram Godse, Gandhi is to blame for partition as he followed the policy of Muslim appeasement leading to their becoming assertive and going on to demand Pakistan. In most of the communal discourse, a large part of which has become part of social common sense in both the countries, the role of British in leading to the divisive path, and class character of communal organizations, which believed in the Religion based nation state, is missing altogether.
After the coming into being of Indian National Congress in 1885, from amongst the rising classes of Industrialist-Businessmen, educated sections and workers, the old declining classes of Landlords and Kings came together (1888) to form United India Patriotic Association. It is in this organization in which the future founders of Muslim League and Hindu Mahasabha were working shoulder to shoulder, e.g. Raja of Kashi and Nawab of Dhaka. British played their cards very well and in pursuance with the imperial policy of divide et empera (divide and rule) recognized Muslim League as the representative of Muslims in 1906. That time it was predominantly formed by Muslim elite, who themselves were contemptuous of low caste Muslims; Arzals and Azlafs. Similarly Hindu Mahasabha, which was founded in 1915 had Hindu elite who were for Hindu Nation and average Hindus and low castes had no place in their scheme of things.
There is a lot of deeper parallelism in the agenda and language of both these communal streams. These were not only predominantly male dominated organizations, they also talked exclusively of identity issues. At that time the process of social transformation of caste and gender was going on but these streams totally kept aloof from those social processes. These communal streams emphasized on Muslim (elite) Hindu (elite) interests. That’s why they kept aloof from the national movement which aimed to bring in people of all religions, regions, castes and gender into a single stream of Indian ness. Jinnah’s focus on Constitutional methods and deep opposition to participation of masses in national movement was quite similar to Hindu Mahasbah and RSS policy of keeping aloof from freedom movement. It is from the Hindu stream, Savarakar, that the concept of Hindu nation and its politics, Hindutva, emerged. This Hindutva was later picked up by RSS. There was not much difference in many a formulation, which came from these two stables. As a matter of fact Savarkar goes on to quote approvingly, Jinnah’s statement that there are two Nations in India, Hindus and Muslims. And then says that since this is predominantly a Hindu nation, Muslim nation has to remain subordinate to the same. The deeper agenda of communal streams was same, the only difference was Muslim League called for parity and Hindu Mahasabha-RSS wanted subordination of Muslim nation.
While Hindu Communalism got fragmented between Hindu Mahasabha, RSS and some part of it entered Congress, Muslim communalism came up as a major force and later on a section of the Muslim educated classes came to support the same.
It is in this background that the logistics of partition has to be seen. For Muslim League and Hindu Mahasabha-RSS it was a control over nation. National movement and Congress targeted for getting freedom, to come out of the shackles of feudal system and to lay the foundation of Industrial society on democratic basis. It is because of this that Nehru refused to accommodate Muslim League demand of take them in UP ministry in 1937, despite the defeat of Muslim League. Nehru’s argument was that since Congress wants to go for land reforms etc., how they can have a landlord representative sitting in the cabinet. Also Nehru refused to believe that Muslim League is a representative of all Muslims, the same way he opposed the formulation that Hindu Mahasabha-RSS are representatives of Hindus. Cabinet Mission plan, to which Congress and Muslim League both had assented, suggested a federal structure with all powers to provinces and have only defense, communication, currency and external affairs with the Central Government. During the course Nehru and Patel both realized that such a weak center will not be able to undertake the programs for country, programs for centralized planning for industrialization and related progress.
Superficially Nehru and Patel can be held responsible for what happened, but that’s like looking at the tip of iceberg. The deeper seed of divisiveness, the protection to interests of landlord elements was the British policy. It is in pursuance with that the Muslim League and Hindu Mahsabha was never the subject of British wrath, while the leaders of national movement had to make the British jails as their second home.
For Advani and Jaswant Singh the deeper fascination for Jinnah has some logic. Jinnah pursued two nation theory and succeeded in forming a Muslim nation. They have the wish to have a Hindu nation, so a subtle admiration as to how Jinnah could achieve his goal and so is a great hero for those pursuing religion based politics. At ideological level they are on the same wave-length, religion based nation state, as was Jinnah. They also visualize that by exonerating Jinnah from the blame of partition they are cornering Nehru and Congress, which at one level serves the BJP agenda. And here lies the problem. Since Nehru and Patel are inalienable as for as the trajectory of practical politics is concerned, Patel also comes in to the gambit of blame game which cannot be tolerated by large section of BJP followers. Another reason is that in RSS shakhas’ indoctrination module, the blame of partition is put on Jinnah’s head and the on the follies of Gandhi and Nehru. So how can Jinnah be resurrected without annoying the RSS module of indoctrination? Here lies the dilemma of RSS controlled Rajnath Singhs, and so the expulsion of Jaswant Singh for writing all this. Advani could save his skin earlier despite his ‘secular Jinnah speech’ because of electoral exigencies, as with sickness of Vajpayee, it was difficult to fill the gap by anybody else.
History has strange lessons to teach. Today lot of powerful opinions are being voiced, but most of them are based on one or the other superficial observation e.g. Jinnah’s earlier period when he was part of Congress or his 12th August 1947 speech in the Parliament. Similar type of historiography is also used for the communal historiography where kings are glorified or demonized according their religion. The deeper issues related to the workers, peasants and other average people are missing in this discourse. Same is the problem with the presentation of recent history, where the roots of communal streams (Muslim League, Hindu Mahsabha, and RSS) from the feudal lords and feudal values (Birth based hierarchy of caste and gender) is undermined and deliberately overlooked. This attitude also revels in creating heroes and villains; one streams’ hero being another streams villain. No wonder Bollywood is so successful in using this formula. And as major section of Bollywood is not bothered about the deeper issues of broad layers of society so are many of the worthy commentators for whom this wavelength is something easily understood and deliberated upon!
|
August 31, 2009
August 23, 2009
Emperor's Islamophobia
Emperor’s Islamophobia
Shah Rukh Khan Detained at US airport
Ram Puniyani
Shah Rukh Khan, one of the best known actors from Bollywood was detained for questioning in Newark airport in US (15th August). The actor who is a global icon of sorts was grilled by the US official as his name is a Muslim one, and the legendary actor felt humiliated with the treatment meted out to him. While the star actor was being questioned in this manner the Jet Airways staff vouched for him and many of his international fans were seeking his autographs, but the US official, drunk on the Imperial arrogance and infected by anti Muslim sentiments refused to recognize Khan. That any Google search on his name would have yielded infinite entries to establish his identity, is an elementary knowledge by now.
Just a few weeks ago, India’s ex-President, the scientist of repute, APJ Abdul Kalam was treated like a commoner by the US based Airlines staff. Irfan Khan was also meted with similar treatment. Other actors, with non Muslim names, have also been given such humiliating treatment by US officials but the logic in these cases is different, Neil Nitin Mukesh for having a skin color fairer then his Hindu name and John Abram for having Afghanistan on his passport. In addition the senior ministers from India George Fernandez and Pranab Mukherjee have also been strip searched in the past.
Most of the channels and many eminent columnists criticized Shahrukh Khan and those voicing their protest on the grounds that it is these security checks which have saved US from another terrorist attack post 9/11 2001. The desirability or other wise of these checks apart, there are two basic questions. One is that can those having diplomatic passports and those listed in India’s list of people exempt from such checks be subjected to these ordeals? Secondly why secondary checks are more for those with Muslim names? These commentators realization of the tasks of US security officials notwithstanding the questions remain the double standards of the security check system.
While the major phenomenon visible here is that of US officials have imbibed the anti Islam and anti Muslim propaganda, post 9/11 2001, the additional factor is the inherent arrogance and superiority complex of this Imperial power since US emerged as the sole super power, after the decline of Soviet block in international political arena. The treatment which US officials are giving to Indian dignitaries and celebrities is in stark contrast to the treatment which Indian administration and people are giving to the US dignitaries. The visit of Hillary Clinton just a month ago demonstrates the reality. The US Secretary of State was not only given a red carpet welcome, Indian media also went gaga about her, starting from describing her smart dresses to the details of her smile at different occasions.
The twin phenomenon of US arrogance as a superpower dictating terms to the whole World and its targeting of Islam and Muslims for political goals have got mixed up here. The global democracy which was trying to come up during the middle of twentieth century has really got a set back during last three decades, and despite the humane instincts of Barack Hussein Obama, American system remains as high handed as before. One appreciates the steps of new American President in closing down Guantonamo bay and the subsequent stoppage of the intense torture and insult of accused of 9/11, especially Muslim youth. Despite that it seems the ground level reality of US has not changed much and Islamophobia is still ruling the policies, mindset and attitude of the US system as a whole.
It is after 9/11 2001, the collapse of WTC, and the accompanying statements of Osama bin Laden, which gave the pretext of launching a propaganda against Islam and Muslims. It was at that time that the word Islamic Terrorism was coined and the distorted version of core words, Jihad and Kafir were strongly popularized in the popular thinking. In a way it manufactured a hatred for Muslims and Islam. While Jihad stands for fighting against injustice, it was presented as killing of non Muslims. While Kafir is a concept totally invalid in current times, it was put across as denigrating non Muslims. The net result was that in the global thinking it came to be regarded that all Muslims are not terrorists, while all terrorists are Muslims. The US officials in general and immigration officials in particular stiffened their attitude towards Muslim immigrants to US. Globally also, particularly in our country the trend began where after every blast here and there scores of Muslim youth were apprehended and tortured, and at most of the times their careers were ruined.
The Pakistani film ‘Khuda Ke Liye’ depicted the life of an average Muslims whom US officials suspect to be a terrorist and the outcome of this can be well predicted. Indian film ‘New York’ also puts forward the cruelty of the attitude of US officials. In Indian context films like ‘Black and White’ and ‘Mumbai Meri Jaan’ depicted this sad reality of our society. Many a good articles and literature has also been produced by scholars, which gives us the real story, but despite all this the propaganda by section of US media and the vested organizations in India against Islam and Muslims continues.
The phenomenon of terrorism is very complex. One core point is to understand the genesis of Al Qaeda type organizations, which were the product of indoctrination in the Madrassas, set up in Pakistan. The syllabus and financial support of these came through CIA; the aim was to instigate indoctrinated Muslim youth to fight against the Russian armies who had occupied Afghanistan. Lately this truth is being said by Pakistani leader’s time and over again. In India the rising communal violence and acts of terrorism because of diverse factors, have been used to present the minorities in a negative light.
We in India can feel hurt, insulted and angry to what is being meted out to Indian celebrities and leaders. It is in a way the attitude of US to humiliate ‘others’, to assert its superiority and hegemony. The commentators criticizing the protest against treatment being meted out to the likes of Shah Rukh Khan and Indian dignitaries have to realize that it is not just to uphold the differential status but to protest against the highhanded attitude of United States. The time has come to revive the global democratic equations where the hegemony of one country is not acceptable and people of all countries and religions are treated with equal respect.
Shah Rukh Khan Detained at US airport
Ram Puniyani
Shah Rukh Khan, one of the best known actors from Bollywood was detained for questioning in Newark airport in US (15th August). The actor who is a global icon of sorts was grilled by the US official as his name is a Muslim one, and the legendary actor felt humiliated with the treatment meted out to him. While the star actor was being questioned in this manner the Jet Airways staff vouched for him and many of his international fans were seeking his autographs, but the US official, drunk on the Imperial arrogance and infected by anti Muslim sentiments refused to recognize Khan. That any Google search on his name would have yielded infinite entries to establish his identity, is an elementary knowledge by now.
Just a few weeks ago, India’s ex-President, the scientist of repute, APJ Abdul Kalam was treated like a commoner by the US based Airlines staff. Irfan Khan was also meted with similar treatment. Other actors, with non Muslim names, have also been given such humiliating treatment by US officials but the logic in these cases is different, Neil Nitin Mukesh for having a skin color fairer then his Hindu name and John Abram for having Afghanistan on his passport. In addition the senior ministers from India George Fernandez and Pranab Mukherjee have also been strip searched in the past.
Most of the channels and many eminent columnists criticized Shahrukh Khan and those voicing their protest on the grounds that it is these security checks which have saved US from another terrorist attack post 9/11 2001. The desirability or other wise of these checks apart, there are two basic questions. One is that can those having diplomatic passports and those listed in India’s list of people exempt from such checks be subjected to these ordeals? Secondly why secondary checks are more for those with Muslim names? These commentators realization of the tasks of US security officials notwithstanding the questions remain the double standards of the security check system.
While the major phenomenon visible here is that of US officials have imbibed the anti Islam and anti Muslim propaganda, post 9/11 2001, the additional factor is the inherent arrogance and superiority complex of this Imperial power since US emerged as the sole super power, after the decline of Soviet block in international political arena. The treatment which US officials are giving to Indian dignitaries and celebrities is in stark contrast to the treatment which Indian administration and people are giving to the US dignitaries. The visit of Hillary Clinton just a month ago demonstrates the reality. The US Secretary of State was not only given a red carpet welcome, Indian media also went gaga about her, starting from describing her smart dresses to the details of her smile at different occasions.
The twin phenomenon of US arrogance as a superpower dictating terms to the whole World and its targeting of Islam and Muslims for political goals have got mixed up here. The global democracy which was trying to come up during the middle of twentieth century has really got a set back during last three decades, and despite the humane instincts of Barack Hussein Obama, American system remains as high handed as before. One appreciates the steps of new American President in closing down Guantonamo bay and the subsequent stoppage of the intense torture and insult of accused of 9/11, especially Muslim youth. Despite that it seems the ground level reality of US has not changed much and Islamophobia is still ruling the policies, mindset and attitude of the US system as a whole.
It is after 9/11 2001, the collapse of WTC, and the accompanying statements of Osama bin Laden, which gave the pretext of launching a propaganda against Islam and Muslims. It was at that time that the word Islamic Terrorism was coined and the distorted version of core words, Jihad and Kafir were strongly popularized in the popular thinking. In a way it manufactured a hatred for Muslims and Islam. While Jihad stands for fighting against injustice, it was presented as killing of non Muslims. While Kafir is a concept totally invalid in current times, it was put across as denigrating non Muslims. The net result was that in the global thinking it came to be regarded that all Muslims are not terrorists, while all terrorists are Muslims. The US officials in general and immigration officials in particular stiffened their attitude towards Muslim immigrants to US. Globally also, particularly in our country the trend began where after every blast here and there scores of Muslim youth were apprehended and tortured, and at most of the times their careers were ruined.
The Pakistani film ‘Khuda Ke Liye’ depicted the life of an average Muslims whom US officials suspect to be a terrorist and the outcome of this can be well predicted. Indian film ‘New York’ also puts forward the cruelty of the attitude of US officials. In Indian context films like ‘Black and White’ and ‘Mumbai Meri Jaan’ depicted this sad reality of our society. Many a good articles and literature has also been produced by scholars, which gives us the real story, but despite all this the propaganda by section of US media and the vested organizations in India against Islam and Muslims continues.
The phenomenon of terrorism is very complex. One core point is to understand the genesis of Al Qaeda type organizations, which were the product of indoctrination in the Madrassas, set up in Pakistan. The syllabus and financial support of these came through CIA; the aim was to instigate indoctrinated Muslim youth to fight against the Russian armies who had occupied Afghanistan. Lately this truth is being said by Pakistani leader’s time and over again. In India the rising communal violence and acts of terrorism because of diverse factors, have been used to present the minorities in a negative light.
We in India can feel hurt, insulted and angry to what is being meted out to Indian celebrities and leaders. It is in a way the attitude of US to humiliate ‘others’, to assert its superiority and hegemony. The commentators criticizing the protest against treatment being meted out to the likes of Shah Rukh Khan and Indian dignitaries have to realize that it is not just to uphold the differential status but to protest against the highhanded attitude of United States. The time has come to revive the global democratic equations where the hegemony of one country is not acceptable and people of all countries and religions are treated with equal respect.
August 22, 2009
The Politics of Intimidation
Herald, Panjim, 21 Aug 2009
Bans and court orders are now passé – intimidation is a better strategy to impose your worldview on society, says VIDYADHAR GADGIL
THE BIGGER PICTURE
The latest attempt at cultural censorship by the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (HJS) and the Sanatan Sanstha (SS) – demanding that artist Subodh Kerkar cancel his exhibition of Lord Ganesh pictures, and its campaign against him and the Marathi daily Lokmat for a cartoon ‘denigrating’ Swami Ramdas, the seventeenth-century Maharashtrian saint and contemporary of Shivaji – has firmly drawn the battle-lines between those who believe in freedom of expression and those who would like to constrain cultural and social expression within the narrow straitjacket of their obscurantist agenda.
The pictures of Ganesh drawn by Kerkar are a playful portrayal of the popular Hindu God in a variety of poses. Kerkar himself has been at pains to clarify his stand on the issue: “There is absolutely no intention of hurting anybody’s religious feelings. My drawings are my offerings to Shree Ganapati and no kind of insult is intended … If some people’s feelings have been hurt by these drawings, it only shows their narrow-mindedness and fanaticism.”
The allegation that Kerkar and Lokmat have ‘denigrated’ Swami Ramdas is even more bizarre. The cartoon in question is a genuinely funny comment on cultural censorship. The seventeenth-century Maharashtrian saint Samarth Swami Ramdas is traditionally depicted (including on the covers of his popular Marathi books like ‘Manache Shlok’ and ‘Dasabodh’) wearing a caxtti. The cartoon shows an artist standing before an easel with a canvas of a man wearing a suit, and telling his friend, “Of course this is a drawing of Swami Ramdas. I have dressed him in a suit to avoid hurting anybody’s sentiments.” To find such humour offensive is to extend ‘narrow-mindedness’ and ‘fanaticism’ to ridiculous extremes.
Coming hot on the heels of its demand to remove M F Husain’s painting ‘Standing Buddha’ (which the Samiti itself admits is unexceptionable) from the Goa State Museum, the HJS’s latest demand is so unreasonable that it has, for once, united a wide range of citizens in Goa and prompted them to speak out against such egregious cultural censorship. But there are yet those who dismiss the HJS’ campaign as palpably silly (which it is) and consider speaking out against it to be a mistake, as it gives organisations like the HJS (particularly its fraternal organisation, the Sanatan Sanstha) the publicity they crave and furthers their agenda. But such a view betrays an ignorance of how such organisations operate, and how they succeed in imposing their agenda and vision upon society through systematic intimidation of all opposition.
The HJS is perpetually in campaign mode in its main areas of operation – Goa, Maharashtra and Karnataka – and is indefatigable in its efforts to hunt out and eradicate anything that offends its narrow view of Hinduism. A random sample of alleged ‘denigrations’ of Hinduism from the website of the HJS at http://www.hindujagruti.org/ includes the films Kambakht Ishq, Slumdog Millionaire and The Love Guru; portrayals of Hindu deities in advertisements; and various painters, of which group Subodh Kerkar is the latest member and M F Husain the most illustrious. Ten minutes on the website of the HJS would lead any reasonable person to dismiss the whole caboodle as nonsense and a waste of time – and that is where the reasonable person would be making a serious mistake.
In the course of its campaigns, the HJS uses every means possible to ensure that anything it considers offensive is changed or removed as per its diktats, and it meets with remarkable success in its efforts. When faced with demonstrations and agitations, theatres and art galleries make the changes that are demanded rather than live with the implied threat of ‘retaliation’, and the HJS website reports numerous ‘successes’, with changes made and apologies tendered by film-makers, print media publications, art galleries, and even the Frankfurt Book Fair.
The India Art Summit, reportedly the country’s largest art fair, cited ‘security reasons’, this year (for the second consecutive time), and did not include a single painting by M F Husain, though he is probably India’s best-known painter. Neha Kirpal, Associate Director of the Summit, says that according to her information, “in the last four years, nobody has done any show of Mr Husain in the country.” There is no need to get the government to ban Husain’s works or to get the courts to rule them objectionable (which contention the Delhi High Court dismissed anyway, while exonerating Husain of charges of obscenity and disrespect to religion). The atmosphere of intimidation that has been created ensures that Husain is blocked out of the country’s cultural landscape. Such cultural censorship, without any reference to governments and legal process, is an even bigger blow to freedom of expression than any ban could ever be.
In Goa, the HJS has organised ‘Dharma Jagruti Sabhas’ in the recent past, as part of its stated agenda of “creating awareness amongst Hindus”. Apart from the usual suspects from the BJP, these Sabhas have been attended by politicians like Transport Minister Sudin Dhavlikar of the MGP. The dividends to the HJS have been rich. In 2007, the HJS organised photo exhibitions on Kashmir all over Goa, including one at the government-run Kala Academy. These exhibitions demonised Muslims, and the mobilisation by the HJS around these exhibitions was so virulent that it should have been prosecuted under the provisions banning hate speech. No such thing was done, and ‘secular’ Congress Chief Minister Digambar Kamat actually had the gall to visit the exhibition in Panjim and convert it into a photo-op.
In 2008, the HJS demanded that an award-winning 1966 film ‘Through the Eyes of a Painter’ by M F Husain be withdrawn from IFFI and, on the advice of the Goa government, the Directorate of Film Festivals (DFF) promptly did so. Fortunately, protests by the film fraternity, including luminaries like Shyam Benegal and Adoor Gopalakrishnan, forced a red-faced DFF to screen the film, but not before the damage was done by demonstrating exactly whose writ runs in Goa. During the recent Assembly session, the HJS organised a demonstration in Panjim against temple desecrations, which blocked traffic on one of the Mandovi bridges for hours and featured banners showing a Catholic priest and a Muslim moulvi presiding benignly over the destruction of a temple. No action is reported to have been taken by the police.
Citizens who speak out against the communal agenda of the HJS and the SS receive a barrage of hate mail and threatening calls for their pains, from people claiming to be associated with these organisations. Police complaints – for, inevitably, ‘hurting religious sentiments’ – are filed frequently. Numerous activists from human rights groups and rationalist organisations have also had defamation cases filed against them for speaking out against the HJS and the SS.
While the current imbroglio over the Husain painting in the Goa State Museum and the campaign against Subodh Kerkar has created a welcome unity among citizens in Goa in opposition to the activities of the HJS and the SS, unless the government shows some spine and takes efforts to discharge its constitutional duty of protecting freedom of expression, Goa’s vibrant cultural landscape will inevitably turn into an arid desert, with the HJS and SS succeeding in imposing their agenda and vision on society.
As they have in the Subodh Kerkar case too…
Statements supporting Kerkar have been issued, public meetings held in his support, reams of newsprint have been expended on defending him and excoriating the HJS, and the issue has become a cause célèbre in artistic and journalistic circles. But make no mistake about it – despite all this, the politics of intimidation has proved effective. The bottom line is that an exhibition that was slated to run for 11 days will now run for just two days. And that is a victory for the HJS and a defeat for all those who believe in freedom of expression.
Bans and court orders are now passé – intimidation is a better strategy to impose your worldview on society, says VIDYADHAR GADGIL
THE BIGGER PICTURE
The latest attempt at cultural censorship by the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (HJS) and the Sanatan Sanstha (SS) – demanding that artist Subodh Kerkar cancel his exhibition of Lord Ganesh pictures, and its campaign against him and the Marathi daily Lokmat for a cartoon ‘denigrating’ Swami Ramdas, the seventeenth-century Maharashtrian saint and contemporary of Shivaji – has firmly drawn the battle-lines between those who believe in freedom of expression and those who would like to constrain cultural and social expression within the narrow straitjacket of their obscurantist agenda.
The pictures of Ganesh drawn by Kerkar are a playful portrayal of the popular Hindu God in a variety of poses. Kerkar himself has been at pains to clarify his stand on the issue: “There is absolutely no intention of hurting anybody’s religious feelings. My drawings are my offerings to Shree Ganapati and no kind of insult is intended … If some people’s feelings have been hurt by these drawings, it only shows their narrow-mindedness and fanaticism.”
The allegation that Kerkar and Lokmat have ‘denigrated’ Swami Ramdas is even more bizarre. The cartoon in question is a genuinely funny comment on cultural censorship. The seventeenth-century Maharashtrian saint Samarth Swami Ramdas is traditionally depicted (including on the covers of his popular Marathi books like ‘Manache Shlok’ and ‘Dasabodh’) wearing a caxtti. The cartoon shows an artist standing before an easel with a canvas of a man wearing a suit, and telling his friend, “Of course this is a drawing of Swami Ramdas. I have dressed him in a suit to avoid hurting anybody’s sentiments.” To find such humour offensive is to extend ‘narrow-mindedness’ and ‘fanaticism’ to ridiculous extremes.
Coming hot on the heels of its demand to remove M F Husain’s painting ‘Standing Buddha’ (which the Samiti itself admits is unexceptionable) from the Goa State Museum, the HJS’s latest demand is so unreasonable that it has, for once, united a wide range of citizens in Goa and prompted them to speak out against such egregious cultural censorship. But there are yet those who dismiss the HJS’ campaign as palpably silly (which it is) and consider speaking out against it to be a mistake, as it gives organisations like the HJS (particularly its fraternal organisation, the Sanatan Sanstha) the publicity they crave and furthers their agenda. But such a view betrays an ignorance of how such organisations operate, and how they succeed in imposing their agenda and vision upon society through systematic intimidation of all opposition.
The HJS is perpetually in campaign mode in its main areas of operation – Goa, Maharashtra and Karnataka – and is indefatigable in its efforts to hunt out and eradicate anything that offends its narrow view of Hinduism. A random sample of alleged ‘denigrations’ of Hinduism from the website of the HJS at http://www.hindujagruti.org/ includes the films Kambakht Ishq, Slumdog Millionaire and The Love Guru; portrayals of Hindu deities in advertisements; and various painters, of which group Subodh Kerkar is the latest member and M F Husain the most illustrious. Ten minutes on the website of the HJS would lead any reasonable person to dismiss the whole caboodle as nonsense and a waste of time – and that is where the reasonable person would be making a serious mistake.
In the course of its campaigns, the HJS uses every means possible to ensure that anything it considers offensive is changed or removed as per its diktats, and it meets with remarkable success in its efforts. When faced with demonstrations and agitations, theatres and art galleries make the changes that are demanded rather than live with the implied threat of ‘retaliation’, and the HJS website reports numerous ‘successes’, with changes made and apologies tendered by film-makers, print media publications, art galleries, and even the Frankfurt Book Fair.
The India Art Summit, reportedly the country’s largest art fair, cited ‘security reasons’, this year (for the second consecutive time), and did not include a single painting by M F Husain, though he is probably India’s best-known painter. Neha Kirpal, Associate Director of the Summit, says that according to her information, “in the last four years, nobody has done any show of Mr Husain in the country.” There is no need to get the government to ban Husain’s works or to get the courts to rule them objectionable (which contention the Delhi High Court dismissed anyway, while exonerating Husain of charges of obscenity and disrespect to religion). The atmosphere of intimidation that has been created ensures that Husain is blocked out of the country’s cultural landscape. Such cultural censorship, without any reference to governments and legal process, is an even bigger blow to freedom of expression than any ban could ever be.
In Goa, the HJS has organised ‘Dharma Jagruti Sabhas’ in the recent past, as part of its stated agenda of “creating awareness amongst Hindus”. Apart from the usual suspects from the BJP, these Sabhas have been attended by politicians like Transport Minister Sudin Dhavlikar of the MGP. The dividends to the HJS have been rich. In 2007, the HJS organised photo exhibitions on Kashmir all over Goa, including one at the government-run Kala Academy. These exhibitions demonised Muslims, and the mobilisation by the HJS around these exhibitions was so virulent that it should have been prosecuted under the provisions banning hate speech. No such thing was done, and ‘secular’ Congress Chief Minister Digambar Kamat actually had the gall to visit the exhibition in Panjim and convert it into a photo-op.
In 2008, the HJS demanded that an award-winning 1966 film ‘Through the Eyes of a Painter’ by M F Husain be withdrawn from IFFI and, on the advice of the Goa government, the Directorate of Film Festivals (DFF) promptly did so. Fortunately, protests by the film fraternity, including luminaries like Shyam Benegal and Adoor Gopalakrishnan, forced a red-faced DFF to screen the film, but not before the damage was done by demonstrating exactly whose writ runs in Goa. During the recent Assembly session, the HJS organised a demonstration in Panjim against temple desecrations, which blocked traffic on one of the Mandovi bridges for hours and featured banners showing a Catholic priest and a Muslim moulvi presiding benignly over the destruction of a temple. No action is reported to have been taken by the police.
Citizens who speak out against the communal agenda of the HJS and the SS receive a barrage of hate mail and threatening calls for their pains, from people claiming to be associated with these organisations. Police complaints – for, inevitably, ‘hurting religious sentiments’ – are filed frequently. Numerous activists from human rights groups and rationalist organisations have also had defamation cases filed against them for speaking out against the HJS and the SS.
While the current imbroglio over the Husain painting in the Goa State Museum and the campaign against Subodh Kerkar has created a welcome unity among citizens in Goa in opposition to the activities of the HJS and the SS, unless the government shows some spine and takes efforts to discharge its constitutional duty of protecting freedom of expression, Goa’s vibrant cultural landscape will inevitably turn into an arid desert, with the HJS and SS succeeding in imposing their agenda and vision on society.
As they have in the Subodh Kerkar case too…
Statements supporting Kerkar have been issued, public meetings held in his support, reams of newsprint have been expended on defending him and excoriating the HJS, and the issue has become a cause célèbre in artistic and journalistic circles. But make no mistake about it – despite all this, the politics of intimidation has proved effective. The bottom line is that an exhibition that was slated to run for 11 days will now run for just two days. And that is a victory for the HJS and a defeat for all those who believe in freedom of expression.
August 19, 2009
Implement the Rajindar Sachar Committee Report
The Hindu
August 17, 2009
Seeking a fair deal for Muslims
by Amar Singh
In this December 09, 2008 photo Muslims offer prayers on the occassion of Id-ul-Zuha (Bakrid) at the historic Jama Masjid in Delhi. Photo: R.V. Moorthy
The Hindu In this December 09, 2008 photo Muslims offer prayers on the occassion of Id-ul-Zuha (Bakrid) at the historic Jama Masjid in Delhi. Photo: R.V. Moorthy
The Rajindar Sachar Committee’s report on the social, economic and educational status of the Muslim community in India struck a blow to the Congress’ democratic and secularist assertions made over the decades. It lays out the actual conditions the Muslim minority faces and how it lags behind in terms of human development indicators.
It reports that only a small percentage of them are in government service and involved in areas of socio-political life.
The community has been reduced to a sort of political working capital in the hands of the big political parties. According to the report, Muslims need assistance at all levels. They face deprivation in terms of habitation facilities, access to bank credit and also political decision-making power.
Since Independence, India has seen many commissions and committees constituted to resolve the problems of the minorities, especially Muslims. The Ram Sahay Commission on Muslim weavers, the Srikrishna Commission and the Gopal Singh Commission were formed during Congress governments, but their reports are gathering dust. Such moves constitute nothing but political stunts with empty promises for the vulnerable minority. It is obvious that the Sachar Committee report will meet the same fate.
But this is the first commission to have studied the roots of the problems the Muslim community is facing and what the government has done for it in the last 50 years. Ghettoisation and insecurity have grown among Muslims after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. As a result, the percentage of Muslim children attending school and university has significantly gone down.
The follow-up on the report has taken on political hues, with the Congress using it as a tool to woo the minorities and the BJP raising concerns over the figures mentioned in it. But what has the Congress done for the minorities during all these years? It claims to be a champion of secularism but has used the term only as a euphemism to appease Muslims and secure their votes.
The Sachar report should be an eye-opener for big political parties like the Congress and the BJP, which are using the Muslim issue as a device of vote-bank politics.
After Independence and during Congress rule, there was talk of a classified circular which directed that no Muslim be appointed to senior-level positions in the defence forces. The Congress had created such a stir for a long period of time so that Muslims would be forced to leave India. Further, an imprudent game was played by the communal forces during Jawaharlal Nehru’s rule with the clandestine support of the administration and the police. This continued for almost 30 years, creating fear and anxiety among the minorities. The communal clashes that took thousands of human lives and destroyed property worth crores of rupees were the consequences of this game. The Congress appointed commission after commission to investigate the communal riots, but none of the big perpetrators has been convicted.
Instead of punishing the culprits, the police and the administration invariably prosecuted the innocent Muslim victims. The fear and anxiety this caused, and the cavalier approach of the government, resulted in low levels of progress among Muslims in education and commerce. During a span of 50 years, the entire community has been pushed into a vacuum of illiteracy and unemployment.
The fervour of backward class politics of the Congress waned in the wake of the Mandal and Mandir issues. Now it is seeking to widen its base while leading a coalition government. It has moved for other backward classes quota in higher educational institutions and talked of reservation for Muslims.
The Congress’ efforts for the progress of the minorities have been proved hollow, particularly in the Hindi heartland. On the contrary, the smaller parties, including the Samajwadi Party, the Telugu Desam Party and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, and the Left parties, have brought several benefits to Muslims. The SP has time and again asked for affirmative action on the basis of the Sachar Committee report. They should be encouraged to participate in the process of economic growth. The report is a revolutionary step to uplift the minorities in India, and if the Government of India implements its recommendations, that will boost India’s secular democracy.
It is to be seen how sincerely and resolutely the United Progressive Alliance government will pursue the agenda it has laid out. Should the findings be put in deep freeze, leaving the secular and vibrant democratic future of India in a disastrous state? According to the Director of the Centre for Policy Research, Professor Pratap Bhanu Mehta, the report not only reflects the poor human index of Indian Muslims but indicates the vacuum of Indian governance. It points to the poor development of infrastructure facilities such as electricity and telecommunications services in areas of Muslim habitation. Muslims are not represented enough in the civil services, in banks, in other public sector undertakings, in the judiciary and in the agencies involved with national security tasks. The Central government needs to coordinate with State governments to pool resources and formulate such policies as would help translate their developmental regression into progress.
The Sachar Committee has suggested that a commission examine the livelihood problems faced by Muslims. But apart from instituting a committee of experts, the Congress has made no substantive effort in this direction. Proper representation of the minorities, especially Muslims, in the police and defence forces will prove to be a morale-booster for them in terms of their safety and security issues, but this has not been looked into. As per the committee’s recommendation, the Congress government has promised to open schools, training institutes and banks, provide free education up to the age of 14 and create infrastructure in areas populated by Muslims. But that promise now lies in cyberspace.
The report mentions that representation for the Muslim community to the same order as the percentage of Muslims in the population of the country is found only in one place: in jails. The fact that this is true can be seen now in Congress-ruled States such as Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh. Many innocent Muslim youth of Mumbai and Hyderabad are in jail only on the basis of suspicion. There is hardly any effort being made by the respective governments to provide them legal aid.
In the context of the report, the Congress is trying to play the role of a messiah for Muslims. These represent nothing but tokenism. The Action Taken Report on the Sachar Committee report is but a post-dated cheque. As ever, the Congress wants to use Muslims as a vote bank. It is not really bothered of their rights or their welfare.
There are many areas where work needs to be done for the growth and development of the Muslim community, such as the provision of basic infrastructure facilities in education, health, road and drinking water, employment generation, safety, promotion of the Urdu language, modernisation of madrassa education and the separation of politics from community development.
In the present situation, the SP strives to continue the efforts it has undertaken to work for the minorities and the downtrodden. The party stands for the empowerment of the poor, the minorities, and the marginalised sections that were the worst victims of exploitation due to the lopsided policies pursued by successive governments at the Centre. Muslims want to live a respectable life without any political prejudice. They know how to carry themselves in the present conditions and how to uplift themselves and grow. The government has to support them in different spheres of activity.
The SP wants the implementation of the Sachar Committee report in toto. A high-power expert committee representing all political parties should be constituted to look into the implementation of the recommendations.
(Amar Singh is general secretary of the Samajwadi Party. He wrote this article from a hospital in Singapore while undergoing treatment.)
August 17, 2009
Seeking a fair deal for Muslims
by Amar Singh
In this December 09, 2008 photo Muslims offer prayers on the occassion of Id-ul-Zuha (Bakrid) at the historic Jama Masjid in Delhi. Photo: R.V. Moorthy
The Hindu In this December 09, 2008 photo Muslims offer prayers on the occassion of Id-ul-Zuha (Bakrid) at the historic Jama Masjid in Delhi. Photo: R.V. Moorthy
The Rajindar Sachar Committee’s report on the social, economic and educational status of the Muslim community in India struck a blow to the Congress’ democratic and secularist assertions made over the decades. It lays out the actual conditions the Muslim minority faces and how it lags behind in terms of human development indicators.
It reports that only a small percentage of them are in government service and involved in areas of socio-political life.
The community has been reduced to a sort of political working capital in the hands of the big political parties. According to the report, Muslims need assistance at all levels. They face deprivation in terms of habitation facilities, access to bank credit and also political decision-making power.
Since Independence, India has seen many commissions and committees constituted to resolve the problems of the minorities, especially Muslims. The Ram Sahay Commission on Muslim weavers, the Srikrishna Commission and the Gopal Singh Commission were formed during Congress governments, but their reports are gathering dust. Such moves constitute nothing but political stunts with empty promises for the vulnerable minority. It is obvious that the Sachar Committee report will meet the same fate.
But this is the first commission to have studied the roots of the problems the Muslim community is facing and what the government has done for it in the last 50 years. Ghettoisation and insecurity have grown among Muslims after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. As a result, the percentage of Muslim children attending school and university has significantly gone down.
The follow-up on the report has taken on political hues, with the Congress using it as a tool to woo the minorities and the BJP raising concerns over the figures mentioned in it. But what has the Congress done for the minorities during all these years? It claims to be a champion of secularism but has used the term only as a euphemism to appease Muslims and secure their votes.
The Sachar report should be an eye-opener for big political parties like the Congress and the BJP, which are using the Muslim issue as a device of vote-bank politics.
After Independence and during Congress rule, there was talk of a classified circular which directed that no Muslim be appointed to senior-level positions in the defence forces. The Congress had created such a stir for a long period of time so that Muslims would be forced to leave India. Further, an imprudent game was played by the communal forces during Jawaharlal Nehru’s rule with the clandestine support of the administration and the police. This continued for almost 30 years, creating fear and anxiety among the minorities. The communal clashes that took thousands of human lives and destroyed property worth crores of rupees were the consequences of this game. The Congress appointed commission after commission to investigate the communal riots, but none of the big perpetrators has been convicted.
Instead of punishing the culprits, the police and the administration invariably prosecuted the innocent Muslim victims. The fear and anxiety this caused, and the cavalier approach of the government, resulted in low levels of progress among Muslims in education and commerce. During a span of 50 years, the entire community has been pushed into a vacuum of illiteracy and unemployment.
The fervour of backward class politics of the Congress waned in the wake of the Mandal and Mandir issues. Now it is seeking to widen its base while leading a coalition government. It has moved for other backward classes quota in higher educational institutions and talked of reservation for Muslims.
The Congress’ efforts for the progress of the minorities have been proved hollow, particularly in the Hindi heartland. On the contrary, the smaller parties, including the Samajwadi Party, the Telugu Desam Party and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, and the Left parties, have brought several benefits to Muslims. The SP has time and again asked for affirmative action on the basis of the Sachar Committee report. They should be encouraged to participate in the process of economic growth. The report is a revolutionary step to uplift the minorities in India, and if the Government of India implements its recommendations, that will boost India’s secular democracy.
It is to be seen how sincerely and resolutely the United Progressive Alliance government will pursue the agenda it has laid out. Should the findings be put in deep freeze, leaving the secular and vibrant democratic future of India in a disastrous state? According to the Director of the Centre for Policy Research, Professor Pratap Bhanu Mehta, the report not only reflects the poor human index of Indian Muslims but indicates the vacuum of Indian governance. It points to the poor development of infrastructure facilities such as electricity and telecommunications services in areas of Muslim habitation. Muslims are not represented enough in the civil services, in banks, in other public sector undertakings, in the judiciary and in the agencies involved with national security tasks. The Central government needs to coordinate with State governments to pool resources and formulate such policies as would help translate their developmental regression into progress.
The Sachar Committee has suggested that a commission examine the livelihood problems faced by Muslims. But apart from instituting a committee of experts, the Congress has made no substantive effort in this direction. Proper representation of the minorities, especially Muslims, in the police and defence forces will prove to be a morale-booster for them in terms of their safety and security issues, but this has not been looked into. As per the committee’s recommendation, the Congress government has promised to open schools, training institutes and banks, provide free education up to the age of 14 and create infrastructure in areas populated by Muslims. But that promise now lies in cyberspace.
The report mentions that representation for the Muslim community to the same order as the percentage of Muslims in the population of the country is found only in one place: in jails. The fact that this is true can be seen now in Congress-ruled States such as Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh. Many innocent Muslim youth of Mumbai and Hyderabad are in jail only on the basis of suspicion. There is hardly any effort being made by the respective governments to provide them legal aid.
In the context of the report, the Congress is trying to play the role of a messiah for Muslims. These represent nothing but tokenism. The Action Taken Report on the Sachar Committee report is but a post-dated cheque. As ever, the Congress wants to use Muslims as a vote bank. It is not really bothered of their rights or their welfare.
There are many areas where work needs to be done for the growth and development of the Muslim community, such as the provision of basic infrastructure facilities in education, health, road and drinking water, employment generation, safety, promotion of the Urdu language, modernisation of madrassa education and the separation of politics from community development.
In the present situation, the SP strives to continue the efforts it has undertaken to work for the minorities and the downtrodden. The party stands for the empowerment of the poor, the minorities, and the marginalised sections that were the worst victims of exploitation due to the lopsided policies pursued by successive governments at the Centre. Muslims want to live a respectable life without any political prejudice. They know how to carry themselves in the present conditions and how to uplift themselves and grow. The government has to support them in different spheres of activity.
The SP wants the implementation of the Sachar Committee report in toto. A high-power expert committee representing all political parties should be constituted to look into the implementation of the recommendations.
(Amar Singh is general secretary of the Samajwadi Party. He wrote this article from a hospital in Singapore while undergoing treatment.)
August 18, 2009
Threat to Press and Artists in Goa
Herald, 18 Aug 2009
Editorial
Telephone terrorism?
W ho has given the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (HJS), the Sanatan Saunstha (SS) and the Marathi daily newspaper Sanatan Prabhat the authority to decide what is the right and wrong way to depict Hindu deities?
Hot on the heels of its demand for removing a completely unobjectionable painting by renowned painter M F Husain, which is (hopefully) presently on display at the Goa State Museum, the troika of the HJS, the SS and Sanatan Prabhat are now targeting renowned Goan painter Dr Subodh Kerkar.
The artist is to open an exhibition of innovative sketches on Lord Ganesha, along with a sculpture-installation of Goa’s most popular deity to highlight the issue of plastic waste in the state, on the occasion of the state’s most popular festival, Chowoth or Ganesh Chaturthi. The exhibition is to open on Friday.
None of Dr Kerkar’s sketches is objectionable or obscene in any way. They only show Lord Ganesha engaged in different activities. But the HJS and the SS believe that any deviation from what they dictate as the ‘right’ way to depict Lord Ganesha – for example, showing Him dancing or playing the flute – is a ‘denigration’.
In the past, they have vehemently opposed the efforts of various Ganesh Mandals to create large idols of eco-friendly materials with innovative designs. This, too, they say, is ‘denigration’.
This is an extreme, fundamentalist and reductionist interpretation of Hindusism; somewhat similar to the puritanical interpretation of Islam by the Wahabi sect. The latter considers music, films, and even photographs as un-Islamic.
An accomplished cartoonist, Dr Kerkar also angered the HJS with a cartoon in the Marathi daily Lokmat, lampooning the outfit on the M F Husain issue. It shows an artist drawing the great Maharashtra saint Samarth Swami Ramdas – who is normally shown wearing only a caxtti – in a suit, and explaining that he is doing this so that no one’s religious feelings should be ‘hurt’.
Denouncing it as a ‘denigration’ (what else?) of Samarth Swami Ramdas, the Sanatan Prabhat editor – one Prithviraj P Hazare – has, in a note on Sanatan Prabhat’s front page on Sunday 16 August, charged that Dr Kerkar has ‘deliberately’ denigrated Samarth Swami Ramdas, and asked whether devotees and other devout Hindus will not “take him to task” for this.
A banner headline across the top of the front page states that “stopping” those denigrating Lord Ganesh is nothing but ‘bhakti’ or devotion. Several other news items in the newspaper use strong language to denounce Dr Kerkar. The newspaper has also listed the telephone numbers of Dr Kerkar and Mr Nayak, and urged readers to call them and “protest”.
Thanks to this blatant provocation, both Dr Kerkar and Raju Nayak have been getting dozens of threatening calls a day. Some callers have threatened to chop off their fingers, others to kill them. HJS and SS supporters have filed police complaints against Dr Kerkar and Mr Nayak in different police stations.
If any of the fundamentalist followers of the HJS and SS actually follow through with their threats, who will be responsible? Under Section153 IPC, wantonly giving provocation with intent to cause riot is punishable – by up to one year in jail if rioting is committed, and up to six months in jail if rioting is not committed.
Anyone who feels that our fears are exaggerated should remember that members of the Sanatan Saunstha are accused of setting off a bomb in a Thane theatre, near Mumbai, because it was showing a drama that they the SS had denounced as ‘denigrating’ Hindu deities. The Goa Police should take this threat extremely seriously, and provide adequate police protection to Dr Subodh Kerkar’s studio and residence, as well as the Lokmat office and Raju Nayak’s residence.
The HJS and SS are fond of picking soft targets. When people consecrate stones and trees as ‘Gods’ on the roadside, is it not an act of ‘denigration’? If the SS and HJS are serious about their so-called mission, let them stop these roadside shrines first. There is a tree at Karmal Ghat, Canacona, that some people claim resembles Lord Ganesh. They have started to built a temple around it, that will inevitably block part of National Highway 17. Let the HJS and SS show their sincerity by first stopping ‘denigration’ through such shrines.
--
Herald, 18 Aug 2009, p 2
Scribe alleges death threats from Hindu fundamentalist
HERALD REPORTER
PANJIM, AUG 17
Editor of newly-launched Marathi newspaper Lokmat, Raju Nayak today alleged that some Hindu fundamentalist have threatened to kill him and his family for publishing a cartoon in the newspaper.
Nayak, in his complaint to the Director General of Police Bhimsen Bassi alleged that he has been receiving calls from various people claiming to be members of Hindutva organizations threatening to kill him and his family for publishing cartoons by painter and noted cartoonist Dr Subodh Kerkar.
Nayak further said that the threatening calls by members of Hindutva organizations like Sanatan and Hindu Janjagran Samiti increased after Marathi newspaper Sanatan Prabhat, printed his office telephone number and asked its members to call him up.
“Since then we have been harassed by callers from Goa and Maharashtra,” he alleged.
Nayak has also pointed out that the members of the Sanatan Prabhat organization have been questioned by the Maharashtra police for trying to make bombs and planning terrorist activities in that state.
“The details about inflammatory inciting articles and their call to Sanatan supporters and readers to express anger against me and Subodh Kerkar can viewed on Sanatan Prabhat web site,’ he said.
Further, he said, “surprisingly, one of the calls received today was by Dr Vijay Nadkarni from the number 08322735819. The caller threatened to kill me for what he claimed to be hurting of Hindu sentiments. On inquiry I have found that the number is from the Government-owned ESI Hospital in Margao and the said Nadkarni is a government doctor attached to the same hospital.”
Nayak has enclosed the copies of the illustrations of Ganesh published in Lokmat Goa dated August 11, 2009 and the cartoon on Swami Ramdas Samarth published in the issue dated August 13 “for proof that they are just works of imagination by a talented artist.”
CALANGUTE CORRESPONDENT ADDS: Calangute police on Monday registered an offence against an unknown person who allegedly threatened Dr Subodh Kerkar on his mobile phone in connection with a controversial picture of Lord Ganesha.
Confirming this, Calangute PI Nolasco Raposo told Herald that an offence had been registered against an unknown person for allegedly threatening Dr Kerkar.
When contacted, some members of the Shantadurga temple committee in Calangute claimed they did not find anything offensive with the paintings of Dr Kerkar. “The issue has been blown out of proportion by a few disgruntled elements,” they added.
Speaking to Herald, Chandrakant Chodankar, one of the committee members, said they went to confirm the veracity of the drawings by Dr Kerkar on Monday, but did not find anything offensive with the paintings.
Dr Kerkar reportedly told the committee members that since he too is a Hindu, he would never disrespect his own God and religion.
--
HJS threatens demo outside Kerkar’s gallery
HERALD REPORTER
PANJIM, AUG 17
The series of sketches of Lord Ganesh by renowned artist Dr Subodh Kerkar have earned him ire of Hindu organisations in the state and Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (HJS) has planned to hold a demonstration at the venue of the exhibition of the painter on August 20.
HJS has filed a police complaint against Kerkar for hurting religious sentiments. “What Kerkar has indulged is an obvious violation of section 149 of CrPC. If he does not cancel his scheduled exhibition of these indecent pictures, we will protest outside his gallery,” HJS convenor Jayesh Thali told reporters.
Kerkar, a famous artist has drawn pictures showing Lord Ganesh doing somersaults, Oscar trophy and other actions, which are taken as disrespect by right wing organizations, Thali said.
These drawings will be exhibited in the Kerkar art gallery at Calangute from August 20 to August 31.
“This is an insult to Hindu religion. We have an emotional attachment towards Lord Ganesh,” Sadashiv Dhond, an activist from Dharma Shakti Sena, said.
Kerkar has also denigrated Samarth Ramdas Swami by showing him wearing a coat in Lokmat, Thali said adding that like M F Hussain, Kerkar too has not done cartoons or sketches on other religious gods. “Kerkar is denigrating Lord Ganesh for commercial benefits”, he said.
However, there is no mention of how Sanatan Prabhat has published the phone number of Kerkar and Raju Nayak urging its readers to protest the sketches.
Meanwhile, Kerkar has said that he has been receiving threatening calls from as far as Pune wherein they warn him to chop off his fingers for drawing Lord Ganesh in indecent manner.
Apparently, Dr Kerkar began to get phone calls after Sanathan Prabhat newspaper published the phone numbers of the cartoonist and the editor of the newspaper Lokmat Raju Nayak urging its followers to call up the two for the “blasphemous” cartoons.
--
‘It is assault on freedom of expression’
HERALD REPORTER
PANJIM, AUG 17
Akhil Bharatiya Marathi Patrakar Parishad, Mumbai, has termed the threats to kill issued to Lokmat Editor Raju Nayak for publishing cartoons of noted painter Subodh Kerkar, as assault on freedom of expression.
The Parishad has condemned the attack on Nayak in the strongest terms, at a meeting held today. It was attended by Vijay Patil (President), P D Patil (Secretary), Madhav Ambore (working president), Kiran Naik (Treasurer) and former president S M Deshmukh.
Nayak is the president of Goa Marathi Patrakar Sangh which is a branch of Akhil Bharatiya Marathi Patrakar Parishad. Nayak has been a victim of the Hindu fundamentalists, according to a police complaint, for publishing a cartoon of Kerkar. The meeting also urged the local administration to act promptly if there is any attempt to take law in their hands.
--
Times of India, Panjim, 18 Aug
Police bow to pressure, ask Kerkar to stop show
Preetu Nair, TNN 18 August 2009, 06:21am IST
Print Email Discuss Bookmark/Share Save Comment Text Size: |
PANAJI: Cowing under pressure from the Hindu Janjagruti Samiti (HJS), the police on Monday served notice on reputed Goan artist Subodh Kerkar to
“desist from getting involved in such activities which may insult religious feelings or religious beliefs”. SP (North) Bosco George said Kerkar “should keep in mind the sentiments of the community and avoid creating a law and order problem”. “We will soon take a decision on whether or not the artist’s graphics hurt sentiments.
If it is found to hurt religious sentiments, we will initiate legal action against him,” he said. HJS had petitioned the police last week alleging that Kerkar had published “drawings of Lord Ganesh in various positions”, thereby insulting religious beliefs. It also wanted that the artist’s exhibition of Ganesha drawings be stopped. Earlier this month, HJS had demanded that the Goa State Museum remove M F Husain’s ‘Standing Buddha’ from its gallery. Officials said the matter would be taken up with higher authorities.
Even as the Calangute police issued notice to Kerkar under section 149 CrPC (police powers to prevent cognizable offence), the artist said he would go ahead with his exhibition. He also sought police protection apprehending that some organisations might try to disrupt his show scheduled from August 20 to 31, 2009 at the Kerkar Art Gallery in Calangute. Kerkar also alleged that on Monday he received calls from unknown persons, abusing him and threatening to murder him.
On receiving his complaint, the police have registered an offence under section 507 IPC (criminal intimidation by an anonymous communication) against unknown persons. “There is absolutely no intention of hurting anybody’s religious feelings. My drawings are my offerings to Shri Ganapati and no kind of insult is intended,” he said. “If some people’s feelings have been hurt by these drawings, it only shows their narrow-mindedness and fanaticism.
May Lord Ganesh help them clear their minds,” he said. “You (police) are most welcome to my gallery any time to view my drawings and judge for yourself,” Kerkar said in his reply to the police.
Editorial
Telephone terrorism?
W ho has given the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (HJS), the Sanatan Saunstha (SS) and the Marathi daily newspaper Sanatan Prabhat the authority to decide what is the right and wrong way to depict Hindu deities?
Hot on the heels of its demand for removing a completely unobjectionable painting by renowned painter M F Husain, which is (hopefully) presently on display at the Goa State Museum, the troika of the HJS, the SS and Sanatan Prabhat are now targeting renowned Goan painter Dr Subodh Kerkar.
The artist is to open an exhibition of innovative sketches on Lord Ganesha, along with a sculpture-installation of Goa’s most popular deity to highlight the issue of plastic waste in the state, on the occasion of the state’s most popular festival, Chowoth or Ganesh Chaturthi. The exhibition is to open on Friday.
None of Dr Kerkar’s sketches is objectionable or obscene in any way. They only show Lord Ganesha engaged in different activities. But the HJS and the SS believe that any deviation from what they dictate as the ‘right’ way to depict Lord Ganesha – for example, showing Him dancing or playing the flute – is a ‘denigration’.
In the past, they have vehemently opposed the efforts of various Ganesh Mandals to create large idols of eco-friendly materials with innovative designs. This, too, they say, is ‘denigration’.
This is an extreme, fundamentalist and reductionist interpretation of Hindusism; somewhat similar to the puritanical interpretation of Islam by the Wahabi sect. The latter considers music, films, and even photographs as un-Islamic.
An accomplished cartoonist, Dr Kerkar also angered the HJS with a cartoon in the Marathi daily Lokmat, lampooning the outfit on the M F Husain issue. It shows an artist drawing the great Maharashtra saint Samarth Swami Ramdas – who is normally shown wearing only a caxtti – in a suit, and explaining that he is doing this so that no one’s religious feelings should be ‘hurt’.
Denouncing it as a ‘denigration’ (what else?) of Samarth Swami Ramdas, the Sanatan Prabhat editor – one Prithviraj P Hazare – has, in a note on Sanatan Prabhat’s front page on Sunday 16 August, charged that Dr Kerkar has ‘deliberately’ denigrated Samarth Swami Ramdas, and asked whether devotees and other devout Hindus will not “take him to task” for this.
A banner headline across the top of the front page states that “stopping” those denigrating Lord Ganesh is nothing but ‘bhakti’ or devotion. Several other news items in the newspaper use strong language to denounce Dr Kerkar. The newspaper has also listed the telephone numbers of Dr Kerkar and Mr Nayak, and urged readers to call them and “protest”.
Thanks to this blatant provocation, both Dr Kerkar and Raju Nayak have been getting dozens of threatening calls a day. Some callers have threatened to chop off their fingers, others to kill them. HJS and SS supporters have filed police complaints against Dr Kerkar and Mr Nayak in different police stations.
If any of the fundamentalist followers of the HJS and SS actually follow through with their threats, who will be responsible? Under Section153 IPC, wantonly giving provocation with intent to cause riot is punishable – by up to one year in jail if rioting is committed, and up to six months in jail if rioting is not committed.
Anyone who feels that our fears are exaggerated should remember that members of the Sanatan Saunstha are accused of setting off a bomb in a Thane theatre, near Mumbai, because it was showing a drama that they the SS had denounced as ‘denigrating’ Hindu deities. The Goa Police should take this threat extremely seriously, and provide adequate police protection to Dr Subodh Kerkar’s studio and residence, as well as the Lokmat office and Raju Nayak’s residence.
The HJS and SS are fond of picking soft targets. When people consecrate stones and trees as ‘Gods’ on the roadside, is it not an act of ‘denigration’? If the SS and HJS are serious about their so-called mission, let them stop these roadside shrines first. There is a tree at Karmal Ghat, Canacona, that some people claim resembles Lord Ganesh. They have started to built a temple around it, that will inevitably block part of National Highway 17. Let the HJS and SS show their sincerity by first stopping ‘denigration’ through such shrines.
--
Herald, 18 Aug 2009, p 2
Scribe alleges death threats from Hindu fundamentalist
HERALD REPORTER
PANJIM, AUG 17
Editor of newly-launched Marathi newspaper Lokmat, Raju Nayak today alleged that some Hindu fundamentalist have threatened to kill him and his family for publishing a cartoon in the newspaper.
Nayak, in his complaint to the Director General of Police Bhimsen Bassi alleged that he has been receiving calls from various people claiming to be members of Hindutva organizations threatening to kill him and his family for publishing cartoons by painter and noted cartoonist Dr Subodh Kerkar.
Nayak further said that the threatening calls by members of Hindutva organizations like Sanatan and Hindu Janjagran Samiti increased after Marathi newspaper Sanatan Prabhat, printed his office telephone number and asked its members to call him up.
“Since then we have been harassed by callers from Goa and Maharashtra,” he alleged.
Nayak has also pointed out that the members of the Sanatan Prabhat organization have been questioned by the Maharashtra police for trying to make bombs and planning terrorist activities in that state.
“The details about inflammatory inciting articles and their call to Sanatan supporters and readers to express anger against me and Subodh Kerkar can viewed on Sanatan Prabhat web site,’ he said.
Further, he said, “surprisingly, one of the calls received today was by Dr Vijay Nadkarni from the number 08322735819. The caller threatened to kill me for what he claimed to be hurting of Hindu sentiments. On inquiry I have found that the number is from the Government-owned ESI Hospital in Margao and the said Nadkarni is a government doctor attached to the same hospital.”
Nayak has enclosed the copies of the illustrations of Ganesh published in Lokmat Goa dated August 11, 2009 and the cartoon on Swami Ramdas Samarth published in the issue dated August 13 “for proof that they are just works of imagination by a talented artist.”
CALANGUTE CORRESPONDENT ADDS: Calangute police on Monday registered an offence against an unknown person who allegedly threatened Dr Subodh Kerkar on his mobile phone in connection with a controversial picture of Lord Ganesha.
Confirming this, Calangute PI Nolasco Raposo told Herald that an offence had been registered against an unknown person for allegedly threatening Dr Kerkar.
When contacted, some members of the Shantadurga temple committee in Calangute claimed they did not find anything offensive with the paintings of Dr Kerkar. “The issue has been blown out of proportion by a few disgruntled elements,” they added.
Speaking to Herald, Chandrakant Chodankar, one of the committee members, said they went to confirm the veracity of the drawings by Dr Kerkar on Monday, but did not find anything offensive with the paintings.
Dr Kerkar reportedly told the committee members that since he too is a Hindu, he would never disrespect his own God and religion.
--
HJS threatens demo outside Kerkar’s gallery
HERALD REPORTER
PANJIM, AUG 17
The series of sketches of Lord Ganesh by renowned artist Dr Subodh Kerkar have earned him ire of Hindu organisations in the state and Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (HJS) has planned to hold a demonstration at the venue of the exhibition of the painter on August 20.
HJS has filed a police complaint against Kerkar for hurting religious sentiments. “What Kerkar has indulged is an obvious violation of section 149 of CrPC. If he does not cancel his scheduled exhibition of these indecent pictures, we will protest outside his gallery,” HJS convenor Jayesh Thali told reporters.
Kerkar, a famous artist has drawn pictures showing Lord Ganesh doing somersaults, Oscar trophy and other actions, which are taken as disrespect by right wing organizations, Thali said.
These drawings will be exhibited in the Kerkar art gallery at Calangute from August 20 to August 31.
“This is an insult to Hindu religion. We have an emotional attachment towards Lord Ganesh,” Sadashiv Dhond, an activist from Dharma Shakti Sena, said.
Kerkar has also denigrated Samarth Ramdas Swami by showing him wearing a coat in Lokmat, Thali said adding that like M F Hussain, Kerkar too has not done cartoons or sketches on other religious gods. “Kerkar is denigrating Lord Ganesh for commercial benefits”, he said.
However, there is no mention of how Sanatan Prabhat has published the phone number of Kerkar and Raju Nayak urging its readers to protest the sketches.
Meanwhile, Kerkar has said that he has been receiving threatening calls from as far as Pune wherein they warn him to chop off his fingers for drawing Lord Ganesh in indecent manner.
Apparently, Dr Kerkar began to get phone calls after Sanathan Prabhat newspaper published the phone numbers of the cartoonist and the editor of the newspaper Lokmat Raju Nayak urging its followers to call up the two for the “blasphemous” cartoons.
--
‘It is assault on freedom of expression’
HERALD REPORTER
PANJIM, AUG 17
Akhil Bharatiya Marathi Patrakar Parishad, Mumbai, has termed the threats to kill issued to Lokmat Editor Raju Nayak for publishing cartoons of noted painter Subodh Kerkar, as assault on freedom of expression.
The Parishad has condemned the attack on Nayak in the strongest terms, at a meeting held today. It was attended by Vijay Patil (President), P D Patil (Secretary), Madhav Ambore (working president), Kiran Naik (Treasurer) and former president S M Deshmukh.
Nayak is the president of Goa Marathi Patrakar Sangh which is a branch of Akhil Bharatiya Marathi Patrakar Parishad. Nayak has been a victim of the Hindu fundamentalists, according to a police complaint, for publishing a cartoon of Kerkar. The meeting also urged the local administration to act promptly if there is any attempt to take law in their hands.
--
Times of India, Panjim, 18 Aug
Police bow to pressure, ask Kerkar to stop show
Preetu Nair, TNN 18 August 2009, 06:21am IST
Print Email Discuss Bookmark/Share Save Comment Text Size: |
PANAJI: Cowing under pressure from the Hindu Janjagruti Samiti (HJS), the police on Monday served notice on reputed Goan artist Subodh Kerkar to
“desist from getting involved in such activities which may insult religious feelings or religious beliefs”. SP (North) Bosco George said Kerkar “should keep in mind the sentiments of the community and avoid creating a law and order problem”. “We will soon take a decision on whether or not the artist’s graphics hurt sentiments.
If it is found to hurt religious sentiments, we will initiate legal action against him,” he said. HJS had petitioned the police last week alleging that Kerkar had published “drawings of Lord Ganesh in various positions”, thereby insulting religious beliefs. It also wanted that the artist’s exhibition of Ganesha drawings be stopped. Earlier this month, HJS had demanded that the Goa State Museum remove M F Husain’s ‘Standing Buddha’ from its gallery. Officials said the matter would be taken up with higher authorities.
Even as the Calangute police issued notice to Kerkar under section 149 CrPC (police powers to prevent cognizable offence), the artist said he would go ahead with his exhibition. He also sought police protection apprehending that some organisations might try to disrupt his show scheduled from August 20 to 31, 2009 at the Kerkar Art Gallery in Calangute. Kerkar also alleged that on Monday he received calls from unknown persons, abusing him and threatening to murder him.
On receiving his complaint, the police have registered an offence under section 507 IPC (criminal intimidation by an anonymous communication) against unknown persons. “There is absolutely no intention of hurting anybody’s religious feelings. My drawings are my offerings to Shri Ganapati and no kind of insult is intended,” he said. “If some people’s feelings have been hurt by these drawings, it only shows their narrow-mindedness and fanaticism.
May Lord Ganesh help them clear their minds,” he said. “You (police) are most welcome to my gallery any time to view my drawings and judge for yourself,” Kerkar said in his reply to the police.
August 15, 2009
Victim as Culprit: Emraan Hashmi's House Hunt
Victim as the Culprit
Ram Puniyani
One BJP activist from Mumbai has filed a complaint (August 3rd 2009) against actor Emraan Hashmi accusing him of promoting communal enmity. Mahesh Bhatt who gave statement in support of Emran Hashmi also figures in the complaint. Emraan Hashmi had earlier approached state minorities commission that he has been discriminated against by the housing society, Nibhana in posh Pali hill locality of Mumbai. His complaint has been that he had already paid the advance of a lakh of rupees to the seller of the flat, but the housing society refused to give the no objection certificate on the ground that Hashmi is a Muslim. Many others have challenged this version; the society secretary said that they do not discriminate against people on the ground of religion, etc. A week later the compromise was struck between the actor and the society.
One does not know from newspaper reports, as to which version is true, why should Emraan state what he has stated? One also knows that similar trend of Muslims being denied houses in mixed localities have been there earlier as well. No society or builder will officially state that a people from particular religion are not permitted in their complex, these things operate in a very subtle way. Last year Shabana Azmi also was denied her choice to buy the house in a particular area. To that also many people just disbelieved it and many others ridiculed the actor, doubting the authenticity of the fact. It sometimes really sounds surreal that an actor is being denied a flat in a particular housing complex.
The peak of the reaction is seen in the form of a BJP activist filing a case against the actor for promoting communal enmity! Earlier Shabana Azmi and now Emraan Hashmi have faced this situation. There are many other such cases which might have been there but not known to us. For those who interact with large section of the community it is no secret that this type of denial persists more so in Mumbai and also in other places. The religion-caste based societies are there and they are a big set back to the process of national integration, which began during freedom movement. This process has been going on with lots of hiccups due to the rising communal violence, the outcome of communal politics, which aims at communal polarization.
The exclusions of ‘others’ is of various types. There are Parsi, Jain societies which have excluded those not belonging to their religion. In the aftermath of carnage many a Muslims after taking the beating decide to migrate away from the mixed localities to migrate to safer pastures, which later on come to be dubbed as Mini Pakistan’s. The latest observation has been the members of minority community have not been permitted to return to their original abodes. This was observed in Gujarat and later in Kandhmal. Similarly in areas where Muslims are in majority Hindus have been leaving that area voluntarily. The seeds of suspicion, which make them leave, are sown due to prevailing social common sense which demonizes the minorities. This process of exclusion by choice or by force of circumstances, both is very harmful for the national integration; to the concept of fraternity in particular gets a big beating due to this. Some of Mumbai’s suburbs, Mumbra, Bhendi Bazar, Jogeshwari have come up as areas with heavy concentration of Muslims. This concentration went up in the aftermath of the Mumbai violence of 1992-93. In Gujarat also in most cities Muslims got further isolated in the wake of 2002 carnage.
Due to this pattern of violence the general perceptions in society have worsened and now the whole Muslim community is painted as the homogenous uniform body painted in a color, which has nothing to do with truth. Further this physical isolation intensifies the negativity of perceptions about the ‘other’ community and this is mutually reciprocated by different religious communities. This lack of trust in fellow Indians is extremely dangerous.
So far, those complaining against the discrimination in allotment of housing were at least heard but now they are been alleged to be creating enmity! We cannot gloss over societal problems and expect that they are not there. Ostrich like, we can not hide our heads in the sands of make believe, and deny the realities. It is only after properly understanding the social problems that we can solve it. Emran Hashmi in a way has mustered courage to bring forward the phenomenon which is very much there. To treat such a person as culprit is like accusing the girl who has been raped, as saying that she has invited it! In a way this is also the pattern of society, to accuse the victims as having brought the misery onto themselves because of their own fallacies. There is a perception that Muslims start the riots and invite the trouble for themselves. This of course is far from true as a research by a police officer shows (V.N.Rai, Combating Communal Conflicts) and by the inquiry Commission reports including the latest one of Srikrishna Commission report which studies Mumbai riots.
Technicalities apart we need to address this serious social issue. We have examples in small countries like Singapore, where in the Government housing scheme there are reservations for different ethnic groups. This ensures that people from different ethnic-religious communities are neighbors and have an inbuilt situation where they interact socially. We are far from that. The biased builders and subtle operation of biases in the housing complexes needs to be done away by measures which are multilayered. Legal protection, affirmative action and debunking the misconceptions about minorities are the need of the hour. The compromise struck between the actor and society is welcome and kindles the hope that these exclusionary trends get wiped out in due course, one also hopes we are able to overcome these biases against our own citizens and create a more amicable atmosphere for all of us to live together.
(www.pluralindia.com, ram.puniyani@gmail.com)
Ram Puniyani
One BJP activist from Mumbai has filed a complaint (August 3rd 2009) against actor Emraan Hashmi accusing him of promoting communal enmity. Mahesh Bhatt who gave statement in support of Emran Hashmi also figures in the complaint. Emraan Hashmi had earlier approached state minorities commission that he has been discriminated against by the housing society, Nibhana in posh Pali hill locality of Mumbai. His complaint has been that he had already paid the advance of a lakh of rupees to the seller of the flat, but the housing society refused to give the no objection certificate on the ground that Hashmi is a Muslim. Many others have challenged this version; the society secretary said that they do not discriminate against people on the ground of religion, etc. A week later the compromise was struck between the actor and the society.
One does not know from newspaper reports, as to which version is true, why should Emraan state what he has stated? One also knows that similar trend of Muslims being denied houses in mixed localities have been there earlier as well. No society or builder will officially state that a people from particular religion are not permitted in their complex, these things operate in a very subtle way. Last year Shabana Azmi also was denied her choice to buy the house in a particular area. To that also many people just disbelieved it and many others ridiculed the actor, doubting the authenticity of the fact. It sometimes really sounds surreal that an actor is being denied a flat in a particular housing complex.
The peak of the reaction is seen in the form of a BJP activist filing a case against the actor for promoting communal enmity! Earlier Shabana Azmi and now Emraan Hashmi have faced this situation. There are many other such cases which might have been there but not known to us. For those who interact with large section of the community it is no secret that this type of denial persists more so in Mumbai and also in other places. The religion-caste based societies are there and they are a big set back to the process of national integration, which began during freedom movement. This process has been going on with lots of hiccups due to the rising communal violence, the outcome of communal politics, which aims at communal polarization.
The exclusions of ‘others’ is of various types. There are Parsi, Jain societies which have excluded those not belonging to their religion. In the aftermath of carnage many a Muslims after taking the beating decide to migrate away from the mixed localities to migrate to safer pastures, which later on come to be dubbed as Mini Pakistan’s. The latest observation has been the members of minority community have not been permitted to return to their original abodes. This was observed in Gujarat and later in Kandhmal. Similarly in areas where Muslims are in majority Hindus have been leaving that area voluntarily. The seeds of suspicion, which make them leave, are sown due to prevailing social common sense which demonizes the minorities. This process of exclusion by choice or by force of circumstances, both is very harmful for the national integration; to the concept of fraternity in particular gets a big beating due to this. Some of Mumbai’s suburbs, Mumbra, Bhendi Bazar, Jogeshwari have come up as areas with heavy concentration of Muslims. This concentration went up in the aftermath of the Mumbai violence of 1992-93. In Gujarat also in most cities Muslims got further isolated in the wake of 2002 carnage.
Due to this pattern of violence the general perceptions in society have worsened and now the whole Muslim community is painted as the homogenous uniform body painted in a color, which has nothing to do with truth. Further this physical isolation intensifies the negativity of perceptions about the ‘other’ community and this is mutually reciprocated by different religious communities. This lack of trust in fellow Indians is extremely dangerous.
So far, those complaining against the discrimination in allotment of housing were at least heard but now they are been alleged to be creating enmity! We cannot gloss over societal problems and expect that they are not there. Ostrich like, we can not hide our heads in the sands of make believe, and deny the realities. It is only after properly understanding the social problems that we can solve it. Emran Hashmi in a way has mustered courage to bring forward the phenomenon which is very much there. To treat such a person as culprit is like accusing the girl who has been raped, as saying that she has invited it! In a way this is also the pattern of society, to accuse the victims as having brought the misery onto themselves because of their own fallacies. There is a perception that Muslims start the riots and invite the trouble for themselves. This of course is far from true as a research by a police officer shows (V.N.Rai, Combating Communal Conflicts) and by the inquiry Commission reports including the latest one of Srikrishna Commission report which studies Mumbai riots.
Technicalities apart we need to address this serious social issue. We have examples in small countries like Singapore, where in the Government housing scheme there are reservations for different ethnic groups. This ensures that people from different ethnic-religious communities are neighbors and have an inbuilt situation where they interact socially. We are far from that. The biased builders and subtle operation of biases in the housing complexes needs to be done away by measures which are multilayered. Legal protection, affirmative action and debunking the misconceptions about minorities are the need of the hour. The compromise struck between the actor and society is welcome and kindles the hope that these exclusionary trends get wiped out in due course, one also hopes we are able to overcome these biases against our own citizens and create a more amicable atmosphere for all of us to live together.
(www.pluralindia.com, ram.puniyani@gmail.com)
August 13, 2009
It’s showtime for secularism
Herald, Panjim, 13 Aug 2009
Editorial
The Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (HJS) is back to its usual tricks. It has once more targeted its favourite whipping boy, noted painter M F Husain. HJS convenor Jayesh Thali on Tuesday demanded that M F Husain’s painting titled ‘Standing Buddha’, on display at the state museum, should be removed.
Herald carried a photograph of the oil painting in its yesterday’s edition. It shows a white bull against a vividly coloured backdrop. There is nothing even remotely objectionable about the painting. Jayesh Thali admits this. He said that he had no basic objection to this particular painting.
But, he says, his outfit is determined to prevent Husain’s art from being displayed publicly throughout India. He has threatened that the HJS would be “forced to agitate” if the painting was not removed from public display
Goa Museum Director Radha Bhave refused to take any decision, and said that she will meet ‘higher officials’ first. So now Chief Minister Digambar Kamat – who holds the portfolio of Art and Culture and is therefore the ‘highest’ official – must decide whether he will order the removal of an admittedly unobjectionable painting and allow a Hindu fundamentalist organisation to openly pursue an admittedly political agenda, or whether he will stand up for the rule of law and the avowedly secular policy of his government and party.
Mr Thali says that M F Husain has hurt the religious feelings and national sentiments of millions of Hindus and Indians earlier, and that his paintings of Hindu deities and ‘Bharat Mata’ in the nude were thoroughly obscene and in bad taste. Over 1,600 criminal cases were filed all over India against Husain for ‘obscenity’ and ‘hurting religious sentiments’. Hundreds of them were filed in Goa, mainly by HJS and Sanatan Sanstha activists.
The Supreme Court asked the Delhi High Court to hear them. There were three main grounds for the complaints against Husain: ‘Obscenity’ (Sec 292 and 294), ‘causing offence to religious sensibilities’ (Sec 295 and 298), and ‘creating ill-will among communities on religious grounds’ (Sec 153), all under the Indian Penal Code (IPC). On 8 May 2008, Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul delivered a reasoned judgment rejecting all three grounds and quashing all criminal charges against Husain. “There are many such pictures, paintings, and sculptures, and some of them are in temples also,” the Court said.
All the HJS allegations against Husain have already been examined and rejected by the Delhi High Court. Besides, M F Husain has himself long ago apologised in writing for any offence he may have unwittingly caused through his work. He has specifically clarified that the painting most vehemently objected to by the HJS and its ilk had never been titled by him as ‘Bharat Mata’.
It does seem that it is not Husain but the HJS that is ‘creating ill-will among communities on religious grounds’ by constantly bringing up non-issues like this that have long ago been settled, both by the courts and by the person in the centre of the storm. Especially so when they themselves admit that the painting they want removed is not objectionable.
The HJS complains that the Indian government was quick to ban Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and Hollywood film The da Vinci Code (not true), but takes Hindus for granted. They resent the amount of attention Muslims have commanded when they have been offended by images (like the Danish cartoon) that they consider blasphemous – a concept alien to Hinduism. What do they want really? That Hinduism should be more like Islam and Christianity? We are not at all sure that the majority of Hindus would agree with this.
But that is another issue. The point is that the Husain painting in the state museum is not objectionable – even the HJS says so. Therefore, it should under no circumstances be removed. The government of Goa is not here to advance the political agendas of fundamentalist organisations, no matter which religion’s cause they peddle. The museum should get the security it requires. Or, if it decides to succumb to the HJS’s irrational demand, the Digambar Kamat government should stop calling itself secular.
Editorial
The Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (HJS) is back to its usual tricks. It has once more targeted its favourite whipping boy, noted painter M F Husain. HJS convenor Jayesh Thali on Tuesday demanded that M F Husain’s painting titled ‘Standing Buddha’, on display at the state museum, should be removed.
Herald carried a photograph of the oil painting in its yesterday’s edition. It shows a white bull against a vividly coloured backdrop. There is nothing even remotely objectionable about the painting. Jayesh Thali admits this. He said that he had no basic objection to this particular painting.
But, he says, his outfit is determined to prevent Husain’s art from being displayed publicly throughout India. He has threatened that the HJS would be “forced to agitate” if the painting was not removed from public display
Goa Museum Director Radha Bhave refused to take any decision, and said that she will meet ‘higher officials’ first. So now Chief Minister Digambar Kamat – who holds the portfolio of Art and Culture and is therefore the ‘highest’ official – must decide whether he will order the removal of an admittedly unobjectionable painting and allow a Hindu fundamentalist organisation to openly pursue an admittedly political agenda, or whether he will stand up for the rule of law and the avowedly secular policy of his government and party.
Mr Thali says that M F Husain has hurt the religious feelings and national sentiments of millions of Hindus and Indians earlier, and that his paintings of Hindu deities and ‘Bharat Mata’ in the nude were thoroughly obscene and in bad taste. Over 1,600 criminal cases were filed all over India against Husain for ‘obscenity’ and ‘hurting religious sentiments’. Hundreds of them were filed in Goa, mainly by HJS and Sanatan Sanstha activists.
The Supreme Court asked the Delhi High Court to hear them. There were three main grounds for the complaints against Husain: ‘Obscenity’ (Sec 292 and 294), ‘causing offence to religious sensibilities’ (Sec 295 and 298), and ‘creating ill-will among communities on religious grounds’ (Sec 153), all under the Indian Penal Code (IPC). On 8 May 2008, Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul delivered a reasoned judgment rejecting all three grounds and quashing all criminal charges against Husain. “There are many such pictures, paintings, and sculptures, and some of them are in temples also,” the Court said.
All the HJS allegations against Husain have already been examined and rejected by the Delhi High Court. Besides, M F Husain has himself long ago apologised in writing for any offence he may have unwittingly caused through his work. He has specifically clarified that the painting most vehemently objected to by the HJS and its ilk had never been titled by him as ‘Bharat Mata’.
It does seem that it is not Husain but the HJS that is ‘creating ill-will among communities on religious grounds’ by constantly bringing up non-issues like this that have long ago been settled, both by the courts and by the person in the centre of the storm. Especially so when they themselves admit that the painting they want removed is not objectionable.
The HJS complains that the Indian government was quick to ban Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and Hollywood film The da Vinci Code (not true), but takes Hindus for granted. They resent the amount of attention Muslims have commanded when they have been offended by images (like the Danish cartoon) that they consider blasphemous – a concept alien to Hinduism. What do they want really? That Hinduism should be more like Islam and Christianity? We are not at all sure that the majority of Hindus would agree with this.
But that is another issue. The point is that the Husain painting in the state museum is not objectionable – even the HJS says so. Therefore, it should under no circumstances be removed. The government of Goa is not here to advance the political agendas of fundamentalist organisations, no matter which religion’s cause they peddle. The museum should get the security it requires. Or, if it decides to succumb to the HJS’s irrational demand, the Digambar Kamat government should stop calling itself secular.
August 10, 2009
Crime and no Punishment: Malegaon Blast accused get respite
Crime and No Punishment
Malegaon Blast Accused Get a Respite
Ram Puniyani
Eleven suspects of Malegaon blast, September 9, 2008, got a breather (August 01, 2009) when the special court dropped the charges under MCCOA against 11 suspects of the crime. Prosecution failed to show that all accused were member of a single organized crime syndicate. This MCOCA act also requires that there should be two previous charge sheets against one of them. Since the case prepared by police could not prove these the charges have been dropped. The ATS and Maharashtra Chief Minister have stated that they will ensure that they will go to the higher courts, against the order of this court decision. In past Congress has not undertaken any serious efforts to punish the guilty, so this statement of the authorities has to be taken with a pinch of salt.
MCCOA apart, the overall scenario and line of investigation followed by police has left lot of ground uncovered which can come handy for the culprits getting away lightly if the police does not do its home work well. There may also be deeper political dimensions to the issue as well. The first point which struck the observers so far was that for a long time police line of investigation in the blast cases was based on the premise that some Muslim group is involved in the crime. This created two problems. One was that the innocents kept getting arrested and tortured and second that the real culprits could hide under the cover provided by the popular perception about terrorism. The vicious cycle was broken by Hemant Karakre with the impeccable evidence in the form of the Motor cycle of Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur from the crowded lane of Malegaon. Her link led to several people and many organizations. The people involved were Swami Dayanand Pandey, Lt Col Prasad Shrikant Puroit, Ajay Rahirar, retired Major Ramesh Upadhayay, Rakesh Dhavade and many others. The connections with Abhinva Bharat, Hindu Jagran Samiti, Army units, Bhonsala Military School (Nagpur and Nashik), Akanksha Resort Sinhgad all emerged and the picture of a broad conspiracy became clear.
The investigating officer, Hemant Karkare, about whose death in 26/11 terror attack, Antulay raised certain questions, faced immense pressure due to criticism from Hindu right wingers, Thackeray’s paper Saamana went on to say that they spit on the face of such a anti-national person like Karkare, and some others also called him as Deshdrohi. One does not know what direct/indirect impact all this had on the future drafting of the charge sheet. Human Rights activist Teesta Setalvad in her articles in Communalism Combat Feb 2009 raised several questions about the charge sheet, which remain unanswered.
One recalls that the Nanded blast (April 2006) case investigation itself was very much muted and it was only the pressure of campaign form Rights activists that the investigation was pursued. Rakesh Dhawade, one of the accused in the Malegaon charge sheet had confessed to his involvement in the training of few youth, for the preparation and detonation of bombs. The training was done near the Sinhgad Fort, Pune, in July-August 2003. Despite this he was allowed to be discharged from the Purbea masjid blast case on July 27, 2009! ATS says it was because the local police did not file a strong enough charge sheet! One does not know whether it is a lack of coordination or there is something deeper to this?
It is beyond one’s comprehension as to why section 125, waging war against the Indian Nation, has not been applied to these accused. In this case the involvement of the serving military officers and the retired ones has not been probed. It has ramifications far deeper then can be seen from the surface. These military officers had the background of Bhonsla Military School, which is practically controlled by RSS. The RSS has its wing for retired military personnel and has a lot of emphasis on cultivating connections with men in uniform. The theft of 60 Kilograms of RDX by Purohit is a pointer of what the serving and military officers can do once they are ideologically indoctrinated by the notions other than that of secular democratic India. Purohit in his narco analysis on 9th November 2008 had revealed about his role in Samjhauta Express blast and a possible role Mecca Masjid blast.
There are multiple aspects of the case involved. One does not support MCCOA at all, it is not only arbitrary and draconian; it also is a refuge for police not to undertake the trouble for deeper investigation and doing its home work properly. Even if one does not trust the narco analysis, there are enough other evidences to link up all these accused indoctrinated by RSS ideology. The point is why so many links which are there for all to see are not followed? Why resort to the short cut of MCOCA, or Narco analysis.
The core point is the biases of the state apparatus, political, bureaucratic and that of police in particular which has resulted in evolution of two sets of justice delivery systems. One is for the affluent and privileged that can get away with whatever they want and the second is for the weaker sections, including minorities. Here right from the police investigation to the charge sheeting, the political influence and biases which influence the process of justice delivery (or the lack of it) and the final verdict all are having a tinge of bias.
The political polices do determine the whole process. It is such outcomes which make a section of population feel that they are used merely as vote banks and when the time of justice comes they are not considered at all. If the culprits of Malegaon are treated with kid gloves under the theory that violence from Hindu fold is retaliatory that will be the travesty of justice of the worst order.
Malegaon Blast Accused Get a Respite
Ram Puniyani
Eleven suspects of Malegaon blast, September 9, 2008, got a breather (August 01, 2009) when the special court dropped the charges under MCCOA against 11 suspects of the crime. Prosecution failed to show that all accused were member of a single organized crime syndicate. This MCOCA act also requires that there should be two previous charge sheets against one of them. Since the case prepared by police could not prove these the charges have been dropped. The ATS and Maharashtra Chief Minister have stated that they will ensure that they will go to the higher courts, against the order of this court decision. In past Congress has not undertaken any serious efforts to punish the guilty, so this statement of the authorities has to be taken with a pinch of salt.
MCCOA apart, the overall scenario and line of investigation followed by police has left lot of ground uncovered which can come handy for the culprits getting away lightly if the police does not do its home work well. There may also be deeper political dimensions to the issue as well. The first point which struck the observers so far was that for a long time police line of investigation in the blast cases was based on the premise that some Muslim group is involved in the crime. This created two problems. One was that the innocents kept getting arrested and tortured and second that the real culprits could hide under the cover provided by the popular perception about terrorism. The vicious cycle was broken by Hemant Karakre with the impeccable evidence in the form of the Motor cycle of Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur from the crowded lane of Malegaon. Her link led to several people and many organizations. The people involved were Swami Dayanand Pandey, Lt Col Prasad Shrikant Puroit, Ajay Rahirar, retired Major Ramesh Upadhayay, Rakesh Dhavade and many others. The connections with Abhinva Bharat, Hindu Jagran Samiti, Army units, Bhonsala Military School (Nagpur and Nashik), Akanksha Resort Sinhgad all emerged and the picture of a broad conspiracy became clear.
The investigating officer, Hemant Karkare, about whose death in 26/11 terror attack, Antulay raised certain questions, faced immense pressure due to criticism from Hindu right wingers, Thackeray’s paper Saamana went on to say that they spit on the face of such a anti-national person like Karkare, and some others also called him as Deshdrohi. One does not know what direct/indirect impact all this had on the future drafting of the charge sheet. Human Rights activist Teesta Setalvad in her articles in Communalism Combat Feb 2009 raised several questions about the charge sheet, which remain unanswered.
One recalls that the Nanded blast (April 2006) case investigation itself was very much muted and it was only the pressure of campaign form Rights activists that the investigation was pursued. Rakesh Dhawade, one of the accused in the Malegaon charge sheet had confessed to his involvement in the training of few youth, for the preparation and detonation of bombs. The training was done near the Sinhgad Fort, Pune, in July-August 2003. Despite this he was allowed to be discharged from the Purbea masjid blast case on July 27, 2009! ATS says it was because the local police did not file a strong enough charge sheet! One does not know whether it is a lack of coordination or there is something deeper to this?
It is beyond one’s comprehension as to why section 125, waging war against the Indian Nation, has not been applied to these accused. In this case the involvement of the serving military officers and the retired ones has not been probed. It has ramifications far deeper then can be seen from the surface. These military officers had the background of Bhonsla Military School, which is practically controlled by RSS. The RSS has its wing for retired military personnel and has a lot of emphasis on cultivating connections with men in uniform. The theft of 60 Kilograms of RDX by Purohit is a pointer of what the serving and military officers can do once they are ideologically indoctrinated by the notions other than that of secular democratic India. Purohit in his narco analysis on 9th November 2008 had revealed about his role in Samjhauta Express blast and a possible role Mecca Masjid blast.
There are multiple aspects of the case involved. One does not support MCCOA at all, it is not only arbitrary and draconian; it also is a refuge for police not to undertake the trouble for deeper investigation and doing its home work properly. Even if one does not trust the narco analysis, there are enough other evidences to link up all these accused indoctrinated by RSS ideology. The point is why so many links which are there for all to see are not followed? Why resort to the short cut of MCOCA, or Narco analysis.
The core point is the biases of the state apparatus, political, bureaucratic and that of police in particular which has resulted in evolution of two sets of justice delivery systems. One is for the affluent and privileged that can get away with whatever they want and the second is for the weaker sections, including minorities. Here right from the police investigation to the charge sheeting, the political influence and biases which influence the process of justice delivery (or the lack of it) and the final verdict all are having a tinge of bias.
The political polices do determine the whole process. It is such outcomes which make a section of population feel that they are used merely as vote banks and when the time of justice comes they are not considered at all. If the culprits of Malegaon are treated with kid gloves under the theory that violence from Hindu fold is retaliatory that will be the travesty of justice of the worst order.
August 03, 2009
August 01, 2009
Communalised Segreation in Bombay's Housing: When it effects someone from the elites, it gets media attention
Muslim star claims housing bias
by Zubair Ahmed
BBC News, Mumbai
A Bollywood actor has alleged he was refused a flat in an upmarket
part of Mumbai because of his Muslim faith.
Emraan Hashmi says that a housing society in Pali hill, home to many
Bollywood stars, blocked his purchase.
But a statement issued by the housing society says it has not taken
any decision on whether to allow him to buy a flat in its apartment
building.
Mr Hashmi says he has lodged a complaint with the Minorities
Commission of Maharashtra.
He says the housing society in Pali hill refused to issue a
certificate necessary to buy or rent a flat in Mumbai.
He has also demanded that the state government takes action against
the housing society.
Complaints
Mr Hashmi held a press conference on Friday in which he also said that
housing societies in Mumbai are discriminating against Muslims.
"I had finalised a deal to buy a flat in Pali hill but the society
refused to issue a No Objection Certificate because I am a Muslim," he
said.
His uncle, the film-maker Mahesh Bhatt, said that it was important to
highlight the issue because discrimination by housing societies
against Muslims was widespread.
Last year another Bollywood actor, Zulfi Sayed, also alleged that he
was denied a flat in a suburb of Mumbai because he was Muslim.
Mumbai's suburbs are dotted with multi-storey apartment buildings -
each of which is run by a housing society. They have a lot of power,
including the right to accept or refuse a tenant or a buyer.
They can also evict an existing member on the grounds of breaking the
society's rules.
Some Hindus have also claimed that they find it difficult to rent or
buy a flat in exclusive Muslim suburbs or buildings.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/south_asia/8178289.stm
by Zubair Ahmed
BBC News, Mumbai
A Bollywood actor has alleged he was refused a flat in an upmarket
part of Mumbai because of his Muslim faith.
Emraan Hashmi says that a housing society in Pali hill, home to many
Bollywood stars, blocked his purchase.
But a statement issued by the housing society says it has not taken
any decision on whether to allow him to buy a flat in its apartment
building.
Mr Hashmi says he has lodged a complaint with the Minorities
Commission of Maharashtra.
He says the housing society in Pali hill refused to issue a
certificate necessary to buy or rent a flat in Mumbai.
He has also demanded that the state government takes action against
the housing society.
Complaints
Mr Hashmi held a press conference on Friday in which he also said that
housing societies in Mumbai are discriminating against Muslims.
"I had finalised a deal to buy a flat in Pali hill but the society
refused to issue a No Objection Certificate because I am a Muslim," he
said.
His uncle, the film-maker Mahesh Bhatt, said that it was important to
highlight the issue because discrimination by housing societies
against Muslims was widespread.
Last year another Bollywood actor, Zulfi Sayed, also alleged that he
was denied a flat in a suburb of Mumbai because he was Muslim.
Mumbai's suburbs are dotted with multi-storey apartment buildings -
each of which is run by a housing society. They have a lot of power,
including the right to accept or refuse a tenant or a buyer.
They can also evict an existing member on the grounds of breaking the
society's rules.
Some Hindus have also claimed that they find it difficult to rent or
buy a flat in exclusive Muslim suburbs or buildings.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/south_asia/8178289.stm
In the Name of SIMI
In the Name of SIMI
Ram Puniyani
In third week of July (2009) Maharashtra police arrested several Muslims in Pusad, Akola and neighboring regions on the charge that they are reviving SIMI under a new name. It is after a fairly long time that one has heard of arrests in the name of SIMI. The earlier cycle of arrest of Muslim youth which was a matter of routine after every blast, Malegaon, Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad, Jaipur and other places was broken with the impeccable proof of Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur’s motor cycle being found in Malegaon. The trace of motorcycle link led to Swami Dayanand Pandey, Lt Col Shrikant Purohit and many others associated with Hindu right wing organizations, offshoots of or inspired by RSS ideology.
Society witnessed that after most of the blasts so far, Muslim youth were arrested on the charge of being behind the blasts, were harassed for months and then released for the lack of evidence. This was more or less a routine pattern and it frightened the whole Muslim community to no end. Many a Muslim youths’ careers were crushed due to these reckless and baseless arrests. Many a minority families under went severe problems, were ostracized from their own community once they were dragged into the net on the charges which were guided more by the prevalent biases or stereotypes than any substance. SIMI came to be regarded as the core organization responsible for fomenting trouble through youth. Despite the ban on SIMI in 2001, the Muslim youth kept on being labeled as SIMI activists and were put behind the bar.
It’s not to say that SIMI was holding ideology which was talking of democracy and secularism. One knows that SIMI, which began as a student front of Jamat-e-Islami Hind gradually, came out of its control and became radical in the decade of 1990s in particular. Yoginder Sikand, an Islamic scholar of repute gives a very crisp history of this organization (/www.countercurrents.org/comm-sikand150706.htm). SIMI was founded on the ideology propounded by Maulana Maududi, according to whom all non Muslims are kafirs and man made systems like democracy are false and Shariah is the only way. It kept the goal of spreading Islamic consciousness amongst Muslim students and peaceful missionary work amongst non Muslims. Some events in the decade of 1990 were to shape its ideology in a radical and militant direction. These events were Soviet Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan and Islamization of Pakistan in particular.
Meanwhile Jamat- e- Islami came to accept democracy and Secularism as its guiding ideology. SIMI came out from the control of its parent organization to talk in a different language. The demolition of Babri Mosque and the post demolition violence gave it a fillip in the negative direction. It said that Democracy has failed to protect Muslims so there is a need for some one like Mohammed Gazni, the destroyer of Somanth. This was also the theme of the poster released by them in the aftermath of Babri demolition. It was alleged that SIMI has links with Sikh and Kashmiri militants. It was alleged that they have links with Osama and ISI. At the same time SIMI claimed that it wants to work through peaceful methods, while the worsening communal situation made it to say that Muslims are a belabored community. Under these circumstances SIMI was banned in 2001.
The ban on SIMI was challenged, so a tribunal had to be appointed to review the ban. Ajit Sahi of Tehelka in his painstaking investigation, followed the tribunal’s sitting all through (Tehelka, SIMI Fictions, 12th August 2008), the tribunal did not find any evidence of the charges put against the organization for banning it. The ban could not be upheld. About this investigation Ajit Sahi said, “… his investigation is no dry story rising from lifeless court documents. It has been an emotional rollercoaster to sit across young boys barely into manhood, their foreheads creased by sleepless nights worried stiff over the jailing of a father, a brother, wondering endlessly, “Will this end? Is this for real? What do I do now? Where do I go now? Will I survive this?” He further says “as I interviewed countless Muslims, so weathered, I couldn’t but ask myself, What if this was me? What if it was my brother, my father in jail?”
With the World scenario tilting against the Islam and Muslims, courtesy the radical Islamists trained in the Madrassas set up in Pakistan with US aid, the popular psyche perceived an average Muslim as a terrorist and police machinery operated on this understanding. Even when scores of lives were shattered and the community came under the intimidation of highest order, the Government did not put any corrective to this pattern of investigation with which police was pursuing its work.
Disturbed by this situation two people’s tribunal were set up by the Human Rights groups. The report and recommendations of both the tribunal are similar and overlapping. The first one was headed by Justices (Retd) Bhargava and Sardar Ali Khan, with prominent social activists like Asghar Ali Engineer and Prashant Bhushan as the jury. The testimonies showed that a large number of innocent young Muslims have been and are being victimized by the police on the charge of being involved in various terrorist acts across the country. This is particularly so in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan, though not limited to these States. This victimization and demonisation of Muslims in the guise of investigation of terror offences, is having a very serious psychological impact on the minds of not only the families of the victims but also other members of the community. It is leading to a very strong sense of insecurity and alienation which may lead to frightful consequences for the nation.
The second tribunal set up by different set of organization s of Rajasthan worked under the leadership of Justice (Retd) Bhargava. One of it pertinent observation was that the police authorities investigating the terror offences appear to be violating all the laws of the land and directions of the Supreme Court during the conduct of the investigations. In particular, many persons have been detained for days or weeks, without showing them to be arrested and without producing them before any Magistrate. They have been sometimes tortured and humiliated by the police officers. They have not been allowed to meet their relatives and lawyers, who have often not even been informed of their detention. The investigation of the blasts by the police also appears to be communally motivated and only persons belonging to the Muslim community have been the target of the investigations.
The names of HUJI and SIMI have been bandied about by the police as the perpetrators of the blasts without any evidence. A number of former members of SIMI have been arrested and detained without any basis or evidence against them. The media has also been uncritically repeating and amplifying the baseless allegations and innuendoes of the police mentioning persons and organizations belonging to the Muslim community, thus resulting in ethnic profiling and feeding into the Islamophobia being sought to be created and reinforced in the minds of the Hindu community by the Hindutva organizations. In Jaipur this has resulted in the vilification of the entire Bengali Muslim community who has been victimized by the Hindutva organizations in complicity with the police.
Thousands of them have been picked up after the blasts and forcibly transported to New Jalpaiguri and then Bangladesh without any due process of law and without giving them an opportunity to show their Indian Citizenship. This has resulted in the ethnic cleansing of Jaipur.
One does not know with what seriousness the administration looks at these people’s tribunal, the fact is they have put forward profound realities of the society. It is imperative that the Government takes a serious look at these reports and instructs the investigation authorities to be more professional in their approach and sheds its biases while dealing with minority community.
Ram Puniyani
In third week of July (2009) Maharashtra police arrested several Muslims in Pusad, Akola and neighboring regions on the charge that they are reviving SIMI under a new name. It is after a fairly long time that one has heard of arrests in the name of SIMI. The earlier cycle of arrest of Muslim youth which was a matter of routine after every blast, Malegaon, Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad, Jaipur and other places was broken with the impeccable proof of Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur’s motor cycle being found in Malegaon. The trace of motorcycle link led to Swami Dayanand Pandey, Lt Col Shrikant Purohit and many others associated with Hindu right wing organizations, offshoots of or inspired by RSS ideology.
Society witnessed that after most of the blasts so far, Muslim youth were arrested on the charge of being behind the blasts, were harassed for months and then released for the lack of evidence. This was more or less a routine pattern and it frightened the whole Muslim community to no end. Many a Muslim youths’ careers were crushed due to these reckless and baseless arrests. Many a minority families under went severe problems, were ostracized from their own community once they were dragged into the net on the charges which were guided more by the prevalent biases or stereotypes than any substance. SIMI came to be regarded as the core organization responsible for fomenting trouble through youth. Despite the ban on SIMI in 2001, the Muslim youth kept on being labeled as SIMI activists and were put behind the bar.
It’s not to say that SIMI was holding ideology which was talking of democracy and secularism. One knows that SIMI, which began as a student front of Jamat-e-Islami Hind gradually, came out of its control and became radical in the decade of 1990s in particular. Yoginder Sikand, an Islamic scholar of repute gives a very crisp history of this organization (/www.countercurrents.org/comm-sikand150706.htm). SIMI was founded on the ideology propounded by Maulana Maududi, according to whom all non Muslims are kafirs and man made systems like democracy are false and Shariah is the only way. It kept the goal of spreading Islamic consciousness amongst Muslim students and peaceful missionary work amongst non Muslims. Some events in the decade of 1990 were to shape its ideology in a radical and militant direction. These events were Soviet Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan and Islamization of Pakistan in particular.
Meanwhile Jamat- e- Islami came to accept democracy and Secularism as its guiding ideology. SIMI came out from the control of its parent organization to talk in a different language. The demolition of Babri Mosque and the post demolition violence gave it a fillip in the negative direction. It said that Democracy has failed to protect Muslims so there is a need for some one like Mohammed Gazni, the destroyer of Somanth. This was also the theme of the poster released by them in the aftermath of Babri demolition. It was alleged that SIMI has links with Sikh and Kashmiri militants. It was alleged that they have links with Osama and ISI. At the same time SIMI claimed that it wants to work through peaceful methods, while the worsening communal situation made it to say that Muslims are a belabored community. Under these circumstances SIMI was banned in 2001.
The ban on SIMI was challenged, so a tribunal had to be appointed to review the ban. Ajit Sahi of Tehelka in his painstaking investigation, followed the tribunal’s sitting all through (Tehelka, SIMI Fictions, 12th August 2008), the tribunal did not find any evidence of the charges put against the organization for banning it. The ban could not be upheld. About this investigation Ajit Sahi said, “… his investigation is no dry story rising from lifeless court documents. It has been an emotional rollercoaster to sit across young boys barely into manhood, their foreheads creased by sleepless nights worried stiff over the jailing of a father, a brother, wondering endlessly, “Will this end? Is this for real? What do I do now? Where do I go now? Will I survive this?” He further says “as I interviewed countless Muslims, so weathered, I couldn’t but ask myself, What if this was me? What if it was my brother, my father in jail?”
With the World scenario tilting against the Islam and Muslims, courtesy the radical Islamists trained in the Madrassas set up in Pakistan with US aid, the popular psyche perceived an average Muslim as a terrorist and police machinery operated on this understanding. Even when scores of lives were shattered and the community came under the intimidation of highest order, the Government did not put any corrective to this pattern of investigation with which police was pursuing its work.
Disturbed by this situation two people’s tribunal were set up by the Human Rights groups. The report and recommendations of both the tribunal are similar and overlapping. The first one was headed by Justices (Retd) Bhargava and Sardar Ali Khan, with prominent social activists like Asghar Ali Engineer and Prashant Bhushan as the jury. The testimonies showed that a large number of innocent young Muslims have been and are being victimized by the police on the charge of being involved in various terrorist acts across the country. This is particularly so in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan, though not limited to these States. This victimization and demonisation of Muslims in the guise of investigation of terror offences, is having a very serious psychological impact on the minds of not only the families of the victims but also other members of the community. It is leading to a very strong sense of insecurity and alienation which may lead to frightful consequences for the nation.
The second tribunal set up by different set of organization s of Rajasthan worked under the leadership of Justice (Retd) Bhargava. One of it pertinent observation was that the police authorities investigating the terror offences appear to be violating all the laws of the land and directions of the Supreme Court during the conduct of the investigations. In particular, many persons have been detained for days or weeks, without showing them to be arrested and without producing them before any Magistrate. They have been sometimes tortured and humiliated by the police officers. They have not been allowed to meet their relatives and lawyers, who have often not even been informed of their detention. The investigation of the blasts by the police also appears to be communally motivated and only persons belonging to the Muslim community have been the target of the investigations.
The names of HUJI and SIMI have been bandied about by the police as the perpetrators of the blasts without any evidence. A number of former members of SIMI have been arrested and detained without any basis or evidence against them. The media has also been uncritically repeating and amplifying the baseless allegations and innuendoes of the police mentioning persons and organizations belonging to the Muslim community, thus resulting in ethnic profiling and feeding into the Islamophobia being sought to be created and reinforced in the minds of the Hindu community by the Hindutva organizations. In Jaipur this has resulted in the vilification of the entire Bengali Muslim community who has been victimized by the Hindutva organizations in complicity with the police.
Thousands of them have been picked up after the blasts and forcibly transported to New Jalpaiguri and then Bangladesh without any due process of law and without giving them an opportunity to show their Indian Citizenship. This has resulted in the ethnic cleansing of Jaipur.
One does not know with what seriousness the administration looks at these people’s tribunal, the fact is they have put forward profound realities of the society. It is imperative that the Government takes a serious look at these reports and instructs the investigation authorities to be more professional in their approach and sheds its biases while dealing with minority community.
Govt Shriks From Responsibility on Ensuring Freedom of Expression: M F Husain’s paintings will not be part of Arts Exhibit
IN THE ABSENCE OF ARTISTIC FREEDOM
The New Sunday Express
1 August 2009
Editorial
The absence of M F Husain’s paintings in a forthcoming arts exhibition in Delhi will not surprise anyone. No organiser would like to put up a show that would almost certainly be the target of attack by vandals. The solution could lie in arranging for the posting of a large police contingent. But, again, no organiser would like to turn the exhibition site into a fortress if only because it might put off some visitors. In any event, nothing can be farther apart than art and the strong arm of the state. What is worse, even the presence of armed policemen may not deter at least a few ruffians to sneak in posing as spectators and then attack Husain’s handiwork.
It was probably unavoidable, therefore, for the masters of the show to play safe. But what their capitulation to the threat of anti-socials implies is that the politically-inspired spirit of intolerance continues to be alive and well. The Hindutva brigade may have suffered an electoral setback, but its followers continue to pose a danger to any kind of art or artists of whom they do not approve. In the social sphere, therefore, they continue to hold the whip over a painter or writer or filmmaker who may transgress their perception of what is permissible.
But while the thuggish behaviour of these political activists is understandable, what is curious is the supine response of even those governments that claim to be secular and liberal-minded. The very fact that Husain is unable to return to his home country is in itself an indictment of the government at the Centre for its inability to offer him protection. As the Delhi High Court has said, “a painter at 90 deserves to be in his home, painting his canvas”. But if this criticism has had no impact on the powers-that-be, the reason apparently is that they consider it prudent not to let their political opponents exploit a controversial issue over which there is probably no unanimity of views even in the secular camp.
The high court may have observed that “a painter has his own perspective of looking at things” and that “it would not be proper to hold that he (Husain) had a deliberate intention to manifestly insult Bharat Mata” in his one of his paintings. But to the government, the option of retreat is clearly preferable to upholding artistic freedom.
The New Sunday Express
1 August 2009
Editorial
The absence of M F Husain’s paintings in a forthcoming arts exhibition in Delhi will not surprise anyone. No organiser would like to put up a show that would almost certainly be the target of attack by vandals. The solution could lie in arranging for the posting of a large police contingent. But, again, no organiser would like to turn the exhibition site into a fortress if only because it might put off some visitors. In any event, nothing can be farther apart than art and the strong arm of the state. What is worse, even the presence of armed policemen may not deter at least a few ruffians to sneak in posing as spectators and then attack Husain’s handiwork.
It was probably unavoidable, therefore, for the masters of the show to play safe. But what their capitulation to the threat of anti-socials implies is that the politically-inspired spirit of intolerance continues to be alive and well. The Hindutva brigade may have suffered an electoral setback, but its followers continue to pose a danger to any kind of art or artists of whom they do not approve. In the social sphere, therefore, they continue to hold the whip over a painter or writer or filmmaker who may transgress their perception of what is permissible.
But while the thuggish behaviour of these political activists is understandable, what is curious is the supine response of even those governments that claim to be secular and liberal-minded. The very fact that Husain is unable to return to his home country is in itself an indictment of the government at the Centre for its inability to offer him protection. As the Delhi High Court has said, “a painter at 90 deserves to be in his home, painting his canvas”. But if this criticism has had no impact on the powers-that-be, the reason apparently is that they consider it prudent not to let their political opponents exploit a controversial issue over which there is probably no unanimity of views even in the secular camp.
The high court may have observed that “a painter has his own perspective of looking at things” and that “it would not be proper to hold that he (Husain) had a deliberate intention to manifestly insult Bharat Mata” in his one of his paintings. But to the government, the option of retreat is clearly preferable to upholding artistic freedom.
MF Hussains Work Excluded From the India Art Summit for a second year in a row
Artnet News
July 28, 2009
PAINTER EXCLUDED FROM INDIA ART SUMMIT
For the second year in a row, one of India’s swankiest art events, the India Art Summit, is being overshadowed by terrorism threats. The event is set to bow Aug. 19-22, 2009, at the Pragati Maidan exhibition center in New Dehli, with 54 galleries -- primarily from India, but including a handful from the U.S. (Aicon Gallery, Thomas Erben) and the UK (Artquest, Lisson, Rob Dean Art and W.H. Patterson). At the inaugural India Art Summit in 2008, controversy swirled around the organizers’ prohibition of the display of works by M.F. Husain (b. 1915), following threats from right-wing Hindu groups. The ban has been repeated for the 2009 edition, to the dismay of Husain’s dealers, members of the Indian art community and relatives of the 93-year-old artist.
Husain is regularly referred to as a "legend" of the Indian art world. One of his paintings, Battle of Ganga and Jamuna, Mahabharata 12 (1971-1972), sold for $1,609,000 at Christie’s New York last year. His achievements, however, have been somewhat overshadowed in recent years by a few controversial works depicting Hindu goddesses Durga and Saraswati in the buff (the artist himself is a Muslim), which have inflamed religious sentiments. Threats against his life led him to go into self-imposed exile in 2006 -- according to the New York Times, at one point there was even an $11-million bounty on his head -- and he now divides his time between homes in London and Dubai.
On Sunday, organizers of the India Art Summit released a statement once again forbidding inclusion of Husain’s work by exhibitors. "While we acknowledge the lifelong achievements and the iconic status of artists like M.F. Husain in Indian art," it read, "we are unable to put the entire collective concern at risk by showcasing artists who have, in the past, been received with hostility by certain sections of the society unless we receive protection from the government and the Delhi police."
In 2008, the exclusion of Husain drew the attention of foreign luminaries like Robert Storr, who was quoted as saying that "if you have one of the most famous artists of India not present then people should think twice about how it happened." Within India, the incident stirred enough passion that a group of supporters, the SAHMAT collective, organized an exhibition of reproductions of Husain works at India International Centre in protest -- though anti-Husain vandals did in fact disrupt this show, giving some credence to the fair’s concerns.
Still, the exclusion of such a blue chip painter is a blow to the credibility of an event that aspires to be the apex of the Indian art world. Ashish Anand of Delhi Art Gallery told the Calcutta Telegraph that he had intended to show five of Husain’s early works at the Summit, plans that obviously have to be rethought, while Peter Nagy of Gallery Nature Morte told the CNN-IBN news network, "If you can’t show Husain in an art fair in the capital then where else?" From his exile, Husain himself seems to have shrugged off the controversy, saying simply that "it’s all part of a 15-year-struggle."
For more info on India Art Summit, see www.indiaartsummit.com
July 28, 2009
PAINTER EXCLUDED FROM INDIA ART SUMMIT
For the second year in a row, one of India’s swankiest art events, the India Art Summit, is being overshadowed by terrorism threats. The event is set to bow Aug. 19-22, 2009, at the Pragati Maidan exhibition center in New Dehli, with 54 galleries -- primarily from India, but including a handful from the U.S. (Aicon Gallery, Thomas Erben) and the UK (Artquest, Lisson, Rob Dean Art and W.H. Patterson). At the inaugural India Art Summit in 2008, controversy swirled around the organizers’ prohibition of the display of works by M.F. Husain (b. 1915), following threats from right-wing Hindu groups. The ban has been repeated for the 2009 edition, to the dismay of Husain’s dealers, members of the Indian art community and relatives of the 93-year-old artist.
Husain is regularly referred to as a "legend" of the Indian art world. One of his paintings, Battle of Ganga and Jamuna, Mahabharata 12 (1971-1972), sold for $1,609,000 at Christie’s New York last year. His achievements, however, have been somewhat overshadowed in recent years by a few controversial works depicting Hindu goddesses Durga and Saraswati in the buff (the artist himself is a Muslim), which have inflamed religious sentiments. Threats against his life led him to go into self-imposed exile in 2006 -- according to the New York Times, at one point there was even an $11-million bounty on his head -- and he now divides his time between homes in London and Dubai.
On Sunday, organizers of the India Art Summit released a statement once again forbidding inclusion of Husain’s work by exhibitors. "While we acknowledge the lifelong achievements and the iconic status of artists like M.F. Husain in Indian art," it read, "we are unable to put the entire collective concern at risk by showcasing artists who have, in the past, been received with hostility by certain sections of the society unless we receive protection from the government and the Delhi police."
In 2008, the exclusion of Husain drew the attention of foreign luminaries like Robert Storr, who was quoted as saying that "if you have one of the most famous artists of India not present then people should think twice about how it happened." Within India, the incident stirred enough passion that a group of supporters, the SAHMAT collective, organized an exhibition of reproductions of Husain works at India International Centre in protest -- though anti-Husain vandals did in fact disrupt this show, giving some credence to the fair’s concerns.
Still, the exclusion of such a blue chip painter is a blow to the credibility of an event that aspires to be the apex of the Indian art world. Ashish Anand of Delhi Art Gallery told the Calcutta Telegraph that he had intended to show five of Husain’s early works at the Summit, plans that obviously have to be rethought, while Peter Nagy of Gallery Nature Morte told the CNN-IBN news network, "If you can’t show Husain in an art fair in the capital then where else?" From his exile, Husain himself seems to have shrugged off the controversy, saying simply that "it’s all part of a 15-year-struggle."
For more info on India Art Summit, see www.indiaartsummit.com
Wendy Doniger’s Alternative History of The Hindus: a riposte to the self-appointed guardians of Hindu culture
The National (UAE), July 30, 2009
Sea of stories
An Indian child dressed as the 17th-century Maratha king Shivaji rides with his mother at a procession to celebrate the Maharashtrian new year in Mumbai. Indranil Mukherjee / AFP Photo
Ananya Vajpeyi reads Wendy Doniger’s capacious study of the diversity of Hindu tales and traditions, which serves as a riposte to the self-appointed guardians of Indian culture by celebrating the multiple varieties of Hindu religious experience.
The Hindus: An Alternative History
Wendy Doniger
Penguin US
Dh120
From ancient times men have dominated the world of Sanskrit scholarship. Originally those men were Brahmins; then they became Europeans, then Englishmen, and finally Indians. It is only in the past 50 years or so that women have begun to enter this esoteric field of study, and in this regard, Wendy Doniger has been a pioneer and a force to reckon with. Her new book, The Hindus: An Alternative History brings 30 years of her rigorous and innovative scholarly practice to a fitting climax – and I use the word advisedly. Doniger has studied Hinduism in its erotic, aesthetic and corporeal aspects, making her the target of envy as well as criticism from her colleagues. Her work, which includes a translation of the Kamasutra and extensive writing on Shiva, the Hindu god of cosmic destruction, who is worshipped in the form of a phallus (linga), is often seen to be titillating. She is interested in asceticism, but also in sexuality; in the spiritual, but also in the carnal.
Hindu traditions are diverse and heterodox enough to incorporate a number of parallel doctrines, theologies and belief systems, as well as an enormous repertoire of deities, symbols, rituals and concepts that contradict one another and yet coexist. Doniger’s openness to the varieties of religious experience permitted under the accommodating and multifarious rubric of Hinduism has upset all manner of people, from devout Hindus, to the votaries of Hindu nationalism (“Hindutva”), from American professors to German philologists. Nearly all of them misunderstand her work, particularly her creative ways of exploring how Hindu thought connects mind, body and soul, rather than placing them in conflict with each other.
The rise of Hindu nationalism in the last two decades has made it increasingly difficult for scholars of ancient India and living Hindu traditions to do their work without fear of intimidation, harassment and censorship, both on Indian soil and among expatriate Indians, who tend to be aggressive about their often reactionary views. The very elements of Hindu public culture – argumentation, rationality and syncreticism – that Amartya Sen celebrated in his recent collection of essays, The Argumentative Indian, have been muted by the self-appointed guardians of India’s intellectual, artistic and religious traditions.
In 2003, the American scholar James W Laine suffered the fury of right-wing groups in the state of Maharashtra after he published a book on the life of 17th-century Maratha king Shivaji, a potent political symbol in the religious nationalist discourse of contemporary Maharashtra. (The political party led by the anti-Muslim demagogue Bal Thackeray, who has dominated the city of Mumbai on and off for the past 20 years, is named the Shiv Sena, “Army of Shivaji”.) Laine’s book, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India was banned, his Indian colleagues were physically attacked, his Indian publisher and bookstores carrying his work faced violent intimidation, and a major archive that he had used in the city of Pune was vandalised. That was a low point in a long struggle between the so-called “secular” left and the so-called “fundamentalist” right in India to capture texts, artworks and cultural institutions, attempting thereby to control the social and political meanings of a number of literary, aesthetic and historical symbols.
Every democracy will see such public contests over the meaning of national symbols and historical events, which often pose a challenge to the freedom of expression. In India, the conflict over Hindu culture has often taken a bitter turn, ruining many scholarly careers, and driving writers, artists and filmmakers into uncomfortable corners. Doniger has faced her share of vilification campaigns, in part for her willingness to take seriously “alternative” and “minority” interpretations of Hinduism, coming from women, lower castes and oral traditions.
Doniger’s title, The Hindus, is a politic choice, pointing to an old, diverse and historically complex people (numbering over three quarters of a billion worldwide), rather than to “Hinduism”, a colonial construct, or to “Hindutva”, a political identity invented in the 20th century. In pre-colonial India, all manner of folks who might have practised what we understand loosely to be “religion” did not see themselves as part of any umbrella category corresponding to the English word “Hinduism”. There was no single “-ism” at play until India’s encounter with European missionaries and colonists in the 17th century. As Doniger writes, tongue in cheek, today we could just as well call it “the religion formerly known as Hinduism”.
In a ground-breaking work some years ago, SN Balagangadhara, a professor at the University of Ghent, wrote a devastating critique of the very language we use today to describe religious phenomena in India. In his book, The Heathen in his Blindness, Balagangadhara questioned whether it is appropriate to use terms like “religion”, “orthodoxy” and “Hinduism” at all. He asked whether what are essentially Christian categories may be imputed to non-Western systems of belief and practice without utterly misunderstanding their content and misrepresenting their function.
Doniger, while working with the existing terminology and translations, howsoever problematic, inadequate or inappropriate, has not shied away from the foundational texts of a long and rich textual tradition broadly defined as “Hindu”: she has translated the Rig Veda, the Laws of Manu, and portions of the Mahabharata. She belongs to a generation that has turned the study of India on its head, raised in one paradigm and going on to invent another. This took both intellectual dexterity and political courage. She launched her illustrious teaching career in 1978, the same year that Edward Said published Orientalism. In her introduction she humorously describes herself as a “recovering Orientalist”. Together with her colleagues at Chicago, especially in the 1990s, she has helped the entire field of Indic Studies to recover from the malady of Orientalism, and reinjected Indology with much-needed doses of history, theory, criticism, feminism and, let’s face it, some actual purchase in an India increasingly transformed by globalisation.
Doniger and others effected a paradigm shift that younger scholars of South Asia take for granted. We’ve come a long way from Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss and Louis Dumont, who could write foundational sociological, anthropological and theoretical treatises on India, indeed, build entire sub-disciplines around the study of India, from afar. The compendious nature of The Hindus reflects the versatility, breadth, depth, complexity, and cross-disciplinary ability, not to mention the first-hand knowledge, that is now required of anyone who may venture to write about India, especially in its long pre-modernity, which takes up the bulk of this book. The so-called “post-Orientalist” turn has completely altered the rules of the game for South Asian studies.
Two aspects of Doniger’s scholarship become immediately apparent in the current volume: her enormous erudition, and her sense of humour. Nearly 800 pages long, the book nevertheless is fun and easy to read, and entirely accessible to non-specialists. Fellow professors may scoff at her breezy, chatty style, and her frequent jokes, but lay audiences are sure to enjoy this playfulness. Isn’t “philology” supposed to be “a love of language”?
Sometimes Doniger’s wit is not meant so much to amuse as to translate difficult concepts into a familiar idiom. So the Mahabharata, the world’s longest text and the more complicated of India’s two epics, is about “the planned obsolescence of the moral world” – “an ancient Wikipedia”. Disinterested action, action without the desire for its outcome (nishkama karma), Krishna’s central message in the Bhagavad Gita, gives Arjuna, the reluctant warrior, the “moral Teflon” he needs to do battle against his relatives and teachers.
Doniger’s stylistic preference for the humorous and the idiomatic can be seen as a function of her earthiness, her domesticity, almost. A sure sign of this orientation – call it “womanly” if you will – is the almost obsessive attention paid in The Hindus to the dog as a beast, a symbol, a character. Dogs signify many things, from settled urban life, to accidental grace, to the hidden hand of God, to the injustices of the caste system, to the elusive presence of dharma as the moral regulator of human life. Doniger is surely the first of the major scholars of matters Hindu to make this animal – together with the cow, horse and snake – so central to our understanding of India. Her insistence that we be attentive to animal imagery in Hindu culture is part of her view of Hinduism, broad enough to include folk practices, tribal cults, so-called “little” traditions of all kinds, which often remain firmly grounded in the domestic context and its familiar surround, binding the human and the natural worlds closely together.
At the beginning of her book, Doniger notes, “some of those old Brahmin males knew a hell of a lot of great stories”. Most Hindus, in fact, most Indians of any religion, or even irreligious Indians, will find in this book many of the stories that they already know, in some version or other, from some source or other – stories of nymphs and sages, beggars and demons, elephants and horses, gods and men. Doniger manages to convey something that Roberto Calasso, too, communicates in his exquisitely crafted book, Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India – that the deepest mysteries, the highest wisdoms, and the most abiding truths of Hindu civilisation have been distilled, within the multiple traditions of Hindu thought, into stories that we all can grasp, enjoy and repeat. Hinduism as philosophy has always been a function of elite culture; Hinduism as storytelling is part and parcel of popular culture.
In swimming through a veritable “sea of stories” (kathasaritsagara), Doniger remarks: “India is a country where not only the future but even the past is unpredictable.... You could easily use history to argue for almost any position in contemporary India: that Hindus have been vegetarians, and that they have not; that Hindus and Muslims have gotten along well together, and that they have not; that Hindus have objected to suttee, and that they have not; that Hindus have renounced the material world, and that they have embraced it; that Hindus have oppressed women and lower castes, and that they have fought for their equality.”
A category like “Hindu” basically ends up subsuming within itself almost everything about the Indian subcontinent: violence, civilisation, law, piety, sex, texts, gender, caste, colonialism, deities, ritual, orthodoxy, cosmopolitanism, art. Doniger does not so much take an alternative path as she draws a circle around a vast totality that makes India quite genuinely a world unto itself – one that we may, with care and effort, comprehend, critique and cherish.
But this style of scholarship, which combines philology, philosophy and classics, may now be endangered. The entire infrastructure needed to sustain such humanistic work – from university departments, to specialised publishers, to libraries, to bookstores – is disappearing. In a recent article, Sheldon Pollock, a Sanskritist and long-time colleague of Doniger at Chicago, noted that as older scholars of classical Indian languages retire or pass away, there are no younger scholars to take their place. “Within two generations,” Pollock predicted, “the Indian literary past – one of the most luminous contributions ever made to human civilisation – may be virtually unreadable to the people of India.”
Paradoxically, it is the rise of India’s economy that exacerbates the neglect of its pre-modern heritage, a sad state of affairs if there ever was one. In this regard, India seems to be going the way of China, rushing headlong into the future and forgetting it is the past that actually anchors a nation’s soul. The only glimmer of hope comes from a nascent interest among many younger Indianists in traditions of political thought on the subcontinent. A systematic exploration of Indian political theory – going back at least 2,500 years, to the Buddha – would necessitate a renewed engagement with Indic pre-modernity. This year happens to be the centenary of Mahatma Gandhi’s path-breaking book, Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule). If conferences and publications this year around this text are any indication, there is a lot of new scholarship about Indian political traditions in the works, which may be understood as Indology refashioning and retooling itself for contemporary academic and political contexts. More significantly, the boom in Gandhiana might be a sign that Indians are getting over the tired contrasts between secularism and religion, modernity and tradition, West and East that have thoroughly debilitated genuine debate.
For decades, intellectual newcomers to the Indian subcontinent had one go-to book: AL Basham’s classic The Wonder That Was India, an encyclopaedic survey of Indian culture from the ancient period to the Mughal conquest first published in 1954. A half-century later, The Hindus is a worthy successor, a contemporary text that can transform our perception of Indian history, Sanskrit literature and the Hindu religious universe, all extremely important to understanding the wonder that was, and is, India.
Ananya Vajpeyi teaches at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. Her forthcoming book, Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India, will be published by Harvard University Press.
Sea of stories
An Indian child dressed as the 17th-century Maratha king Shivaji rides with his mother at a procession to celebrate the Maharashtrian new year in Mumbai. Indranil Mukherjee / AFP Photo
Ananya Vajpeyi reads Wendy Doniger’s capacious study of the diversity of Hindu tales and traditions, which serves as a riposte to the self-appointed guardians of Indian culture by celebrating the multiple varieties of Hindu religious experience.
The Hindus: An Alternative History
Wendy Doniger
Penguin US
Dh120
From ancient times men have dominated the world of Sanskrit scholarship. Originally those men were Brahmins; then they became Europeans, then Englishmen, and finally Indians. It is only in the past 50 years or so that women have begun to enter this esoteric field of study, and in this regard, Wendy Doniger has been a pioneer and a force to reckon with. Her new book, The Hindus: An Alternative History brings 30 years of her rigorous and innovative scholarly practice to a fitting climax – and I use the word advisedly. Doniger has studied Hinduism in its erotic, aesthetic and corporeal aspects, making her the target of envy as well as criticism from her colleagues. Her work, which includes a translation of the Kamasutra and extensive writing on Shiva, the Hindu god of cosmic destruction, who is worshipped in the form of a phallus (linga), is often seen to be titillating. She is interested in asceticism, but also in sexuality; in the spiritual, but also in the carnal.
Hindu traditions are diverse and heterodox enough to incorporate a number of parallel doctrines, theologies and belief systems, as well as an enormous repertoire of deities, symbols, rituals and concepts that contradict one another and yet coexist. Doniger’s openness to the varieties of religious experience permitted under the accommodating and multifarious rubric of Hinduism has upset all manner of people, from devout Hindus, to the votaries of Hindu nationalism (“Hindutva”), from American professors to German philologists. Nearly all of them misunderstand her work, particularly her creative ways of exploring how Hindu thought connects mind, body and soul, rather than placing them in conflict with each other.
The rise of Hindu nationalism in the last two decades has made it increasingly difficult for scholars of ancient India and living Hindu traditions to do their work without fear of intimidation, harassment and censorship, both on Indian soil and among expatriate Indians, who tend to be aggressive about their often reactionary views. The very elements of Hindu public culture – argumentation, rationality and syncreticism – that Amartya Sen celebrated in his recent collection of essays, The Argumentative Indian, have been muted by the self-appointed guardians of India’s intellectual, artistic and religious traditions.
In 2003, the American scholar James W Laine suffered the fury of right-wing groups in the state of Maharashtra after he published a book on the life of 17th-century Maratha king Shivaji, a potent political symbol in the religious nationalist discourse of contemporary Maharashtra. (The political party led by the anti-Muslim demagogue Bal Thackeray, who has dominated the city of Mumbai on and off for the past 20 years, is named the Shiv Sena, “Army of Shivaji”.) Laine’s book, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India was banned, his Indian colleagues were physically attacked, his Indian publisher and bookstores carrying his work faced violent intimidation, and a major archive that he had used in the city of Pune was vandalised. That was a low point in a long struggle between the so-called “secular” left and the so-called “fundamentalist” right in India to capture texts, artworks and cultural institutions, attempting thereby to control the social and political meanings of a number of literary, aesthetic and historical symbols.
Every democracy will see such public contests over the meaning of national symbols and historical events, which often pose a challenge to the freedom of expression. In India, the conflict over Hindu culture has often taken a bitter turn, ruining many scholarly careers, and driving writers, artists and filmmakers into uncomfortable corners. Doniger has faced her share of vilification campaigns, in part for her willingness to take seriously “alternative” and “minority” interpretations of Hinduism, coming from women, lower castes and oral traditions.
Doniger’s title, The Hindus, is a politic choice, pointing to an old, diverse and historically complex people (numbering over three quarters of a billion worldwide), rather than to “Hinduism”, a colonial construct, or to “Hindutva”, a political identity invented in the 20th century. In pre-colonial India, all manner of folks who might have practised what we understand loosely to be “religion” did not see themselves as part of any umbrella category corresponding to the English word “Hinduism”. There was no single “-ism” at play until India’s encounter with European missionaries and colonists in the 17th century. As Doniger writes, tongue in cheek, today we could just as well call it “the religion formerly known as Hinduism”.
In a ground-breaking work some years ago, SN Balagangadhara, a professor at the University of Ghent, wrote a devastating critique of the very language we use today to describe religious phenomena in India. In his book, The Heathen in his Blindness, Balagangadhara questioned whether it is appropriate to use terms like “religion”, “orthodoxy” and “Hinduism” at all. He asked whether what are essentially Christian categories may be imputed to non-Western systems of belief and practice without utterly misunderstanding their content and misrepresenting their function.
Doniger, while working with the existing terminology and translations, howsoever problematic, inadequate or inappropriate, has not shied away from the foundational texts of a long and rich textual tradition broadly defined as “Hindu”: she has translated the Rig Veda, the Laws of Manu, and portions of the Mahabharata. She belongs to a generation that has turned the study of India on its head, raised in one paradigm and going on to invent another. This took both intellectual dexterity and political courage. She launched her illustrious teaching career in 1978, the same year that Edward Said published Orientalism. In her introduction she humorously describes herself as a “recovering Orientalist”. Together with her colleagues at Chicago, especially in the 1990s, she has helped the entire field of Indic Studies to recover from the malady of Orientalism, and reinjected Indology with much-needed doses of history, theory, criticism, feminism and, let’s face it, some actual purchase in an India increasingly transformed by globalisation.
Doniger and others effected a paradigm shift that younger scholars of South Asia take for granted. We’ve come a long way from Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss and Louis Dumont, who could write foundational sociological, anthropological and theoretical treatises on India, indeed, build entire sub-disciplines around the study of India, from afar. The compendious nature of The Hindus reflects the versatility, breadth, depth, complexity, and cross-disciplinary ability, not to mention the first-hand knowledge, that is now required of anyone who may venture to write about India, especially in its long pre-modernity, which takes up the bulk of this book. The so-called “post-Orientalist” turn has completely altered the rules of the game for South Asian studies.
Two aspects of Doniger’s scholarship become immediately apparent in the current volume: her enormous erudition, and her sense of humour. Nearly 800 pages long, the book nevertheless is fun and easy to read, and entirely accessible to non-specialists. Fellow professors may scoff at her breezy, chatty style, and her frequent jokes, but lay audiences are sure to enjoy this playfulness. Isn’t “philology” supposed to be “a love of language”?
Sometimes Doniger’s wit is not meant so much to amuse as to translate difficult concepts into a familiar idiom. So the Mahabharata, the world’s longest text and the more complicated of India’s two epics, is about “the planned obsolescence of the moral world” – “an ancient Wikipedia”. Disinterested action, action without the desire for its outcome (nishkama karma), Krishna’s central message in the Bhagavad Gita, gives Arjuna, the reluctant warrior, the “moral Teflon” he needs to do battle against his relatives and teachers.
Doniger’s stylistic preference for the humorous and the idiomatic can be seen as a function of her earthiness, her domesticity, almost. A sure sign of this orientation – call it “womanly” if you will – is the almost obsessive attention paid in The Hindus to the dog as a beast, a symbol, a character. Dogs signify many things, from settled urban life, to accidental grace, to the hidden hand of God, to the injustices of the caste system, to the elusive presence of dharma as the moral regulator of human life. Doniger is surely the first of the major scholars of matters Hindu to make this animal – together with the cow, horse and snake – so central to our understanding of India. Her insistence that we be attentive to animal imagery in Hindu culture is part of her view of Hinduism, broad enough to include folk practices, tribal cults, so-called “little” traditions of all kinds, which often remain firmly grounded in the domestic context and its familiar surround, binding the human and the natural worlds closely together.
At the beginning of her book, Doniger notes, “some of those old Brahmin males knew a hell of a lot of great stories”. Most Hindus, in fact, most Indians of any religion, or even irreligious Indians, will find in this book many of the stories that they already know, in some version or other, from some source or other – stories of nymphs and sages, beggars and demons, elephants and horses, gods and men. Doniger manages to convey something that Roberto Calasso, too, communicates in his exquisitely crafted book, Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India – that the deepest mysteries, the highest wisdoms, and the most abiding truths of Hindu civilisation have been distilled, within the multiple traditions of Hindu thought, into stories that we all can grasp, enjoy and repeat. Hinduism as philosophy has always been a function of elite culture; Hinduism as storytelling is part and parcel of popular culture.
In swimming through a veritable “sea of stories” (kathasaritsagara), Doniger remarks: “India is a country where not only the future but even the past is unpredictable.... You could easily use history to argue for almost any position in contemporary India: that Hindus have been vegetarians, and that they have not; that Hindus and Muslims have gotten along well together, and that they have not; that Hindus have objected to suttee, and that they have not; that Hindus have renounced the material world, and that they have embraced it; that Hindus have oppressed women and lower castes, and that they have fought for their equality.”
A category like “Hindu” basically ends up subsuming within itself almost everything about the Indian subcontinent: violence, civilisation, law, piety, sex, texts, gender, caste, colonialism, deities, ritual, orthodoxy, cosmopolitanism, art. Doniger does not so much take an alternative path as she draws a circle around a vast totality that makes India quite genuinely a world unto itself – one that we may, with care and effort, comprehend, critique and cherish.
But this style of scholarship, which combines philology, philosophy and classics, may now be endangered. The entire infrastructure needed to sustain such humanistic work – from university departments, to specialised publishers, to libraries, to bookstores – is disappearing. In a recent article, Sheldon Pollock, a Sanskritist and long-time colleague of Doniger at Chicago, noted that as older scholars of classical Indian languages retire or pass away, there are no younger scholars to take their place. “Within two generations,” Pollock predicted, “the Indian literary past – one of the most luminous contributions ever made to human civilisation – may be virtually unreadable to the people of India.”
Paradoxically, it is the rise of India’s economy that exacerbates the neglect of its pre-modern heritage, a sad state of affairs if there ever was one. In this regard, India seems to be going the way of China, rushing headlong into the future and forgetting it is the past that actually anchors a nation’s soul. The only glimmer of hope comes from a nascent interest among many younger Indianists in traditions of political thought on the subcontinent. A systematic exploration of Indian political theory – going back at least 2,500 years, to the Buddha – would necessitate a renewed engagement with Indic pre-modernity. This year happens to be the centenary of Mahatma Gandhi’s path-breaking book, Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule). If conferences and publications this year around this text are any indication, there is a lot of new scholarship about Indian political traditions in the works, which may be understood as Indology refashioning and retooling itself for contemporary academic and political contexts. More significantly, the boom in Gandhiana might be a sign that Indians are getting over the tired contrasts between secularism and religion, modernity and tradition, West and East that have thoroughly debilitated genuine debate.
For decades, intellectual newcomers to the Indian subcontinent had one go-to book: AL Basham’s classic The Wonder That Was India, an encyclopaedic survey of Indian culture from the ancient period to the Mughal conquest first published in 1954. A half-century later, The Hindus is a worthy successor, a contemporary text that can transform our perception of Indian history, Sanskrit literature and the Hindu religious universe, all extremely important to understanding the wonder that was, and is, India.
Ananya Vajpeyi teaches at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. Her forthcoming book, Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India, will be published by Harvard University Press.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
