On ‘moral policing’ in Muzaffarnagar and Sanyukt Hindu Sangharsh Samiti . . .

(Tehelka
June 24 , 2006)

One Day in the Life of Sullentown

In pursuing a news report on an incident of ‘moral policing’ in Muzaffarnagar, Shyama Haldar comes upon a place blistered by its own nature

Omkar Singh, co-ordinator of the Muzaffarnagar branch of the Sanyukt Hindu Sangharsh Samiti (SHSS), is insistent that the truth of the May 27 Incident at Nandi Sweets be established with public finality. “We aren’t terrorists, you know; we aren’t thugs,” he says. “That’s right, we’re all cultured people, educated, got our own businesses,” avers SHSS local president, Sanjay Agarwal, between sips of midday tea at Singh’s garment store in the town’s Sadar Bazar. “You people, you make mountains from dunghills,” Singh resumes. “A small matter — boys in the neighbourhood having a street scuffle — you twist it about and dress it up so people won’t switch channels on your one-minute-twenty-second stories. Television, newspapers, same difference, you’re all alike.”

Three weeks ago, a 50-strong contingent of what are said to have been SHSS members descended on a group of school students — three boys and three girls — treating themselves at Nandi Sweets restaurant to a round of lemon mint. Muzaffarnagar, as a district, is known for its frequent appearances in crime report datelines and for its primordial revenges upon those who love across caste or religious lines — ‘honour’ killings, panchayat-ordered maimings, rapes and lynchings. In comparison, the Nandi Sweets fracas is a pimple too minor to leave disfigurement, but it has upset Singh and Agarwal because their names feature in the fir. The incident has been reported in the media as yet another case of west Uttar Pradesh moral policing — what gives it a grimmer edge is the special corrective reserved for the one Muslim in the unlucky clutch of teenage truants. Five of them were let off with admonitions and a little light roughing-up. The sixth, the unfavourably-named Aleem, an out-of-towner from Deoband, was beaten, stripped, and later briefly hospitalised before his parents arrived to hasten him away to home and hiding.

This is the police version. As it turns out, it’s the only account available. At Nandi Sweets — polaroid windows, battered airconditioning and an out-of-order fountain giving it a prosperous edge over other Nai Mandi eateries — it’s impossible to find anyone who actually saw anything happen that weekend. The owner of the establishment was away; the waiters work shifts and hadn’t come in; the cashier was unwell; the manager was present but has now left town indefinitely. All the shops up and down the street outside also seem to have been on unofficial holiday that afternoon: everyone was somewhere else, everyone only knows about the disturbance second-hand, no-one wants their word to be taken for anything, not even when asked for their names, no-one here has names. At a paan shop, the old man at the counter doesn’t seem to hear too well. When a younger man, perhaps his son, demands to know what’s being asked for, he tells him, “Oh nothing, they want to buy biscuits.”

If one scents fear or even collusion in this reticence, the crowning stroke is waiting back at Singh’s shop — the Sanyukt Hindu Sangharsh Samiti wasn’t on the scene either, not, at any rate, as perpetrators. “We had absolutely nothing to do with it,” Singh declares. “We were in fact called in to control the crowd by people from the Traders’ Association. It’s like when someone snatches a chain, people get together to beat him up, nothing more; but you know what a mob can turn into. The shopkeepers were scared; if it wasn’t for us, who knows what could have happened. We talked the boys out of it, sent them home. And then we get blamed. Just because we helped out. Think about it — someone’s had an accident and you take him to hospital and then you get framed for it.”

Speaking strictly hypothetically, only in theory, Nai Mandi doesn’t like what might be said to have happened at Nandi Sweets. Neither, if no one else is listening, does it seem too fond of the SHSS. “Lousy wasters; nothing else to do with their time,” mutters a shop clerk; “We’re no less than anyone else, let them try something smart and we’ll see them settled,” says the owner. Others will tell you that the locality is the richest in the district and that it stays open for business no matter what may disturb the town or the world beyond — “Even after Ayodhya, Nai Mandi was open.” On the incident itself, opinion is latticed behind generalised platitudes — “Indecency is in the eye of the beholder. If you wish to see evil, you’ll see it”. The only articulate criticism comes from a woman who keeps a tailoring shop across the street from Nandi Sweets; she too remains nameless but her neighbours say she’s a Pathan married to a Jat. “And so what if those kids were sitting together? If they can go to school together, sit together in class, why can’t they share a cold drink — it’s not a crime yet, is it?”

“Nothing objectionable, nothing wrong with it at all,” is Singh’s reply. Far be it from him to be an obstacle to modernity — his own shopfront bears two mid-size posters of halter-topped women tossing blondish hair. “If a Muslim boy makes friends with a Hindu girl there’s no problem, lekin restaurant mein jakar, pant ke zip khol kar, chai peena bahut galat lagta hai (to sit in a restaurant drinking tea with your fly open is very wrong indeed).” Scepticism quails before such conviction. Nonetheless — has Singh actually seen any such? No — but he’s heard about it.

Rumour, hearsay, insinuation, belief — under-currents that turn into rip-tides. Now three years old, the SHSS encompasses an 11-member affiliation of Sangh Parivar usuals — Shiv Sena, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Bajrang Dal, Hindu Jagaran Manch and various others. Apart from the occasional restaurant rampage (the SHSS is also said to be behind another assault earlier in May on a restaurant called Vatika), the Samiti is not locally famous for any other activity than the staging of demonstrations. Some of these can turn a little too heated for a town that prides itself on having skirted large-scale communal confrontation for several decades — despite the Babri reverberations, despite Muzaffarnagar’s uneasy sectarian balance, estimated at 40 percent Muslim, 60 percent Hindu. Protests here in mid-February over the cartoons of Prophet Mohammad saw a turnout reported to have numbered over a lakh; a week later, the SHSS was on the streets, protesting against MF Husain. Stones were pelted, shops were closed, selective curfews declared, 18 people arrested. Presence was registered.

However, competitive agitation is not the SHSS’ consuming or even dominant preoccupation. For the past few years, Singh and Agarwal will tell you, a new engine of jehadi malevolence has been in insidious motion. Loving Jehad, it’s called. “They take false admissions to schools and colleges,” Singh explains, “they wear tilaks and karas, just like Hindus; they use names like Sonu, Monu, Mintu, Pintu, so they won’t be caught out. They make friends with Hindu girls, they get them to come to their homes on various pretexts. There they give the girls new clothes to wear and have two other men lying in wait to photograph them while they change. Then they blackmail them. That’s how they get these girls into their clutches and through them they get at their friends.”

The mind boggles at the detailing — how, after all, do they know? In the congealing fog of suggestion and supposition, one misses the recalcitrant Nai Mandi empiricists for whom nothing can conclusively be said to exist if they have not themselves verified it. “You want proof?” asks Agarwal. “In the last six months alone, we have rescued 80 Hindu girls who had gone with Muslim boys. Of these, 60 girls were graduates — some of them MCom, some BCom, some BA, some MSc. And the boys — 60 boys — labourers, whitewashers, scrap dealers, fruit sellers, house painters — can you believe this? A girl of good family, studying for her graduation, would she go with a labourer, a house painter? This is the new jehad. This is what we are trying to make our community aware of. That’s what the sanghathan is for, to make Hindus strong, to make them alert.”

Senior Superintendent of Police, Amarendra Kumar Sengar is unimpressed. In a town where an accidental scratch can spurt into gory vendetta, he could do without the SHSS’ compound of acids. He’s been in Muzaffarnagar a year — going by the list of his predecessors on the plaque on the wall, a year is about as long as anyone lasts here. Very shortly after his arrival, he oversaw the setting up, under Supreme Court directive, of a cell for the protection of this district’s hunted lovers — the Yugal Branch, it’s called. It has not been very well publicised; it has not received a single case so far. But the killings haven’t stopped. In just the last two months, Sengar’s dealt with three ‘honour’ murders — in one of them, the girl survived, was taken to hospital; a brother of hers came visiting and ended what had been left undone. The ssp’s voice is low, precise as he describes this — people are unbelievably desensitised here, he says.

It is very silent after hours at the Celestial Garden nursery school; the enclosure around the play-yard so shuts out the town that even the wrangle of the traffic that nags you everywhere else seems to have fallen back at the gates. Qamar Khan, who runs the school, points to the tree-tops visible over the wall: there, in the house next-door, they had a girl who ran away; she was found after two years, brought back and killed the same night. Some years later, her niece ran away too; she went with a Muslim, they haven’t found her yet. Qamar’s daughter, Binish, in her first year of an MA in English, remembers a Muslim boy and girl who ran away and should never have returned — they were in a rickshaw coming in from the station when the girl’s father and brother caught up with them. The boy was killed in the street, the girl taken to a nearby masjid, her throat slit and her body cut to pieces. “And those people, they still walk around, they think they’ve done something great.” “But a child must never go against her parents,” pipes up Binish’s younger sister, Alisha, tucking her dupatta behind her ears. “They bring you up with so much love, it’s a terrible sin to not obey them. You’d deserve anything after that.” Alisha gets an earful from Binish — “And it’s not a sin to kill someone, to kill your child?” — Alisha subsides. Later, she says, “Alright, now you tell our mother I want to go to SD Degree College. She won’t let me, she thinks the boys are too rowdy there. But it’s better than the all-girls’ one.”

The tensions in Muzaffarnagar are not those of impoverishment; quite the opposite. Agriculture in this fertile district has created a highly prosperous peasantry, but its affluence has done little for its quality of life, made small dent in beliefs about caste, about women, about notions of clan honour. If anything, it’s given them justification, made them more severe. Long-time inhabitants say living here grows worse by the decade. Dr Dinesh Kumar, principal at the Sanatan Dharam Degree College, the town’s largest, grew up in Muzaffarnagar in the 1950s and 60s. His memory of the town is of one known for its unhurried life. It was a place where, as he puts it, people wanted to settle. “Now, a man who lives here, if he’s got any chance to get out, he grabs it. Everywhere else, even in the desert, people develop an attachment to the land where they live. Not in these parts. You can’t enjoy life; you have to keep a low profile, otherwise nobody knows what might happen to you. Prosperity here has outstripped education.”

Deputy Superintendent of Police Kalpana Saxena takes a more hopeful view. For her, Muzaffarnagar is a regressive pocket in the path of cross-winds from two cosmopolitan hubs — Delhi to the west, Dehra Dun to the east. “Of course there’ll be a storm, a tornado,” she says, “but it’ll subside, even if it takes a long time.” For her, the arrival, after the privatisation of education, of new training centres in the town has been a revolution: “The government institutions here were atrocious; if people wanted their kids to study, they had to send them to Meerut, or to Delhi if they could afford it. Now, there’s enough right here, and that means girls get chances they didn’t have when studying meant sending them away.”

A bit of Saxena’s “revolution” can be seen outside the building that’s shared by the Howard Institute of World Class English Speaking and the American Institute of English Language (also the place where the Nandi Sweets group were classmates). A hive of these spoken-English coaching shops is clustered on Bhopa Road, a little way up from the turn to Nai Mandi. For around Rs 500 every three months, their students can expect a grounding not so much in precision of grammar and pronunciation, but in overcoming the one real lack that the backwaters’ indifferent schooling has left them with — that of confidence. A batch of ‘Howardians’ coming out of class says they swear by the approach — “The basic thing is confidence, not Hindi-English” says Vivek Kumar, who’s 23. “We get that here — if you have confidence, no language can stop you.” “We only knew how to read English when we left school,” says 22-year-old Visalaxi Tyagi, who like most other Muzaffarnagar children went through the UP Board. “But you can’t compete anywhere if you don’t speak English.” Vivek bears his schooling no grudge, but he does say, “If we’d had an environment like this one before, we could have been anywhere.”

Being elsewhere — Delhi, at the least — is very much part of these youngsters’ future plans. Touch on the Nandi Sweets incident and Lokesh Verma, also in his early 20s, says, “If people think like this, they’ll never be able to cope if they ever leave Muzaffarnagar.” An assault in a restaurant isn’t baggage this lot wants to carry with it, though — “There will be change,” asserts Vivek. “We are from this society and our generation is coming up — they know.” His elders may not give this much credence, but, he says, “If I’m capable, there’s no way they can pressure me.”