Ku Klux Klan in Kandhamal
(Hard News, Sept 2008)
So, what was her crime? Rajani Majhi cared for children in an orphanage in the interiors of backward Orissa, where every big Indian and MNC wants to dig for the treasures buried deep beneath the tribal forests, home to several of India's indigenous tribes for thousands of years. Was it a crime to protect the children when the mob, inspired by the VHP bandh, attacked the orphanage and set it on fire? Did Rajani murder Swami Lakshmananda Saraswati, the undisputed guru of the VHP? Was she a Maoist? Was she a Christian fanatic? Did she participate in hate campaigns? Was she a proselytising zealot?
Now, reports are coming from this hazy twilight zone of burnt houses and churches, of terror unleashed and exile and condemnation in their own imagined homeland, that Rajani Majhi was a Hindu.
So, why did they murder her? Was it revenge? Was it divine retribution, sanctioned by the gods?
It was for the law enforcement agencies to find and punish the killers of the swami. Is the VHP/Bajrang Dal/RSS a constitutional authority to punish, with quick and bloody retribution? If the Maoists were behind the killing, let the Indian State tackle it. Why let loose criminals on the innocent, make a public spectacle of xenophobic enactments?
Go back to Gujarat 2002. Did the people of Naroda Patiya, Juhapura and Gulberga attack coach S-6 at Godhra? Did Ehsan Jaffrey burn the coach? Why were innocent people hacked and burned; and hapless women raped? The persecution continues to this day, after what was clearly a State-sponsored massacre like the November 1984 organised massacre of Sikhs in Delhi and elsewhere.
This is because this hate machine has neither rationality nor humanity nor religion. It neither believes in the Constitution nor democracy nor civilised codes of conduct. It has no social or political agenda except to indulge and wallow in organised hate campaigns against Muslims and Christians. In that sense, they are outside the pale of the Indian justice system, outside all accountability. Blinded by vicious madness, these little men are caricatures of Hindutva's perverse distortion of both Hinduism and humanism. Like the fundamentalist Islamic jihadis who kill innocents, these Hindutva jihadis share the same barbarian instinct, and their place is either the mental asylum, or the prison.
Why should the VHP and Bajrang Dal be let off if the Simi can be termed terrorist and banned? And, how is the BJP a mainstream party when it patronises and pampers this hydra-headed monster? In fact, all the members of the sangh parivar are intrinsically linked - the RSS-VHP-Bajrang Dal-BJP, a diabolical symphony of several fronts, using mainstream and underground spaces, terrorism and communal violence to further its ends. Trace most of the ‘landmark communal riots' in India, and enquiry commission reports, and you will find their sinister shadow.
Remember Geetabehn? Rajani Majhi brings the old narrative back, however stunningly tragic and barbaric it all seems. And there is a lesson and message in it.
Wrote Siddharth Varadarajan in The Times of India on April 18, 2002 (The Mask is Off - A Tale of Two Hindus, edit page): "Two weeks ago, the resident editor of The Times of India in Ahmedabad sent our office in Delhi a photograph so shocking it made my stomach churn. Shocking not just for what it depicted but because, to paraphrase Roland Barthes, "one was looking at it from inside our freedom." This was my India. This is my India....
"On a hot and dusty patch of asphalt lies the naked body of a woman, Geetaben, her clothes stripped off and thrown carelessly near her. One piece of her underclothing lies a foot away from her body, the other is clutched desperately in her left hand. Her left arm is bloodied, as is her torso, which appears to have deep gashes. Her left thigh is covered in blood and she is wearing a small anklet. Her plastic chappals sit sadly alongside her lifeless body and in the middle of the photo frame is a gnarled, red, hate-filled remnant of a brick, perhaps the one her assailants used to deliver
their final blow...
"Geetaben was killed in Ahmedabad on March 25, in broad daylight, near a bus stop close to her home. She was a Hindu who in the eyes of the Hindu separatists currently ruling Gujarat had committed the cardinal sin of falling in love with a Muslim man..."
The question returns: Why was Rajani burnt alive, like Graham Staines and his two little sons? And let us not forget his wife, Gladys, who chose forgiveness for the killers, continuing to work in the leprosy camp in the forsaken interiors of Orissa.
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