India owes Ankit Saxena’s father a debt of gratitude for refusing to communalise his son’s murder
Yashpal
Saxena, whose son was killed by the family members of a Muslim girl he
was in love with, lights the way for us in these dark times of hatred.
10 February 2018 · 07:30 am
Harsh Mander
By
affirming that he bore Muslims no ill will, Yashpal Saxena, whose only
son Ankit Saxena was murdered by the family of the Muslim girl he loved,
demolished one of the most widely used rationalisations for communal
hatred. For this, for his luminous humanity even in the face of great
personal tragedy, the nation owes him an immense debt of gratitude.
Yashpal
Saxena rejected what I call the Doctrine of Vicarious Guilt. It is the
idea that an entire community must collectively carry the guilt for
crimes – real or imagined, committed now or in history – which any of
its members may have perpetrated. This doctrine harbours a moral
rationalisation of violence that people may wreak on other people in
vengeance solely for sharing the same identity as the real or imagined
criminal.
Some of the most brutal mass crimes
in recent history were such acts of collective vengeance against a
community for the real or imagined crimes of a few of its members. More
than 3,000 Sikhs were killed in 1984 in reprisal for the assassination
of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by two Sikhs guards. The 9/11 attack has
been invoked to condone military strikes on civilian populations in
faraway Afghanistan and Iraq. Each terrorist attack in Paris inevitably
makes the entire Muslim population of France culpable in many eyes. It
is the same idea that is invoked to justify communal violence and hate
crimes in this country.
Remarkably, though,
this doctrine is applied selectively. For the gruesome killing of Dalits
in Tsundur, Andhra Pradesh, in 1991, in Jhajjar, Haryana, in 2002, in
Khairlinji, Maharashtra, in 2006, or indeed the atrocities against
Dalits that shame every generation, the upper caste Hindus are never
held collectively responsible. Nor are they pronounced jointly guilty
for the massacre of Sikhs in 1984 and of Muslims in 2002. Much less are
all men held responsible for the subjugation of women through history in
much of the world. Such collective responsibility seems to be
apportioned only to religious minorities, most of all to Muslims.
Murderous thinking
When
Shambhulal Regar chose the 25th anniversary of the Babri Masjid’s
demolition to kill Mohammad Afrazul Afrazul Khan, a migrant worker from
West Bengal living in Rajasthan’s Rajsamand town, he did not target him
for any crimes he had committed. He felt justified hacking Afrazul to
death and burning his body for the many crimes he believed Muslims were
responsible for. He listed them in a series of videotaped rants: he
speaks of love jihad, a conspiracy theory pushed by Hindutva groups that
Muslim men woo Hindu women for the sole purpose of converting them to
Islam; of counterfeit money that funds terrorist groups; of films such
as PK and Padmavati that make fun of Hindu gods and distort “Hindu
history”; of a Muslim conspiracy to destroy a generation of Hindus by
attracting them to drugs; of mafia dons who find safe havens in Pakistan
while looting India; of sinister black-robed Muslim men who surround
mosques; and of Ayodhya, where a Ram temple could not be built even 25
years after the Babri Masjid was razed.
The
same rationalisation drove the violence that accompanied the campaign to
demolish the Babri Masjid and replace it with a grand temple to Ram.
The logic went thus: Babar had demolished a Ram temple and built a
mosque in its place – it was irrelevant that there was no convicting
archaeological or historical evidence to back this claim – and Indian
Muslims today must atone for the 16th century Mughal emperor’s crime by
giving up their claim to the site. The Bharatiya Janata Party leader Lal
Krishna Advani began his 1989 Rath Yatra, meant to galvanise the Hindu
masses for building the Ram temple, from Somnath temple in Gujarat to
underline “Muslim guilt” that dates back even further – this temple had
been looted and destroyed by the Muslim invader Mahmud Ghazni in 1024
CE.
In 1999, when Australian missionary Graham
Staines was burnt alive with his two young sons in Odisha by the Sangh
Parivar activist Dara Singh to “avenge the crime” of converting Hindus
to Christianity, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee implied the same
rationale of vicarious guilt by calling for a “national debate” on
conversions.
It was also implicit in Prime
Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s notorious remark, in relation to the 1984 Sikh
massacre in Delhi, that when a big tree fell, the earth was bound to
shake. At that time, I was posted in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, and my wife
taught in the city’s Daly College. One of her colleagues, reading out
the attendance sheet, stopped and asked a little boy with cropped hair,
“Are you not a Sikh?” The boy was petrified, then responded in a shaking
voice, “Hanji, Madam, main Sikh hun, par maine Indira Gandhi ko nahi
mara.” Yes, I am Sikh, but I did not kill Indira Gandhi.
An
identical rationale lay behind the Gujarat carnage of 2002. At a
meeting of the BJP’s parliamentary party in Delhi in December 2002,
Vajpayee, in a thinly disguised rationalisation of the “Hindu anger”
that manifested in the violence that followed the alleged torching of a
train coach carrying Hindu pilgrims, lamented: “Why didn’t people of the
Muslim community condemn the Godhra incident? Even today, there is no
repentance that we committed a mistake or that this should not have
happened and that it was a crime.”
Regretting
the post-Godhra violence, he had asked in April 2002, “Lekin aag lagayi
kisne?” Who lit the fire? The poet prime minister suggested that Muslims
as a community should seek forgiveness for the crime that some of their
co-religionists had allegedly committed.
The
orgy of slaughter, rape, loot and arson that followed the burning of a
train coach in Godhra was widely perceived as righteous, or at least an
understandable reaction to the “barbaric crime” of the Muslims. Photo
credit: AFP
In fact, ever since that train
coach burned at Godhra railway station, an intolerably heavy burden of
vicarious guilt has been thrust upon the shoulders of India’s Muslim
community. The orgy of slaughter, rape, loot and arson that followed was
widely perceived as righteous, or at least an understandable reaction
to the “barbaric crime” of the Muslims. Chief Minister Narendra Modi
described the gruesome incident at Godhra as a planned “one -sided
collective terrorist attack by one community.” In a speech telecast on
Doordarshan on February 28, 2002, he said, “This heinous crime, cowardly
and inhuman crime, has taken place in Gujarat. It cannot be justified
in any civilised society. A crime that can never be forgiven.” He has
never made a comparable speech expressing anguish at the murders and
rape of Muslims that followed the train burning.
Not
just for Modi. For a very large number of my friends, extended family
and colleagues in the Indian Administrative Service, the anger and
violence against Muslims by Gujarati Hindus was understandable, if not
actually righteous, because some Muslims were claimed to have
deliberately set fire to a train compartment filled with Hindu women,
children and men. If there was evidence this had indeed happened, it
would not justify the killing, rape and looting. But even the facts of
what happened at Godhra that fateful morning are far from settled.
Still,
The Times of India reported that Modi quoted Newton’s law that every
action has an equal and opposite reaction to virtually justify the
massacre of Muslims. The statement was denied later, but the Special
Investigation Team appointed by the Supreme Court to look into the
Gujarat riots cases confirmed that Modi had made this statement in a
television interview. The team’s report quotes the exact statement:
“Kriya pratikriya ke chain chal rahi hai. Hum chaete hai ke na kriya ho,
aur na pratikriya.” A chain of action and reaction is going on, he
said, we neither want action nor reaction.
Lighting the way
It
is these ideas of vicarious guilt and the inevitable, even righteous,
action-reaction that Yashpal Saxena has rejected. His photographer son
fell in love with a Muslim college student in his neighbourhood and they
wanted to marry. Her father was opposed to their relationship and
allegedly killed Ankit Saxena in what was a gruesome hate crime.
The
magazine Caravan reported that when Delhi BJP chief Manoj Tiwari went
to meet Yashpal Saxena, he begged him and the media not to communalise
his son’s murder. “I had one son,” he said. “If I get justice, it’s
good. If not, even then I don’t have hatred against any community. I
have no such (communal) thinking. I am unable to understand why the
media is showing this issue in that way.”
One
of Ankit Saxena’s closest friends was a Muslim, Mohammed Azhar Alam. He
told The Quint he accompanied Yashpal Saxena to Haridwar to immerse
Ankit Saxena’s ashes. There he performed puja with his friend’s father.
“Uncle even showed me the way in which the holy dip is taken in the
Ganga,” he said. “I took the dip with him, and prayed with him.”
The
Caravan report is full of endearing stories about Ankit Saxena’s
carefree group of friends who called themselves “Awaara Boys”. One of
them, Chetan Narang, said, “Temple, gurudwara, mosque, church – we used
to go visit every place of worship. It was Ankit who would take us to
all these places. He never discriminated against any religion.”
India
would be a an infinitely more humane land if we had more people like
Ankit Saxena and his father. We owe Yashpal Saxena a special debt for
his humanity and fairness, for rejecting the doctrine of collective
communal responsibility for the crimes of individuals and of “action
justifies reaction”. He lights the way for us in these dark times of
hatred.
II.
Opinion: Ankit Saxena’s murder is tragic but it does not warrant protest marches from liberals
Personalised violence cannot be equated with systematic, normalised violence.
11 Feb 2018
Sanjay Srivastava
Every
now and then, there is an exception to the Great Indian Obsession with
things mathematical and scientific. I refer to the well-established
calculus of response whenever there is an incident that involves Hindus
and Muslims. The tabularisation goes something like this: if the
so-called liberals march and hold protest meetings after a Muslim is
killed by a Hindu, then they should do the same in case the opposite
happens. The argument also goes: just as they interrogate Hindu opinion
in the case of a Muslim killing, so they should ask questions of Muslims
in the obverse case. But the family of Ankit Saxena, a young man whose
life was cut short by the blind rage of human senselessness, have bucked
this calculus. They have spurned offers of assistance by politicians
and others to cast the tragedy as an instance of Hindu-Muslim violence.
In
their hour of unimaginable grief, they have refused to be swayed by an
imagination of good and evil whose key aim is the persistent pursuit of
social disharmony in the cause of political gain.
It
has been reported that members of Saxena’s extended family have
publicly said his murder by the family members of a young women he
intended to marry should not be seen as communal. Rather, they have
appealed, the murder should be seen as a tragedy at a personal level, a
disaster visited upon one family by the mindless actions of another.
It
would, of course, have been easy for them to align with a political
cause and, perhaps, gain some material benefit as well as the gratitude
of some very important people. They did not. And by refusing to let
their personal suffering be the stage for enacting cynical political
dramas, they served an important pedagogical function. They told us that
the calculus of public rage ought to be reconsidered so that we better
understand the relations between action and reaction. They told us that
we must not be threatened into becoming robots with a mechanical
understanding of outrage.
A human understanding
of outrage against violence – marching and protesting, say – must
direct our attention to situations created by systematic, planned and
normalised violence. It should enable us to realise the difference
between personalised violence and the kind of violence that requires one
community to be seduced into thinking of another as the enemy. Grief
deserves an answer, but it cannot be the same under different
circumstances. This only serves to make banal the nature of empathy and
political outrage. We should, of course, be outraged by Saxena’s murder.
Further, it should be deeply concerning that those who murdered him did
so because they did not want a member of their family marrying a person
from another faith. But this in itself does not constitute communal
violence, as Saxena’s family has pointed out.
Communalism as context
Preparations
to unleash communal violence – for it is almost never spontaneous, but
results from careful groundwork and calculations regarding costs and
benefits – damage the social fabric. A Muslim family murdering the Hindu
suitor of their daughter damages individual lives. Moreover, and
perhaps ironically, while the act may be motivated by the horror of
having to welcome someone from another religion into the family, it may
not necessarily be inspired by a dread of that religion. There are many
Muslims who cannot imagine marrying a Hindu and many Hindus who would be
just as resistant to the idea that one of their own might marry a
Muslim. This, however, does not mean such Muslims and Hindus hate the
other community. In many parts of India, these communities exist
peacefully, recognising the right of the other to its own lifeways.
Communalism
is the context in which the right of another community to exist is
questioned. Identities are complex: I may not wish to enter into certain
kinds of relationships with you but that does not mean I wish to
destroy your identity and seek to subsume it within my own. We know each
other’s boundaries and occasionally wander across them and relate to
one another in some contexts, but not in others. This maynot be the
ideal situation for a multi-religious society but it is how most lives
in such societies are lived. Historically, too, the situation has not
been much different.
This, then, is what the
Saxena family’s reaction tells us in all its undeniable tragedy: in
their sorrow, they seek no false comfort of hating that which they can
tolerate.
This is also why we must resist calls
to hit the streets in protest against the murder of Saxena as an act of
Hindu-Muslim violence. It cheapens pathos by casting it as part of an
abstract drama of identity, rather than the site of personal grief. And
it sets rolling preparations for greater tragedies.
Sanjay Srivastava is a sociologist.
