Opinion piece in Mercury, South African daily (October 6, 2010)

Corrective history and collective hatred

The roots of xenophobia in the Indian subcontinent are not difficult to trace: the ancient Sanskrit law-giving text Manusmriti as well as the epic Mahabharata, labelled foreigners, strangers, aliens, and non-Aryans as Mlecchas, meaning barbarians. They were described as cave-dwellers and people of crooked faces; predictably, they were condemned to be outcasts and slaves.

The dictionary definition of xenophobia might point towards ‘an intense or irrational dislike or fear of people from other countries,’ but in the hands of Hitler’s ideological descendants, it also involves the cunning depiction of a section that is culturally/ethnically/religiously/linguistically different from one’s own as ‘foreigners’ in order to fuel hatred and build a systematic hate campaign. When such an in-group usurps the power of the state to push its agenda, the out-group faces the risk of becoming the voiceless victims of a genocide.

The horrors of xenophobia, like the story of its cross-cousin caste discrimination, has a long history in South Asia.

A pathological aversion towards the Indian Tamil plantation workers in Southern Sri Lanka, made the Sinhalese-Buddhist state disown them overnight and close to a million people became stateless non-citizens. Several of them who had never seen their country of origin were shipped back to India. The hatred grew unhindered in that island nation, with the state flaunting an openly an anti-Tamil character, robbing the language its official status and making Tamil people second-class citizens.

The oppression of the Tamils in North-East Sri Lanka gave rise to militancy and violent resistance movements like the LTTE, but nothing could contain the juggernaut of state-sponsored terrorism that was trained to look at Tamils as unwelcome foreigners. Former Army Commander Sarath Fonseka, who under President Mahinda Rajapakse led the genocide of Eelam Tamils said in an interview with Canada’s National Post said, “I strongly believe that this country belongs to the Sinhalese.” Xenophobic hatred ensured that in a couple of months, by May 2009, the Fonseka-led Sinhalese armed forces had brazenly killed a few hundred thousand Tamil civilians using every weapon―from cluster bombs to chemical bombs―at their disposal.

In a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-cultural, multi-religious nation like India, hatred leads to hallucination, and the minorities are conveniently re-imagined as aliens/foreigners/outsiders so that it becomes easier to rob them of their rights.

As I write this article, my nation stands divided over the verdict in the Ayodhya case. We are burdened with a judiciary that seeks to appease the Hindu majority; a judiciary that ignores the solid existence of a masjid that was used as a place for worship by the Muslims for over 450 years; a judiciary that does not decide to be shocked over the brazen, daylight demolition of the masjid on 6 December 1992 by fanatic Hindu mobs; a judiciary that instead decides to gift two-thirds of the mosque’s land to the fundamentalist Hindu groups based on the mere ‘belief’ that it was the birthplace of an epic/mythic hero, Ram. This happens because the nation prefers to willfully forget the fact that Muslims are also sons-of-the-soil, that they are as Indian as any of us. When the Indian imagination is indoctrinated to look at its own citizens as the Other, there can be no greater danger and defeat to our idea of nationhood.

Second part of my interview in Thejas

Here is the second part of my interview (to M. Noushad) in the Malayalam fortnightly magazine THEJAS. A friend wrote in to say that the magazine has been published for the past 14 years, and that a majority of its readers are Dalits and Muslims. (-:

(I still haven’t read the first part, unable to find any Malayalam friends. Will read it soon. All that I can appreciate now is the layout and photographs based on which I have tagged this article)

My interview in the Malayalam fortnightly magazine Thejas

I cannot read Malayalam, but I am sure the thoughts in this interview are mine. All that I know is that the interviewer M Noushad asked me challenging questions that set me think, and it was not one of those run-of-the-mill how you started writing, who is your favourite author, what is your favourite colour kind of interviews. This one was different.

If you know Malayalam, click here to read the first part of my  interview in the Malayalam fortnightly magazine Thejas.

Book Review: Muslim Portraits

Muslim Portraits: Everyday Lives in India
By Mukulika Banerjee (Editor)
Publisher: Yoda Press
Pages: 142 + xxii
Price: Rs.250

By following a policy of alienation and exclusion towards its Muslim population, India has earned a fair share of criticism. The Sachar Committee exposed how Indian Muslims have suffered from prejudice, poverty and political disenfranchisement. The committee’s report showed that Muslims lag behind in literacy, they are under-represented in the armed forces and government jobs. They find it hard to rent a home in cities, they struggle to get a bank loan anywhere. They are systematically criminalised: Muslims form 12 per cent of the Indian population, but make up 40 per cent of the prisoners languishing in its jails. Statistical and sociological studies have sketched this story of marginalisation, but by revealing the faces behind these facts, Muslim Portraits, an anthology of profiles of individual Muslims, comes to possess a legitimacy that is hard to refute or replicate in formal discourse.

In this book, anthropologists who have studied Muslims societies in contemporary India, profile one single individual whom they have befriended during the course of their research. These 11 engrossing life-stories, narrated from places as far-flung as Lucknow and Lakshadweep, let us encounter the diversity of lived experience and force us to step out of the sin of stereotyping.

Manuela Ciotti’s pen-portrait celebrates the friendship (and fictive kinship) of a Muslim barber Islam and his Chamar friend Jannulal in a village near Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh as a testimony to the egalitarian spirit of Islam. On the other side of the spectrum, Shail Mayaram’s story of the story-teller Abdul belonging to an untouchable service caste called kamin, brings out the caste discrimination faced by mirasis within the Muslim community.

Brian Didier’s sketch of an alim in Lakshadweep highlights the extent to which Islam has adapted itself in order to stay in tune with age-old native practices. Didier, brought up on “searing television images of ayatollahs”, admits to having deep-seated biases about Islamic clerics that are unseated when he meets Koya. Not only does this alim uphold the island’s matrilineal heritage, but he also refrains from condemning Sufi practices because he considers social harmony the greatest virtue of Islam.

The only profile from Gujarat is about a guide, Mohammed Husain from Bhuj, who survived the earthquake of January 2001. I would much rather have read the story of a survivor of the violent Hindutva carnage in February 2002, when thousands of Muslims were massacred in Gandhi’s home state. The closest this book comes to documenting a conflict situation is through Thomas Blom Hansen’s story of Javeedbhai, a local don in Mumbai whose gang stood up against the police force and warded off Shiv Sena attacks on a Muslim locality in January 1993, shortly after the Babri Masjid demolition.

The portraits of four women challenge popular assumptions. Patricia Jeffery’s portrait (co-written with Roger and Craig Jeffery) of Aisha, the only female teacher at a madrasa in Bijnor, reveals a vivacious young woman who makes excellent and engaging conversation. Aparna Rao chronicles the story of Khatij, one of the unheard voices from the Kashmir valley. Khatij hasn’t even heard of ‘Bharat’, but she is politically aware enough to condemn the torture and atrocities carried out by the armed forces from ‘Dilli and Hindustan’. Sylvia Vatuk’s memoir of Dr Zakira Ghouse, who earned her doctorate at 73, and Soumya Venkatesan’s portrayal of Banu Beevi, a panchayat president, show us strong women who transcend the boundaries of gender, religion and social status because of their ambition to make a mark in this world.

Stereotyping Muslims has ensured that they are shorn of personal histories. Systematic vilification and disinformation campaigns have made them the first subjects of blame in their own country. Aggressive Hindutva and the global war on terror have strengthened Islamophobia and Muslims have been relegated to a nameless, voiceless existence. This book is a commendable attempt to correct that and could go a long way in healing new and old wounds.

Published in The New Sunday Express. Read the official online version here.

Revisiting tragedies

My general euphoria went for a toss today. In some not-so-occasional fit of fun I had agreed to do the subtitling for a short-film taken by a close friend. In all earnestness, I had expected something light. What I got instead was something poignant and powerful. Parzania, anyone? Yes. Turns out that he has set his story in the midst of the Gujarat anti-Muslim pogrom and God, it was really one hell of an experience. It was only a 13 minute film, but when you are doing the job of subtitling, you have to linger with it for a couple of hours and that way, tragedy seeps in much more slower and much more painfully. And Gujarat is not something anybody can ever erase from the collective and individual consciousness. Yes, 2002 looks like six years back, but to somebody like me, it looks like yesterday. The whole goddamn fear of something as brutal happening closer home because of Hindutva’s sinister designs is always there.

The genocide and riots in Gujarat somehow for me evoke images from my own life during that period. In 2002, I was editing The Dalit and we were wrapping up one of our issues. Gujarat was all over the papers. And we were a bimonthly, so we couldn’t put away coverage of something as important. Everything I read everywhere was depressing and benumbing. Gujarat was far away, but its horror was right under our skins. I still remember sitting next to my layout artist and doing the centrespread with pictures of all those children, their charred little bodies arranged in such neat rows. Grim and gruesome and ghastly. It hurt us to work with those pictures. I was only eighteen then. My layout artist Alice akka was pregnant. She was the one who suffered the most. She couldn’t bare to see the pictures. She, who carried another life within her. We wept. We would both walk away from the computer screens. We were both hurt, and we didn’t talk about it because it would only hurt us more. We couldn’t say we weren’t brave women. But in such cases, being strong wasn’t a solution.

The second time Gujarat’s reality terrorized me was when I was talking to my close friend Shazia. She was telling me that for a whole year she was in one massive depression. That existence became meaningless, and yet, under threat. That never before did we know that despite everything, we were really helpless people. And it was then that I figured that I was in the same predicament. We were young people, we had become disillusioned by this state terror, by this rabid communalism. We yearned to have normal dreams.

Everyone speaks of how 9-11 changed people’s lives and their perceptions, but as far as India is concerned, I think that unholy glory belongs to the Gujarat carnage.

My review of Advani’s biography

(This review of LK Advani’s My Country, My Life appeared in today’s The New Sunday Express)

A SHORT CUT TO THE BALLOT BOX

Those who claim that Advani’s biography is a calculated effort to shed his Hindu hardliner image haven’t read his 986-page book. He maintains that the Babri Masjid demolition is synonymous with Hindu awakening and the Ram Rath Yatra is the  “most transformational event of his political journey”. He labels December 6, 1992, “the saddest day of his life,” yet rejoices that no Indian politician has vowed to reconstruct the demolished structure. Likewise, his sympathy lies with Narendra Modi whom he feels is a ‘victim’ of villification. He pins down the state-sponsored carnage against Muslims to they-asked-for-it provocations and dismisses all accusations of genocide. This isn’t surprising, given that his first lesson in secularism, at the ripe old age of 21, was “not all Muslims are disloyal to India.”

To appreciate the book one should suspend judgment and memory, and offer ourselves the consolation that its intended audience is the ballot box. He rakes up the oh-so-emotive issue of Sonia Gandhi’s foreign origins, condemns cross border terrorism, beams with pride about our nuclear weapons arsenal and Kargil. He is honest when he admits that the India Shining campaign proved to be distastrous, and courageous when he stands up for Jinnah’s secular credentials. Advani is an Emergency-produced hero, so the sections targeting the dynastic leadership and flawed foreign policies of the Congress have an authenticity lacking in the rest of the biography.

This book shows Hindutva’s efforts to appropriate Dr. Ambedkar—the fiery leader who authored Riddles of Hinduism—and reduce him to a poster boy of the Sangh Parivar; so Advani (with all eyes on the Dalit votebank) quotes him to drive home a point against the Partition, to describe Ghazni’s raids on the Somnath temple, and to conveniently indicate that Dr.Ambedkar’s didn’t convert to Islam or Christianity because it “meant going away from the cultural soil of India.”

This biography has a multipersonality disorder, so it often assumes the role of a breathless catalogue of important names. Sometimes, it reads like a manifesto for the forthcoming elections. For a man waiting for the people’s mandate to become Prime Minister, the epilogue sadly doesn’t throw up his vision for the nation. It paints the picture of an eighty-year-old man finding directions for the future from Sri Aurobindo and Swami Vivekananda.

Read this book. It is lavish with words and economic with truth, so remember to read the newspapers too where you will find the rebuttals. Dr  Farooq Abdullah has disagreed that he traded power for Kashmir’s autonomy, Robert Blackwill has said he was at Harvard during the IC814 hijack rubbishing Advani’s claims of having called him. It isn’t free of gaffes either: It is not just the reference to a living Amritsar-based CPI leader as the late Satyapal Dang. Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev were awarded capital punishment for killing J.P.Saunders, but the book tells us that it was because they bombed Delhi Assembly.

The monotonous narrative, devoid of the distancing that makes political biographies work, ensures that at end of the exercise the Loh Purush (Iron Man) has rusted away.

Official link here

Old habits die hard

How was your women’s day?

Saturday evening, I was at a meeting at the LLA building (the first easily affordable choice of Chennai’s activists when it comes to venue!) where a fact-finding report was released. The team, led by Prof.Marx and Ko. Sugumaran had visited Tenkasi and Mutthupettai, known for a history of (shall we say, manufactured) communal tension. Their report was in agreement with the police findings: the RSS had bombed its own office two days before Republic Day, 2008. The Hindutva forces certainly stand to gain from the sympathy-generaton, state-terror on Muslims, community polarization, and the whole aftermath… So, they stooped to this level. And worse, left trademark Muslim caps in order to incriminate others. (I will be writing about this at length somewhere, so, more later… Besides, I hear, the mainstream media ignored it as usual)

(This post was initially meant to deal with the fact that I was the only woman in the 150 member audience. That too, on women’s day. I won’t blame women, because I personally know how difficult it is for women to get out of their homes, to become a part of what is called the public sphere.. But, I regret the mindsets of our men who are content at having sisters/wives/friends/daughters who work at home, and in the office, but do not really have a say about happens in the nation. I really don’t see any change happening in India unless our women are politicized.)

Why this whole story today? Because, the RSS doesn’t stop with bombing its own offices in flare-up zones, it is has grown so thick-skinned that it attacks the CPI(M) headquarters!