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The Gurgaon namaaz row marks one more victory for majoritarianism – and a template for India today
It was a mischievous and dangerous ploy to divide communities, and it seemed to have worked.
For some weeks, India’s glittering hub of
information technology, industry and finance near Delhi was shrouded in
fear and animosity. Simmering hate threatened to erupt into a raging
communal fire in Gurugram after Hindutva mobs disrupted
the traditional Muslim Friday afternoon worship in several open spaces
for weeks starting April-end. Reports claim that devout Muslims were
finally able to offer namaaz peacefully on May 11 and May 18. The dispute has since fallen off newspaper front pages and television screens. Peace seems to have been restored.
But
what appears to be peace is actually a poor camouflage for one more
triumph of majoritarian politics and of the rule of the mob – that too
in the country’s National Capital Region. The tried and tested template
has been deployed with mounting regularity in recent years across the
country. It goes like this: left to themselves, Hindus and Muslims live
together peacefully. Majoritarian Hindutva organisations incite communal
trouble by entering Muslim spaces with taunts and provocative slogans,
sometimes brandishing weapons. If Muslims are provoked, a communal
skirmish ensues. If instead they maintain restraint, this is interpreted
jubilantly as evidence of their weakness and defeat. Both ways, society
is split wide open and the BharatiyaJanata Party reaps rich electoral
harvests.
A recent example of this was seen in West Bengal. The
state has no tradition of elaborate celebrations for Lord Ram’s birth,
but for the past three years, Ram Navami processions
have been organised by Sangh organisations that stretch over several
days and deliberately wind through Muslim-majority areas. Men display
naked weapons and shout slogans
demanding that Muslims must hail Jai Shri Ram or else make their way to
a cemetery or to Pakistan. Most Muslims do not react – whether because
they are unprovoked or muffled by submission and fear – but when a few
incensed youth in Asansol fought back in March, it triggered a communal riot. Lives were lost and properties destroyed of people of both faiths.
In Gurugram, on the other hand, when a belligerent and unruly crowd on April 20 disturbed prayers in Sector 53
with slogans of Jai Shri Ram (which was captured in a video that
subsequently went viral), the men who had gathered for the weekly
collective worship rolled their prayer mats and quietly dispersed. Two
weeks later, on May 4, vigilantes disrupted prayers in more than 10
locations. The disruptors were from several organisations, including the
Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Bajrang Dal, Hindu Kranti Dal, Gorakshak Dal,
Hindu JagaranManch and Shiv Sena, that gathered under the umbrella of
the Hindu SanyuktSangharshSamiti. The troublemakers were backed by some
panchayat members who threatened to organise religious havans at the
same time and venues as the Friday prayers.
According to the Times of India,
there were “unprecedented scenes of people offering namaz getting up
midway and running away in the face of slogan-shouting” in many crowded
spots. Reports also claimed that agitators arrived in four jeeps
at a namaaz venue on MG Road and shouted abusive slogans. The police
force present there did nothing to stop the sloganeering and threats and
instead asked the namaazis to disperse. In Sector 40, the Imam who was
leading the prayers was pushed to the ground. People who had come for
the prayers folded their mats and left. There were private factories
where for years, Muslim employees had been allowed to pray in the
parking lot or any other open space. Even this was stopped by police or
government officials, without explaining why or with what powers they
were enforcing this ban. Through all of this, not one instance of
Muslims resisting or retaliating has been reported. There has been
anguish and confusion, but no forceful confrontation or violence.
Play
The video of the April 20 disruption
Space crunch
Over
the last decade, the boom in construction, eateries and offices in
Gurgaon (renamed Gurugram in 2016) have transformed it into a powerful
magnet for the most impoverished residents from India’s rural
hinterlands in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Bengal, Assam and
elsewhere. Many of these are Muslim. Circular migrants are not captured
by census enumerators, but estimates of the numbers of Muslim workers in
Gurugram are around half a million.
Islamic teachings recommend
congregational prayers for Muslims on Friday afternoons: the Prophet is
said to have described the Friday prayer as the Haj of the Poor,
symbolic of brotherhood and equality. But Gurgaon has only about 15
mosques, many small and makeshift, which cannot accommodate more than a
fraction of Friday worshippers. Muslims have therefore been congregating
for namaaz in open spaces for at least 10 years now, with no
opposition.
Members of Hindutva organisations under the banner of
the Sanyukt Hindu SangharshSamiti have justified their protests on
several grounds. Traffic troubles were the least of these. They described
the disruptors as “patriotic” and the men who offered prayers in
communal tropes that are standard in Sangh propaganda. They called them
criminal-minded, conflated them with Bangladeshi and Rohingya refugees
and described them as a threat to Hindu women and girls in the area, as
people who shout slogans against the country in the guise of prayers and
men eager to illegally occupy open government lands.
Some
observers suggest that resistance to usurping public spaces for worship
is legitimate. One of India’s most respected craft activists, Laila
Tyabji, also an observant Muslim, wrote a Facebook post
opposing public displays of religiosity. She maintained robustly that
“disrupting traffic or unauthorised occupation of private property
cannot be allowed”. She said:
“I
see the controversy as a wonderful opportunity for civil society to
demand that the public observance of ANY religion should be forbidden
altogether in our already overcrowded, noisy and volatile cities
– whether these be Kavadias, Muharram processions, or the recent
assertive Ram Naumi celebrations which actually led to destruction and
loss of life.
...Loudspeakers blaring from mosques, noisy
truck/motorbike parades that block roads, and Satsangs taking over
public parks should all be prohibited. If done impartially,
even-handedly, legally, and without fear or favour, this would be an
important step in confining religion to our hearts, homes and religious
places; while keeping it firmly out of both public life and public
spaces. After all a fundament of all faiths is living in peace, not
competitive self-assertion.
...As it happens, though we are
encouraged to pray in a congregation, especially on Fridays and Eid,
(as a demonstration of the brotherhood and equality of man), Muslims can
pray anywhere as long as we are ritually clean and know the right
direction! The desert sand, a corner of your room...... Even a prayer
rug is not required…Islam is an intensely practical religion’.
These
days, sadly, whatever your religion, the form and ritual have become
more important than the actual meaning. An assertion of community
rather than god.”
Few among us would disagree in
principle with Tyabji’s measured plea for restraining public displays of
religious worship, which on many occasions has less to do with
religious faith and more with communal assertion. But this is a complete
misreading of the contestations in Gurugram. The Gurugram incidents
were a provocation by belligerent Hindutva mobs, protected by a
sympathetic administration, against weekly prayers by mostly
working-class migrant Muslims who have no other covered spaces for
worship.
It is noteworthy that before the mobs set out to violently disperse the prayers, the satellite city’sresidents had not protested against these. The
six men who disrupted the prayers on April 20 were reportedly residents
of a nearby village but also members of Hindutva groups. If residents
in any part of the city did or do face problems because of the weekly
prayers, they would be entirely within their rights to alert the state
administration about obstructions or nuisance that prayer congregations
may cause at any location and these grievances could be dealt with
fairly under the law. By all means, we also do need a public debate
about the blocking of roads, often for several days, for festivities
(mostly Hindu), the building of shrines in public lands (I have seen in
my South Delhi colony a temple on public land grow from a stone to a
grand structure), the use of public offices for festivals of only one
religion and indeed the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh drills in public
parks. But selectively attacking one practice is only feeding a toxic
communal agenda. A public notice at the HUDA ground in Gurugram on May 4. Credit: IANS
Administrative response
The
namaaz row is a mischievous and dangerous ploy to divide communities in
Gurugram and the larger National Capital Region. The state
administration should have dealt firmly with the troublemakers bent on
fomenting communal hatred. It did arrest six men identified in the video
of the first disruption, but took no action against the mobsters that
followed or those who incited them with provocative slogans. The
administration then put up boards
on disputed spaces where vigilantes had disrupted the prayers,
declaring that these were government lands in which the status quo
should be maintained. Chief Minister ManoharLalKhattar signalled his
sympathy with the demands of those who disrupted the prayers when he said
that namaaz should be read in mosques or Idgahs rather than public
spaces. What he failed to acknowledge was that Muslim migrants who
build, clean and run the city are too poor to be able to build mosques
and also lack the political clout for land allocations and official
permissions.
Taking a cue from Khattar’s stance, the district
administration called for negotiations between Hindu and Muslim
residents of the city. The problem with these negotiations is that the
Hindus were represented by hotheads from communal formations, not the
large numbers of peaceable residents of the city who believe in goodwill
between communities. Muslims, on the other hand, came to the table
acutely conscious of their political, economic and social powerlessness.
I met several of these negotiators. These are mostly well-meaning
young, educated Muslim professionals and entrepreneurs. They believed
that their educational capital gives them both the right and the
responsibility to represent the working class members of their
community.
The administration brokered with them an agreement to
bring down the numbers of sites of Friday worship from 106 open spaces
to reportedly only some 23 open spots and 13 mosques. On May 12, prayers were allowed only in these select locations, under the shadow of the police. Those with cars or bikes drove confusedly
from site to site, and there were sometimes four shifts of prayers
because of the surge of worshippers. But many were too poor to pay for
public transport to distant prayer locations during their short lunch
breaks. One imam began his prayer with the song SareJahan Se Achha to
prove his loyalty to his country. The next week has seen the number of
sites swell only a little, but the numbers of worshippers increase
further because of the holy month of Ramzan. Many of the sites that have
been ceded are open spaces with no tree cover, making it physically
very demanding for the worshippers. Mosques are now running several
shifts for the Friday prayer.
“All we want is peace”, the
worshipers often pleaded through these weeks of communalised aggression.
This is what they got in its place. Muslims pray under a makeshift tent in Gurgaon Sector 29 on May 11. Credit: Abhishek Dey
Poor trade-off
The
administration claims that the reduction of prayer sites to a fraction
of the original number is voluntary. This claim is disingenuous in many
ways. The drastic reduction has been accomplished on the one hand under
the pressure of Right-Wing Hindutva formations, and on the other with
the consent of middle-class Muslims who wish to avoid confrontation with
mobs of Hindu men and a partisan administration. They fear that
violence will wreak havoc in the lives of highly vulnerable migrant
Muslim workers. If the administration wanted to reduce the sites of
worship, they should have done so of their own volition, or after legal
representations by residents, not after namaaz sites were overrun by
inciting mobs. They should then have passed legal orders after due
process for each of the sites that they wished to see closed, giving
reasons, after giving a notice to worshippers and a chance to present
their points of view. The administration is actually helping secure one
more victory for the majoritarian mob.
It is for this reason that I joined a group of around a dozen retired officers to write to
the Chief Secretary of Haryana on May 7 and express dismay over many
Friday namaaz attacks which were “coordinated, violent and clearly
designed to terrorise and intimidate and are taking place across the
district”. We spoke of “a gradual intensification of hate-mongering and
allegations against the Muslim community in supposedly upmarket
colonies”. We added, “If Hindus can organise their Bhagavati Jagaran,
Navratra gatherings and Durga Pujas freely in public spaces, where is
the rationale for preventing Muslims from offering prayers in open
fields?” We were firmly of the view that this is not a problem of law
and order as characterised by the chief minister. On the contrary, his
“government and the administration also has the responsibility to ensure
the right of all citizens to practise their religion – a right
guaranteed by the Constitution”, the letter read.
The only silver
lining is the push-back from all classes and communities in Gururgram.
Many more people are opening up their homes, basements or work-spaces
for the Friday namaaz. Saba Dewan and Rahul Roy, filmmakers and
conveners of the stirring Not in My Name protests
in July last year, are residents of Gurugram. They called a meeting of
concerned citizens in their living room and were overwhelmed when 90
people turned up, ranging from corporate heads and professionals to
home-makers, NGO workers and artists. This group has formally
constituted itself into a platform called the Gurgaon Nagrik Ekta Manch,
the name a tribute to the Nagrik Ekta Manch constituted in Delhi in the
wake of the 1984 anti-Sikh massacre. They plan a massive iftar during
Ramzan with residents of every religion and class joining the
celebration. They are determined to communicate the social message to
all that they – we – will not be divided.
The past years have
witnessed growing vigilante attacks, targeted police encounters and
routine hate speech by ministers and elected representatives, all
calibrated at high pitch to teach Muslim residents their status in new
India – that they no longer are equal citizens as assured by the
constitution, but second-class citizens of a Hindu nation. That mobs
from communal organisations will mediate and decide their rights.
It
is no secret that only one political party gains when the country gets
divided by hate and majoritarian belligerence. As we brace ourselves for
the year ahead leading to the next general elections, with little else
to offer people reeling under jobless growth, the farmers’ crisis and
crony capitalism, it is sobering to think that Gurugram may well be the
model for the ruling establishment for all of India.
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