(Tehelka - Oct 30 2004
URL: http://www.tehelka.com/story_main7.asp?filename=Ne103004the_civil_war.asp )
The civil war on saffron
By Aman Khanna
Hidden from arc lights, a tiny band of activists were quietly prodding the public to vote against communal politics. About 40 non-governmental organisations rallied in a strong alliance, disseminating anti-communalism messages through creative leaflets, posters, booklets and stickers all over Maharashtra.
This followed a pattern. A similar 'campaign' was organised in the nooks and corners of India during the last Lok Sabha elections. Lakhs of pamphlets and thousands of documentaries, especially on Gujarat, added with concerted workshops and door-to-door campaigns, consolidated the secular vote. While professors marched in the inner lanes of Old Delhi, talking to "parents of students", iit students from Bombay took a sabbatical and worked in the villages of Maharashtra. So did jnu and du students, artists, filmmakers and women's groups. This was the quiet revolution that helped the upa turn the tide. Once again in Maharashtra, with Shabnam Hashmi of Anhad at the forefront, they targeted railway stations and bus stands, reminding ordinary people of Gujarat's deep wounds. "We wanted to raise the issues of secularism, the concept of India," says Hashmi. "It was important to defeat the communal forces in these elections. Their victory would have paved the way for their return to the Centre in the months to come."..
Poets Javed Akhtar and Gauhar Raza penned the text for some of the campaign literature. Other leaflets documented a conversation through letters between an old woman and her granddaughter. Aaji (grandmother in Marathi) reminisces the days gone by, when they joined Mahatma Gandhi on the banks of the Sabarmati. And then she says, "Yesterday Pinku's aaji returned from Ahmedabad. She was telling us that they did not spare anybody: babies, children, men, women and old women. Nobody was spared."...
As in Gujarat, rightwing forces too distributed hate literature in Maharashtra before the polls, exhorting Hindus to vote en masse against Muslims and Congress. And what was their argument? "Muslims have an animalistic tendency to rape Hindu women, Muslims are rising in numbers." The 40-page leaflet has a photograph of Qutubuddin Ansari, the tailor whose grief-stricken face came to sum up the story of thousands of Muslims in Gujarat. Tears in his eyes, hands joined together, Ansari was pleading to frenzied vhp/Bajrang Dal mobs to spare his family's lives. In the saffron pamphlet, the photograph carries the caption: "Hinduon ki aisi sthiti na hone de (Don't let the Hindus come to this.)"
If the election results are anything to go by, the people of Maharashtra (as the people of India earlier) did distinguish what is secular information and what is hate politics.
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