by Barkha Dutt
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‘If I were to write Sholay today, I’d have to write it differently, wouldn’t I?’ said Javed Akhtar, one of India’s best-known screenwriters and lyricists, referring to his cult film. He said this in all seriousness in the course of a conversation we were having about the assassination of three elderly rationalists in three years—Narendra Dabholkar (sixty-seven years old), Govind Pansare (eighty-one years old) and M. M. Kalburgi (seventy-six years old)—and what it meant for freedom and secularism in India. Pansare had been targeted for challenging the conventional narrative around Shivaji and suggesting that the great seventeenth-century Maratha warrior king’s rule had been inclusive towards Muslims. In the same week that I met Javed in September 2015, musician and composer A. R. Rahman, a devout Muslim, had been served with a fatwa for composing the music for the Iranian film Messenger of God directed by Majid Majidi. In a stirring response to the fatwa, in which Rahman described himself as ‘part traditionalist and part rationalist’, he posed a counter question to those who had targeted him: ‘What, and if, I had the good fortune of facing Allah and He were to ask me on Judgment Day: I gave you faith, talent, money, fame and health…why did you not do music for my beloved Muhammad film?’
The two incidents—the murder of rationalists and the attack on Rahman—brought home the sad truth of an increasingly intolerant and toxic environment in the country, where individual liberty was under siege.
Investigators believed that there was a pattern and a common connection to all three murders; all three men had been targeted by Hindu right-wing groups for their scepticism and questioning of ritualistic religious practices. ‘India was once known for its tolerance and the elbow room it gave to free thinkers, especially when compared to countries in its neighbourhood, like Pakistan and Bangladesh. Now, it seems instead of them learning from us, we are learning from them,’ Akhtar said to me. ‘In 1975, Sholay had a very innocent scene where Dharmendra hides behind an idol and talks to Hema Malini and she thinks “bhagwan” is talking to her. Today, if I were writing Sholay all over again, I would not write this scene. Because I know that there are so many people who will claim to be outraged. There was another film called Sanjog that told the story of Krishna and Sudama through film songs; today somebody would object even to that.’
Akhtar, a self-professed atheist, believed that India had been a freer country in some ways forty years ago. He had always been an outspoken critic of fundamentalism among Muslims, often inviting the wrath of clerics and the more conservative Muslim politicians. Today, he believed, that Hindus were showing the signs of orthodoxy and intolerance that had once been typical of the practitioners of conservative Islam. ‘I have always respected the kind of liberal values that Hindu society has, the kind of space it has always given to people who are not very reverent. It’s tragic that instead of these Muslim groups learning from Hindu groups, these Hindu groups are learning from Jamaat-e-Islami.’
Well-known Hindi author Uday Prakash, best known for his book The Girl with the Golden Parasol, was also on the same television show I was presenting. Uday had just returned his Sahitya Akademi award—the highest national honour for literature—to protest the murder of Kalburgi. He was the first of dozens of prominent writers who had returned awards or made strong public protests over the stifling of dissent and free speech and growing sectarian intolerance. One of the objections to Kalburgi from religious groups had been that he had quoted Jnanpith award winning writer U. R. Ananthamurthy in one of his speeches. Ananthamurthy had written that as a child he had urinated on the Devva stone in the village to rid himself of the fear that the deity had superpowers. Ananthamurthy’s account of his childhood experiment was in a book that had been in print for eighteen years. But it was only when Kalburgi repeated the story at a public programme that it erupted into a major controversy. After Kalburgi’s murder, a local Bajrang Dal member in Karnataka—a state governed by the Congress—had said on Twitter that he had got the ‘dog’s death’ he deserved.
Invoking Ambedkar and Buddha, Uday Prakash said that the Hindu tradition had always made space for people who challenged faith. He shared his own story about how he had, in a fit of rage, broken all the idols in his house when his mother died of cancer. ‘Today, will they kill me for it? We are scared now,’ Uday told me, ‘we have begun to censor ourselves.’ Another prominent writer who returned her award was Nayantara Sahgal, niece of Jawaharlal Nehru, who said she was standing up for the right to dissent. ‘I am a Hindu, a believing Hindu,’ she told me, ‘and it saddens me and infuriates me more than anything else the mockery that Hindutva has made out of Hinduism. It has reduced it, shrivelled it, to a kind of nightmare. Millions of Indians like me who are Hindus reject Hindutva.’ The award wapsi, in turn, reopened all the old debates about the double standards of secularists. Why had writers not returned their honours after the 1984 riots, supporters of the BJP demanded to know. And so, here we were back to the bookending of injustice, where no outrage can stand on its own without being compared to other, just as horrific, injustices.
Hamid Dabholkar, the son of Narendra Dabholkar captured in a single sentence the tragedy of ‘secular’ politics in India: ‘The pain of the common citizen in this country is that we are crushed between a party that is programmatically communal and another that is pragmatically communal,’ he said, to the applause of the audience. ‘That is the only difference I see between the BJP and Congress.’ Hamid’s father had been murdered in Maharashtra when it was governed by the Congress–NCP coalition; he found them uncommitted about taking a clear position and pursuing justice for his father. Hamid pointed out that the Congress had refused to ban the Sanatan Sanstha—the right-wing group being investigated in Dabholkar’s murder—even when presented with incontrovertible evidence.
He explained that unlike many other rationalist groups, his father had taken a ‘neutral stance’ on matters of faith. ‘We don’t tell people to abandon religion and God, we only encourage them to question it.’ Quoting Veer Savarkar, regarded as the ideological hero of the RSS, Hamid argued that Savarkar had questioned the cow being a holy mother, calling for humanism to be shown to it more because it was a useful animal. ‘Do you want to shoot him too?’ he challenged. Politics in the name of the holy cow would surface in the ugliest way possible, when a few weeks later, Mohammad Akhlaq, a village blacksmith, was lynched with bricks and lathis by a mob in Dadri in Western Uttar Pradesh over rumours that he had slaughtered a cow and stored beef in his house. ‘Does the rule of law apply or not in this country?’ asked Hamid, displaying extraordinary courage. ‘This is not an attack on an individual; this is an attack on Reason. You may have killed my father; you can’t kill an idea’.
The paradox in the country today is that while, on the one hand, there is a rising tide of intolerance committed by what some call the radical fringe (Romila Thapar is more forthright. ‘The violent fringe are terrorists, let’s call them that,’ she told me), on the other hand there is an indifference towards some of the most contentious issues of the not-so-distant past. For example, when the Allahabad High Court delivered its Ayodhya judgement, the only people who whipped themselves into a frenzy were the politicians. So, are we entering a new period where the old disease of sectarianism will be kept in check by the new mantras of development that Modi is fond of promoting (and that won him his prime ministership), as well as by the advent of a watchful, aggressive social media and ubiquitous TV coverage? Or are we going to see the mainstreaming of religious politics and its practitioners—voices that were once only heard on the margins and are already much more voluble today? All one can say with any certainty is that the secularism that will survive into the future will be Gandhi’s brand of secularism rather than Nehru’s. In a country where religion is threaded into the fabric of society and culture, the only thing we can hope for is a way of living that respects all faiths and does not deny faith altogether.
VI
We began with 2002, and I’d like to end this chapter with
some of the more positive lessons that I learned from that calamity. The one thing that gave me hope was how organic secularism was to the everyday lives of people, before it was tarnished by political divisiveness. Back in Vadodara, among the many Muslim-owned storehouses burnt down was one belonging to the largest wholesale timber supplier to Hindu crematoriums across the state. When we met Mohammed Salim, the owner of the warehouse that made and sold the material (‘aakhri samaan’) for the ‘Hindu last rites ceremony’, he proudly showed us around, pointing out the wood that is precisely cut three ways to carry the earthen pot, even as he held up pipes (used to craft the stretcher that carries the dead) that had been burnt by the mob. He explained with pride that this had been his family’s profession for years; the historic economic interdependence of various religious communities made his embrace of secularism calm, philosophical and unquestioning. ‘Hum rozi roti inse hi kamaate hain, inse bhed-bhaav rakh khar hum kya karenge. Hum apna kaam karenge, uska phal Allah humein dega (We earn our living from them, there’s no question of any prejudice or hostility. I will continue to do my work. I’m sure Allah will recognize that),’ he said.
Opposite Vadodara’s Swamy Narayan Temple we met Nusrat Bhai—the city’s most famous kite maker. ‘Our Hindu brothers, especially those who come to pray at the mandir, have always bought kites from us,’ he told me. ‘Our business depends on them.’ In the backstreets, Muslim women and children would work through the day, threading the string used to fly the kites during the Hindu festival of Makar Sankranti, while the men handled the production and sale of the kites. The annual burst of colours in the sky was also a rainbow of shared histories.
Whether it was the Ganesh statues used during the Ganpati puja or bindis and bangles, they were all made and sold by Muslim craftsmen and shopkeepers. The motor workshops and small factories ravaged by the rioters may have been owned by Muslims, but nearly all of them employed people from both communities as labourers and mechanics. One such businessman, Abbas Kothari, expressed his anguish about the meaningless and waste of the destruction that had been visited upon him. ‘We belong to the Bohra community and have three factories dealing in plastic. All three got burnt and looted in the recent riots. The irony is that the rioters didn’t realize that there are more than 200 Hindu workers’ jobs at risk. In our factory we have fifteen Hindu families living on the premises and on our payroll we have only one Muslim worker—the watchman. We came to know later that the fifteen families had protected him from the rioters.’
Salim, Nusrat and Abbas’s stories bear out the contention I have made that the future of secularism in this country will need to be founded on this idea of inclusiveness and respect for all faiths. Many of us were shaped by an automatic and often unexamined Nehruvian discomfort with all things religious or ritualistic. I would include myself among those who grew up wary of religion, always opting to leave unanswered the column in forms and surveys that sought to know which faith you practised. It was only with the wider exposure that journalism brought that I realized that life in the confines of a liberal bubble had closed my mind to a deeper understanding of the social dynamics of my country. The pursuit of an ideal that would never allow religious identity to divide people had made me dangerously acultural. It was time to get rooted in a liberalism and secularism that was inclusive and celebrated the plural and multi-religious reality of India.
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Ten years after the riots, I returned to Gujarat to meet some of those I had first met in the shadow of violence. In Ahmedabad I met Bharat Panchal, an autorickshaw driver attached to a private school in the city. Bharat’s wife, Jyoti, had been among the kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya to Godhra, when the S-6 coach she was in was set on fire. Since then Bharat’s life had moved on. He married a neighbour and friend, Bela, who was carrying the scars of her own tragedy. Bela’s mother-in-law was also among those killed on the Sabarmati Express and her husband died in violent street clashes three months later. But Bharat harboured no hostility or rancour. He told me that every morning, as freshly scrubbed little children clambered into the back of his rickshaw, he thought of the kids whose parents had been killed in 2002. He said he was haunted by the thought of their growing up without the nurture and love of their parents. His healing, he told me, was now through the bonds he had built with the children he ferried to school. ‘Main aapko bataana chahta hoon ki mere saath zyada tar Muslim bacche hain aur unke ma baap ne kabhi nahin yeh socha ke main Hindu hoon (I want you to know that there are many Muslim children whom I drop to school everyday. Not once do their parents say that I am a Hindu so they don’t trust me or vice versa. And the kids really love me),’ he told me proudly.
Another survivor from the Sabarmati Express was undertaking a personal journey that he hoped would deliver him from a troubled past into a more peaceful future. Satish, an understated businessman, his wife Mangla, and their daughter Archana were also among those trapped inside a burning coach on the morning of 27 February 2002. As clouds of smoke filled the coupe, Satish had used his hands and feet to wrench open the three-rod window, pushing his daughter out to safety. In the ensuing chaos, he was separated from his wife. He would never see her again, nor was he ever able to locate her body. But a decade later, Satish had decided that he needed to make his daughter’s happiness the focus of his life—he was making the same journey that he had on that fateful day, but this time in the opposite direction, from Vadodara to Lucknow and beyond. There was a fitting symbolism in embarking on new beginnings on the anniversary of a deep loss. ‘Grief and happiness are co-travellers in life’s journey,’ he said reflectively, explaining that he was headed to Uttar Pradesh for his daughter’s wedding. ‘She was just ten-twelve years old when she was trapped inside that train. I wish her mother were alive today to see this day. Jo hua, woh insaniyat ke khilaf tha, mera yeh hamesha manna raha hai (Whatever happened, first at Godhra and then the riots that followed, both went against the grain of humanity).’
In Vadodara, I had to make a stop at the home of J. S. Bandukwala, one of the few people I had met in the course of my career who led his life on Gandhian principles. Professor Bandukwala, a twinkly-eyed nuclear physicist, had made his home in a colony with a mixed religious demographic, a conscious decision to defy the creeping ghettoization of the urban landscape in Gujarat. In 2002, he was with his daughter Umaima, when a 300-strong mob of rioters attacked their home. They made a narrow escape with help from their Hindu neighbours. The myth of ‘spontaneous’ violence was once again busted—the vandals who came for the professor, first pelted stones and smashed his cars; when they could not force open the gates of his apartment, they returned the next day with reinforcements. The neighbours who had dared to help did not escape the rage of the mob either. ‘I don’t know where this is going to end,’ he told me, when I interviewed him in 2002, still gentle of mind and spirit, ‘they were physically assaulted just for helping me out. At one stage I even considered stepping forward and telling them if you want my life, take it, but don’t harass others.’ Even though it had only been hours since he had been forced out of his home, he spoke without anger, without a trace of bitterness as his young daughter sat by his side in a friend’s balcony, holding back her tears. Umaima was engaged and soon to be married to a Gujarati Hindu she had fallen in love with. Inter-faith romance was no cataclysmic event in this household; what frightened them were the invisible and seemingly indelible lines that were being drawn to demarcate communities. ‘These extremists, they want that no Muslims should live in Hindu localities and no Hindus should live in Muslim neighbourhoods,’ said Bandukwala, who was also among the first to call the attack on the kar sevaks at Godhra ‘absolutely barbaric. The viciousness on both sides is what frightens me’.
Ten years later, the professor told me he had become more, not less, religious since 2002. This surprised me. I would have imagined that once religious fault lines ripped apart the life he had known and left him vulnerable, he would have turned more cynical.
Instead,
the professor, now considerably older, greyer and wiser, said he drew strength from the fact that Umaima was happily married to Maulin, the man she had been engaged to when the riots broke out. They live in the United States, committed to the idea of maintaining a multi-faith home. ‘Umaima has a Quran and also the statue of a Hindu goddess gifted to her by her mother-in-law. Every morning, she worships the goddess and then kisses the Quran. This is the pluralism we have to build. I know many of my Muslim friends don’t agree with my choices. But we are living in a diverse society. We can’t let Pakistan develop over here.’ He spoke of the pressure on him in the aftermath of the riots to force his son-in-law to convert to Islam. ‘I told them that would be wrong. Instead, they should both practise the best of both religions. You may think I am exaggerating but I believe Umaima’s marriage to Maulin was a way of Allah telling me that you have to join hands with Hindus and build the bridge that Gandhi wanted us to.’