From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 4, Issue 49, Dated Dec 22, 2007
APOORVANAND celebrates the largely unknown efforts of men and women from within and without Gujarat, working to reinvent a society’s psyche
NARENDRA MODI and the Congress may fight it out for Gujarat, but this election, like every other, is also about the idea of India. “Who lives if India dies?” Nehru once asked — though that perhaps is a question that does not interest his party, the Congress, any more. Is this election, like every other, only about the clever manoeuvring of caste equations? On the surface of it, one must say yes, for this is how elections in India are fought and won. But there is another battle raging on in Gujarat, a battle in the minds of its young. A conflict over questions of how to live their lives, over the mental structures that lead to situations like the genocide of 2002, over how ordinary people can be made accomplices to mass crimes organised around exclusionary hate.In this battle, you won’t find a single Congress, BSP or NCP leader participating. On the contrary, they shun it.
Election campaigns for political parties began only a few weeks ago. There is a parallel, subterranean campaign being waged, however; one that is also about elections and politics, but more about overcoming the failure of the imagination represented by the massacre of 2002 and its subsequent endorsement by large sections of Gujarat’s Hindu population. Since May, as part of an initiative organised by Act Now for Harmony and Democracy (ANHAD), more than 25 Gujarat-based rights organisations have traversed the length and breadth of the state with street plays, songs and films, speaking primarily of the need for Gujaratis to re-imagine their lives.
What one has seen in this state since 2002 is a deep-seated unwillingness in the part of middle-class Hindus to accept the fact of the genocide of Gujarat’s Muslims. This was a denial more frustrating, almost, than the actual killings. In one despairing moment after the genocide, a senior academic of the University of Delhi proposed a total boycott of Gujarat. He felt that only a message of utter rejection would force the state’s middle class to confront what had gone wrong. Fortunately, there were still many people who thought otherwise, and some decided to plunge into the quagmire Gujarat was in. The state is now their second home, despite the fact that when they started out, their knowledge of the state ended with the textbooks of their school days. Their initial lack of familiarity with Gujarat has earned them the name ‘Bingujaratis’, a pejorative term, meant to alienate one and make one’s intentions suspect.
This feeling of a divide between Gujaratis and non-Gujaratis is found everywhere, even among the secular activists. Non-Gujaratis, apparently, have no legitimate right to speak about Gujarat. When GN Devy tried to analyse the violence that had shattered the state, he had to face a barrage of attacks from fellow writers who suddenly discovered that he was an outsider, that he could not speak Gujarati fluently and that he had Marathi roots which automatically disqualified him from giving any opinion on anything Gujarati.
Devy, ironically is the man thanks to whom many people, from academics to tribal rights activists, know of Gujarat at all . He is one of those who dared to hope when it seemed that everything was over. Had not his own Tejgadh, where he had worked for more than five years, witnessed violence? Did not members of the Chhara community, for whose rights he had fought, participate in the attacks? He persevered by giving fuller shape to the Adivasi academy he had set up under a Mohura tree ten years ago, by bringing more and more tribal villages under the academy’s fold, by continuing to publish Dhol, a magazine issued in ten tribal languages, and by gradually giving the responsibility of running the Academy to tribal youths. It was a different kind of identity politics he was working at. Gujarat’s tribals were realising that their boundaries far exceeded those of the state.
AND THERE was the revival of forgotten memories thrown in the dark recess of history. It was again a Bingujarati, Shabnam Hashmi, who recognised the significance of the memory of Basant and Rajab, the Hindu-Muslim duo who lost their lives fighting the riots of 1946. Their memories lived on in Jamalpur, in Ahmedabad’s old city, but the honour accorded them was muted. Shabnam brought them to centrestage in 2003 when ANHAD started celebrating July 1, the day of their martyrdom, on a large scale. It was a different kind of iconography. Fashioning a history which had personalities and symbols beyond Sardar Patel, but which was close enough for Gujaratis to identify with, would also help weave a present that could find sources of celebration beyond shrill cries of Jai Shri Ram.
The most important thing after 2002 was to break the fear Gujarat has been shrouded in and that is what people like Shabnam did. When every cinema house in the state had closed its doors on Parzania, ANHAD organised. its public screening. When Babu Bajrangi’s very name sent shivers down politicians’ spines, Shabnam and her friends hit the road raising slogans demanding his arrest. Organising youth conventions and festivals meant giving young people under 30 ownership of the campaign. It was a leap into darkness. But it started to pay off. It was a clever cultural strategy to break the deadening silence Gujarat was submerged in after 2002 with the music of bands like Indian Ocean. It was remarkable to see young people on the streets of Ahmedabad marching with banners with anti-communal messages — something unthinkable for political parties even now.
ANHAD also undertook large-scale publication in Gujarati. Think of distributing lakhs of copies of the Preamble to the Constitution of India! It was like a re-education in the basics of secular citizenship. Accompanying these visible campaigns were a series of intense political education workshops with youth from different sections of society. For these young people, the workshops became a process of waking up to their own selves and to the realities surrounding them. A Hindu boy found himself spending the night for the first time in his life in a Muslim locality. A Muslim girl, who had witnessed her father being killed in the 2002 massacre, spoke for the first time to boys outside her family. Hindu boys and girls took care of their rozadar Muslim friends, arranging for their iftars. Muslims decided not to leave the workshops and broke their roza with plain water while sessions were on. An Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad member wrote at the end of one workshops that from now on she would only remain Puja, forgoing her Pandya surname.
It was a difficult journey. But many people and organisations decided to embark on it. You have Ela Ben who works with women and has now started working with youth on issues of peaceful co-existence. And there are the members of Aman Samuday, many of them victims of the 2002 massacre, ordinary women till yesterday, but now well-versed in the finer points of law. It is fascinating to see these formidable women — Rashida, Bismillah, Nazim and Laxmi — taking the lead with their men companions. Young people, like those associated with Urjaghar, working to spread dialogue around peace and secularism, are active in the villages of Gujarat. You will also find activists like Yusuf Bhai, who works with the members of the Antarik Visthapit Haq Rakshak Samiti (Committee for the Rights of the Internally Displaced), and couples like Meera and Rafeeq who did not give up, even after their office was burnt down four times.
2002 was a wake-up call up for many. They have not slept since then. You hear Father Cedric Prakash raising the alarm every time there is something unconstitutional happening. He is another outsider who has not buckled before threats and abuses. So the fight for Gujarat is not only about legal battles, though those are very important. As important, however, is the struggle to fashion a language of everyday politics. That is something that does not make news. But that is also happening here and is essential to the recovery of Gujarat’s lost soul.
Apoorvanad is a communal harmony activist
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