Soon after this brutal killing of the Bangladeshi-American atheist blogger, protests have begun across Dhaka. We extend our support to the struggle against the dangerous forces of religion-inspired extremism. See more detailed report in Al Jazeera here and The Guardian here.
अभी पिछले साल की बात है जब जनवरी के मध्य में महाराष्ट्र के कोल्हापुर में ‘डा दाभोलकर की हत्या और तर्कशीलता/विवेकवाद’ विषय पर बोलते हुए कामरेड गोविन्द पानसरे, ने एक अहम बात कही थी कि अंधश्रद्धा के खिलाफ संघर्षरत रहे डा दाभोलकर की हत्या इसी वजह से हुई क्योंकि वह विवेकवादी थे। उनका कहना था कि
‘ऐसे सभी लोग जिन्होंने तर्कशीलता का रास्ता अपनाया, उसका प्रचार किया, उन तमाम लोगों को कुर्बानी देनी पड़ी है। तर्कशीलता की बलिवेदी पर अपने आप को न्यौछावर करनेवाले डा दाभोलकर न पहले शख्स हैं और न आखरी। तर्कशीलता और तर्कशीलता विरोध का यह संघर्ष आदिम काल से चल रहा है और उसमें बदल करना है या नहीं इसके बारे में आप को फैसला लेना होगा।’
निश्चित ही उस वक्त़ किसे यह गुमान हो सकता था कि महज एक साल के अन्दर शहीदों की इस गौरवशाली परम्परा में उनका नाम भी जुड़ जाएगा।
20 फरवरी 2015 को मुंबई के ब्रीच कैण्डी अस्पताल में कम्युनिस्ट पार्टी के इस वरिष्ठ नेता ने अपनी अन्तिम सांस ली। 16 फरवरी को सुबह जब वह अपनी पत्नी उमा के साथ सुबह टहलते हुए लौट रहे थे, तब मोटरसाइकिल सवार युवकों ने उन पर गोलियां चलायी थी। अपनी लम्बी जिन्दगी लेखन से लेकर आन्दोलन, संगठन निर्माण से लेकर रचनात्मक काम आदि तमाम मोर्चों पर एक साथ सन्नद्ध रहा यह सेनानी, चार दिन जिन्दगी और मौत से संघर्ष कर, यह जंग हार गया। इसे विचित्र संयोग कहा जा सकता है कि डा दाभोलकर की मौत और उनकी मौत के तरीके में भी एक समानता थी, मोटरसाइकिल पर सवार युवकों ने दोनों पर तभी गोलियां चलायी गयीं जब वह सुबह टहल कर लौट रहे थे। Continue reading हम सब पानसरे
Guest post by ARSHIE QURESHI
For a child born in Kashmir, the chances of living a normal life and even survival vary greatly from one region to another. Suppose you are born in the seemingly volatile stretch of Downtown. You may well turn out to be someone whose pictures are flashed on social media as the epitome of bravery, someone whose demise is imminent, and someone ready to wear the ‘Shaheed’ label. I arrived at this place at 4:30 on a cold evening. The room was crowded by women sitting with only one recognizable face; Shehzaad’s mother, Rubeena Akhter. Nobody spoke. The air smelled like rain. After a short while, a tall man in a brown-checkered pheran appeared. Leaning on the walls, he helped himself to one corner of the dimly lit but spacious room. He did not want himself to be identified as a ‘victim of conflict’.
For Shehzaad, life had been altogether different before. He had spent happy summers with his family in the town where violence, as it existed, had never appeared to him naked. By now, he is 23. He has become larger and properly bearded. The one thing which you can’t miss about Shehzaad is that he has giant brown eyes like a dairy cow. That’s what prompts my most idiotic lines of inquiry. Could someone who looks like that really pelt stones on streets? Idiotic, I know. “Do I have to tell you how I was supposed to have been killed that day?” he says, sounding like a gull. I hear a slow whimpering strangled with ache. This soon changes into full-throated babbling—a cascade of terrible, terrified pleading wails as he continued naming those who had been killed during the 2010 agitations.
Guest post by TARANGINI SRIRAMAN
Porters at ISBT (Image courtesy DNA)
Barely six years into its introduction, the Aadhaar project, otherwise known as the Unique Identification (UID) project has been studied and critiqued extensively – its promises to strengthen welfare delivery, curb corruption, exorcise ghost beneficiaries from government databases, initiate financial inclusion and enhance intra-governmental coordination have been enthusiastically received in certain corporate and technocratic circles and skeptically, if not scathingly viewed in other academic and journalistic quarters. The liberties this far-advanced project has taken with individuals’ privacy and its failure to acquire a statutory basis (even as enrollment drives continue unabated) have justly attracted severe censure. And until recently, the surreptitiously mandatory nature of the project – where welfare entitlements were linked to the possession of numbers – was cause for alarm. The Supreme Court judgment in 2013 challenging this mandatory linkage between Aadhaar and subsidies/entitlements may have slowed down processes of the number’s proliferation as an exclusive proof.
However, since the new government at the Centre took over, newer uses and linkages are being imagined. How indispensable the Aadhaar will be to such schemes and entitlements only time can tell: cases in point the Jan Dhan Yojana (JDY) and the linkage of the Aadhaar with the passport. As new linkages appear in place of the old, the new government is urging all of us to walk boldly into the embrace of biometric identification that will, to a certain extent, at least, pervade public transactions (for some) and their very socio-economic chances of welfare support (for most others). It was against this conceptual and empirical backdrop (so competently elucidated by the various scholars, lawyers and journalists following this project) that I decided, as part of my work on a larger book project, to speak with a migrant community in Delhi about their Aadhaar-related experiences – did they wish to get these numbers, if so why?
For these purposes, I picked a community of bus coolies or porters in North Delhi most of whom were migrants from different parts of the country and who stayed in a makeshift residence on the premises of the bus terminal. Continue reading Bus Porters’ Petition for Aadhaar – A Political Analysis: Tarangini Sriraman
Guest Post by MUBASHAR HASAN
Even though, according to a series of Gallup and Pew Research polls, Bangladeshi society is now perhaps most illiberal in its history of existence, most informed readers know that a strong secular discourse led by a group of academics, creative writers and artists still continues to flourish and resisting the illiberalism to be the main discourse of the country.
After the independence, the 1972 constitution of the country have endorsed secularism, socialism and democracy as key founding principles among others. However, it is unclear to me as a Bangladeshi who is in his thirties whether these principles were propounded within the constitution with mass support or influential elite intellectuals who were close to the power-base asserted these values because they had the luxury to construct Bangladesh in paper the way they wanted to. May be the latter is true. If secularism was a value held close to the hearts of Bangladeshi masses, it does not make sense now why there is a huge mass support-base for the center-right party Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) or the growing shift to Islam by the ruling Awami League (AL).
In this article, I want to revisit the role of a group of intellectuals who were instrumental in shaping a secular discourse for Bangladesh when Bangladesh was known as the East Pakistan. I call my approach as a second reading to Bangladesh history simply because I haven’t come across any narratives that looks into the thought process of the key constructors of secular discourse in Bangladesh. In this lieu, I shall try to point out to the motivational forces of key actors behind the secular discourse of Bangladesh. Continue reading The Genealogy of the Secular Discourse of Bangladesh – A Second Reading to Bangladesh History: Mubashar Hasan
Guest Post by Kavita Krishnan
“Phool shaakhon pe khilne lagey” tum kaho,
“Jaam rindon ko milne lagey” tum kaho,
“Chaak seenon kay silne lagey” tum kaho,
Iss khule jhooth ko,
Zehn ki loot ko,
Main nahin maanta,
Main nahin jaanta
“Branches are abloom with flowers” you say!
“The thirsty have got to drink” you say!
“Wounds of the heart are being sewn” you say!
This open lie…
A plunder of reason…
I shall not accept!
I shall not recognise!
(Habeeb Jalib, translated by Ghazala Jamil)
In Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, Petrucchio declares the noontime sun to be the moon: “I say it is the moon,” to test his wife’s loyalty and obedience. As long as she stands by her reason and asserts “I know it is the sun”, she continues to be a ‘shrew’. Only when she consents to ‘zehn ki loot’ (plunder of reason), when she agrees to subordinate her own reason to the whim and diktat of her husband, and deny the self-evident truth, does she achieve approval as a suitable wife.
We, the people of India, are being similarly tamed of our ‘shrewish’ behaviour, with propaganda and public shaming in TV studios accomplishing the ‘zehn ki loot’. It is a process that seeks to bully us into declaring that the sun is the moon, that night is day, that ‘khula jhooth’ (open lie) is in fact the only truth. Refuse to part with your reason, and you are chastised for ‘bad behaviour’.
I would like to revisit the #GovtVsNGO News Hour show on Times Now, on 17th February, as a particularly glaring instance (Activism or Anti-nationalism, Parts 1 and 2 )
The topic of the show was the Government of India’s decision to deplane a Greenpeace activist Priya Pillai from a London-bound flight, because she was planning to depose before British MPs about the violation of India’s forest rights laws by a British mining company, Essar, in Mahan in Madhya Pradesh.
Continue reading Zehn ki Loot – The Plunder of Reason in a Times Now TV Studio: Kavita Krishnan
Report produced by PEOPLE’S UNION FOR DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS
Between December 26th and 31st 2014, a PUDR fact-finding team visited 9 villages of Bijapur district, Chhattisgarh to ascertain reports of arrests, intimidation and harassment, including sexual abuse by security forces who are stationed there to fight the Maoists. Predominantly Adivasi villages, the residents of Basaguda, Kottaguda, Pusbaka, Lingagiri, Rajpeta, Timmapur, Kottagudem, Korsaguda and Sarkeguda, narrated the daily acts of violence and violations committed by armed personnel residing in security camps. Apart from documenting the continuance of ‘area domination’ by the security forces, the report draws particular attention to:
Guest post by SATYA SAGAR
Among the epithets, most frequently hurled at Arvind Kejriwal by the BJP, in the run up to the Delhi assembly elections, were ‘anarchist’, closely followed by ‘urban naxal’. What is it about AAP that threatens the Sangh Parivar to a point of exhibiting such great hysteria and anxiety?
AAP, despite some novelties, is after all a very mainstream political formation, operating completely within the ambit of the Indian Constitution and no pretensions of turning the system upside down?Is there something deeper happening here?
One possibility is of course that, in its name-calling, the BJP presumed the average Delhi voter would run scared, straight into the waiting arms of Papa Modi[1]. In that case then, it was obviously a complete misreading of the public mood of anger and defiance against established national parties. Continue reading Peace, bread and politics of AAP: Satya Sagar
My piece (linked to and pasted as text below) in The Indian Express today, takes stock of AAP’s order to halt evictions and the possibilities it opens up to intervene into Delhi’s housing inequalities. I link it here in order to place it together with one additional frame that is necessary to the argument in the piece.
The counter to eviction is also a second object: a 25 sq m flat that is increasingly the primary choice of our housing policies to replace self-built house. This is seen as progress, an easily legible move from kuccha to pucca, from basti to flat. Complexes of these flats – often built in the thousands with a characteristic green stripe of the National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) at the bottom – have begun to emerge across Indian cities. Many more are on their way.
Who doesn’t want such a housing unit? It turns out, in fact, many people. Occupancy rates of units built in the first decade of JNNURM are as low as 30%. Why do families leave? Well, because life on very low incomes isn’t possible far from work, schools and transit. New housing units need land – far more land than the dense, self-built bastis – which means they are most often, especially in the bigger cities, peripheral. Far precisely from work, schools, and transit.
It isn’t just the distance. Housing decisions by the income poor are not made on the basis of the quality of a flat but on the ability to integrate housing with work by using homes as workspaces and living near jobs. This is why bastis are built where and how they are. Even if the new units weren’t peripheral, they remain a form unsuited to these multiple lives of housing: they can’t be incrementally changed and moulded into godowns, warehouses, tailor shops, or restaurants, or grow with families. They are houses, not housing. Moving beyond evictions will also need re-imagining the 25 sq m unit.
Link to the main piece here. Text after the break.
Continue reading Halting the Demolition Derby
Guest post by SAGAR DHARA
The Aam Admi Party (AAP) has won a spectacular victory in the Delhi assembly elections and will form a government shortly. The party’s manifesto 2015 (http://www.aamaadmiparty.org/AAP-Manifesto-2015.pdf) promises to do many things—some positive, e.g., passing a Swaraj Bill and some that are not so positive, e.g., setting up pithead power plants to supply power to Delhi. Here are a few practical suggestions that may help AAP and its supporters to strengthen people’s participation in grasroot self-governance.
Participatory budgeting
AAP’s proposed Swaraj Bill is aimed at strengthening grassroot self-governance in Delhi mohallas and community neighbourhoods. Mohalla committees are designed to deal with local issues. However, they can also be used as platforms for Delhi’s polity to participate in decisions that that affect all of Delhi through a process called participatory budgeting.
Participatory budgeting first began in 1990 in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. In the first quarter of every year, communities hold open house meetings every week to discuss and vote on the city’s budget and spending priorities for their neighbourhood. Later, city-wide public plenaries pass a budget that is binding on the city council. The results speak for themselves. Within seven years of starting participatory budgeting, household access to piped water and sewers doubled to touch 95%. Roads, particularly in slums, increased five-fold. Schools quadrupled, health and education budgets trebled. Tax evasion fell as people saw their money at work. People used computer kiosks to feed communicate suggestions to the city council’s website.
Participatory budgeting is now being done in 1,500 towns around the world—Europe, South America, Canada, India—Pune, Bengaluru, Mysore and Hiware Bazar in Maharashtra. Twenty five years ago, Hiware Bazar was like any other drought-prone village in Marathwada. Today its income has increased twenty-fold and poverty has all but disappeared. Continue reading AAP Victory and Some Tools for Popular Self-Government: Sagar Dhara
Guest post by JEET SINGH SANWAL
उन्नाव (उ.प्र.) से भारतीय जनता पार्टी के सांसद साक्षी महाराज ने पिछले माह हिन्दू धर्मावलम्बी महिलाओं को चार-चार बच्चे पैदा करने की सलाह देकर हिन्दुत्ववादी संगठनों की वर्षों पुरानी ख्वाहिश को मानो एक जीवनदान दे दिया। इस बयान के बाद तमाम हिन्दुत्ववादी संगठनों ने धर्म की दुहाई देते हुए महिलाओं को ज्यादा से ज्यादा बच्चे पैदा करने की सलाह देने के लिए मोर्चा संभाल लिया। कुछ लोगों ने तो आठ और कुछ ने दस-दस बच्चों को पैदा करने तक का आह्वान कर दिया। कई वर्षों से विश्व हिन्दू परिषद इस विषय को मुद्दा बनाये हुए है लेकिन साधारण जनमानस ने उसे कोई महत्व नहीं दिया। भाजपा के नेताओं द्वारा इस तिरस्कृत मुद्दे को उछालने के बाद इस तरह के तमाम संगठनों ने इसे हाथों-हाथ लेते हुए एक व्यापक मुद्दा बनाने का प्रयास किया।
महत्वपूर्ण बात यह है कि वी.एच.पी. से संबंधित साध्वियों को यदि छोड़ दें तो महिलाओं से संबंधित इस मुद्दे पर यह बहस पुरुषों ने शुरू की है। महिलाओं को संबोधित करने वाले ये बयान महिलाओं पर अधिकार जमाने वाले पुरूष मानसिकता का प्रतिरूप है, जिसमें महिलाओं की स्वतंत्रता, इच्छा, अधिकार, समानता व आत्मसम्मान की कोई जगह नहीं है।
इस मुद्दे की जमीनी सच्चाई तो यह है कि ऐसे बयानों के बावजूद भारतीय महिलाओं ने प्रजनन दर को कम रखने को प्राथमिकता दी है। जनसंख्या निदेशालय के आंकड़ों के अनुसार भारत की कुल प्रजनन दर जो 1971 में 5.2 थी वह घटकर 2013 में 2.3 हो गई। धार्मिक भावनाओं केा भड़का कर इन महिला विरोधी बयानों को तूल देने की इस प्रक्रिया में चिंता इस बात की है कि इसमें धर्म के ठेकेदारों के साथ-साथ सत्ता पक्ष से जुड़े राजनेताओं ने भी मोर्चा संभाला हुआ है। छिट-पुट विरोधों के अलावा प्रगतिशील मंचों से इस तरह के बयानों की कोई खास आलोचना न होने से भी इन संगठनों व लोगों के हौसले बढे हैं। Continue reading धर्म की आड़ में महिला अस्मिता पर प्रहार: जीत सिंह सनवाल
Guest post by SHANKAR GOPALAKRISHNAN
For those who don’t like Modi-Sangh politics, February 10th was a day of joy. When this note was drafted a month ago, the provisional title was “This is No Time for Despair.” But last Tuesday has not only dented Modi’s invincible image – it has also dented the sense of being besieged. Since May 2014, almost every progressive force in the country has been on the defensive. The AAP’s politics and the popular tsunami that drove it to power have shattered this gloom.
But the key question at this point – is the eventual defeat of the NDA in an election the only goal? I argue that here that that is just the beginning. The end of this period – which, notwithstanding February 10th, is obviously some time away – will offer a space that has not existed in Indian politics in decades. Whether that space gets used or not will depend on how the struggle develops in the interim period.
The potential of this period is rooted in three basic flaws that the current ruling coalition (between big business and the Sangh) suffers from. First, its key forces are fundamentally myopic and delusionary in character. Second, it is internally contradictory – the two pillars of this formation will undercut each other in organisational (not just political or rhetorical) terms. Finally, it embodies a peculiar combination of organisational strength and political weakness. Continue reading A Chance for Social Change Like Never Before: Shankar Gopalakrishnan
Guest Post by HUSSAIN INDOREWALA
In the early 1970s, a conservative government in the UK set up a study group for the London Docklands. Its report, which focused primarily on exploiting the commercial potential of the docklands, was torn up and thrown out by local community groups and the local boroughs. Later, in 1974, a strategic-planning authority called the Docklands Joint Committee (DJC) was set up to plan the area. This committee included, along with central and local government representatives, the Port of London Authority and trade unions; it was also associated with the Docklands Forum, which was a group that represented various sections of the public, including “militant community groups.”[i] The DJC along with the Docklands Forum adopted a radically new approach to planning: it instituted a bottom-up process, working with communities entailing a “delicate, even tentative, negotiated style of planning.” The planner was now the “servant of the public” and the “large-scale, top-down, professionally oriented planning” was replaced with its opposite.[ii] Significantly, the DJC came up with a comprehensive plan – the London Docklands Strategic Plan of 1976 – that was based on the preservation of manufacturing, creation of social housing, and social programs for residents of the area. So progressive it seemed, that it never got realised. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of the UK, drowning any little hope that remained.
Continue reading Mumbai’s Docklands – Cutting the Cake: Hussain Indorewala
Guest Post by RUPANDE MEHTA
By now it is all beginning to sound very familiar: A woman gang raped, her vital organs missing, stones and blades found in her stomach, other objects found in her anus and vagina and the doctor conducting the post mortem stating it was the most horrific case of his life. This case, however, has one additional parameter – the woman raped and killed was mentally challenged and being treated for her condition at the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences (PGIMS) in Rohtak, Haryana.
There is conflicting information on the mental condition of the woman raped and killed. While some reports state she was suffering mental retardation, others state her as condition as being psychiatric. Never mind that mental retardation is untreatable but the contradiction in reporting highlights a fact we all know – how widely misunderstood mental illness really is.
Mental illness is the most undertreated of all diseases around the world. There is an unspoken stigma around it and most sufferers usually do not want to talk about their “condition.” We have a difficult time grasping its severity and hence victims usually quietly suffer on their own until the situation often gets very serious. Many famous people have suffered mental illness and it has taken many of them years to come out and acknowledge their suffering. Few of them have fallen to their disease, the most notable recent case being that of Robin Williams who suffered from extreme depression. Other personalities who suffered mental illness include: Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of UK, Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, Beethoven, musical genius, Diana, Princess of Wales who suffered from bulimia, an eating disorder, and depression. Mental illness is the most unrecognized and, perhaps, one of the most damning diseases.
Guest Post by FAWZIA NAQVI
One cold Karachi Night
On the night of February 1st, Jibran Nasir Pakistan’s leading activist and a handful of peaceful protesters sat on a road in Karachi near the Sindh Chief Minister’s house for more than 24 hours, demanding the arrest of terrorists responsible for the January 30th Shikarpur attack which killed 65 Shias during Friday prayers, and demanding action against banned sectarian organizations. There were only 20 protesters, their average age 25, outnumbered it seemed by riot police with water cannon and batons at the ready.
Continue reading Are Jibran Nasir and his friends Game Changers in today’s Pakistan? Fawzia Naqvi
Let me say it once again, the AAP victory cannot be understood outside the post-ideological moment. I have argued earlier on Kafila (here and here), that one of the key features of AAP was its post-ideological character – one that moved relentlessly beyond many verities of 20th century ideologies and binaries like state versus market, or religious/communal versus secular and so forth. To reiterate, this formation represents the spirit of the moment that is itself post-ideological.
But it is also time perhaps, to underline that post-ideological does not mean post-political. At least, not any longer. There is no doubt that a politics of AAP is gradually and clearly coming into view – but it is a politics whose edifice is being built from the bottom up. It does not derive from any settled ideological blueprint that comes ready-made – a blueprint around which a politics is then sought to be constructed. That was the project of all 20th century ideologies, which had already divided the world into neat camps and made the divisions into permanent battle lines. Ideologies became repositories of Truth – universal and unchanging, taking away from politics the very contingency and fluidity that defines it. Ideology, in other words, was fundamentally anti-political. In parenthesis, it may be relevant to point out that that is why, perhaps, Marx himself celebrated the Paris Commune by underlining that the workers “had no ideals to realize, no blueprints to which the world must conform”; they merely had to set free the new forces that were challenging the old order. Socialism in the 19th century was not yet an ideology in that sense. Continue reading AAP Victory and the Challenges of a New Politics
Well, they tried, and more power to them.
A shuddhikaran of that hate-filled, divisive, toxic organization (and others of the Hindutva brigade) would have considerably reduced pollution in the only vasudha we have, which is our kutumb, but the attempt was foiled by a compliant Delhi Police. However, Parliament Street Police Station was very shuddh indeed by the end of the day, its noxious atmosphere cleansed by the cosmic vibrations of music, dance and “marriages” among all sorts of human beings.
Mehndi ceremony inside parliament Street Police Station
Image courtesy feminisminindia.com
This hilarious subversion of the idea of marriage, with which Hindu Mahasabha threatened lovers, is in fact a deeply political gesture against the institution of patriarchal, heterosexual marriage with all its violent hierarchies of age and gender, in which disobedient women and younger people are in the custody, much like prisoners in jail, of the patriarchs of the family, which include compliant women. There are no honour killings – these are custodial deaths, when families violently separate couples who chose to marry outside their caste or religious community, often killing one or both of them.
Continue reading Shuddhikaran of Hindu Mahasabha by Lovers of Love in Delhi
[LINK TO SOLIDARITY STATEMENT BELOW]
If you saw the programme on IBN7 last night, vilifying Teesta Setalvad and Javed Anand, with BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra and Sangh spokesperson Rakesh Sinha at their asabhya virulent best, shouting down and intimidating mild Sandeep Pandey and shouting continuously throughout whatever feisty Priyanka Chaturvedi (Congress spokesperson) had to say (which was hard-hitting and unanswerable), you would know what the case against the two activists is really about.
Of course, the charges against them are of corruption and embezzling of funds collected for Gujarat riot victims, but when Priyanka Chaturvedi pointed out that the case against them is dubious because Gujarat police and judiciary are not exactly exemplars of probity, given the assiduous stalking carried out by the Gujarat police on behalf of Modi’s man, of a young woman (whose family was paid off/ intimidated in classic Hindutva style, ending in the woman claiming gratitude for being stalked) they had no answer. (She could have added the blatant miscarriages of justice in cases of fake encounters and the Ishrat Jahan killing.) Continue reading BJP and Sangh spokespersons reveal real reason for witch hunt against Teesta Setalvad and Javed Anand
Guest Post by NANDINI RAO
Thank you, unknown-vandals-out-there.
For burning church altars to ashes; for desecrating sacred objects inside houses of worship, for tossing carcasses inside religious places; for converting, de-converting, un-converting or re-converting (as the case may be); for stealing objects from churches that are more valuable to their parishioners for their emotional significance rather than monetary value. For making people ask in hushed tones when and where the next attack is going to take place and what form it will take. For making the pastor conduct midnight mass on Christmas eve outside the church in Delhi, with the faithful offering their prayers in the freezing winter night, simply because they did not have a church to go to.
But most of all, thank you for frightening communities who follow different religions and worship different gods. As for those who do not believe in god or religion, thank you for making them worried about how the social fabric of this country is being pulled apart, thread by thread, through political machinations.
Because by doing all of the above, the unknown vandals (they are, needless to say, not criminals, just harmless “vandals”) have made people stop in their tracks and think. They have made communities question law enforcement agencies that brush aside fears and doubts and try to minimise the crimes taking place in their houses of worship. They are compelling them to discuss and debate about forced versus consensual conversions to religions of one’s choice. They are making people of all communities and religions realise how they are being pitted against each other and used as pawns in devious political games. They understand that, in the bargain, it is the poor and the marginalised living on daily wages who are being exploited in the worst possible way. People are realising the importance of their vote and of the very real impact they can make and the change they can bring about, with the single act of pressing a button.
Vandalism has made people come together to hold meetings and consultations to chart out a course to resolve the crises. It has made them stand outside their churches on pavements and on roads, demanding justice and accountability from a state and administration that does not seem to be heeding their voices.
And most important of all, vandalism is teaching us (more than political speeches and advertisements) how one needs to keep on asserting till our voices are heard that we are all citizens in a secular, socialist and democratic republic. That as believers and non-believers, we may worship (or not worship) in varied ways and learn from the teachings of one holy book (or a multitude of books and philosophies), but as citizens, our Holy Book is only the Constitution of India and what it has defined for us, as Indians.
Continue reading Vandalism – The Perfect Solution To Communalism! Nandini Rao
Tafawut ast mun-I-shunidam-I-man-o-to, Tu bastan-dar, o, man fatahe-bab me shunidam
(What you and I hear are different : you hear the sound of closing doors, but I of doors that open)
– A Persian couplet that Maulana Abul Kalam Azad choose to use while addressing a gathering of Muslim Youth at the Aligarh Muslim University in 1949.
I
It was the mid of 2008 when I first heard about Shahid Azmi.
Friend/journalist Ajit Sahi had written a series of articles in ‘Tehelka’ about the fraudulence of the police in framing innocent Muslim men, which had caused enough consternation among the chattering classes. As Ajit had revealed Shahid had played an important role in making the story happen. Apart from facilitating meeting with victims of system, he had himself provided many facts relevant to the story.
And the name kept cropping in. I read an interview of Shahid where he discussed the challenges faced by lawyers like him who dared to take up inconvenient cases which at times put the police people on the defensive. I was still not aware of the many twists and turns in his life – his spending prime years of his youth behind bars as an innocent victim of TADA – or his classes at the prestigious TISS (Tata Institute of Social Sciences) where he use to enthuse students in magical ways. Continue reading Shahid Lives, Shahids Never Die
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 