Communal Cleaving That Fragmented The Hindu Caste Fabric !
BY R.K.MISRA
Pebble-stirred
ripples both caution and crush. In either case they leave a lasting impact.
Three
news items that appeared in the course of this week bear eloquent testimony to
it.
The first,
pertains to the account of Lt Gen.Zameer Uddin Shah(retd.) who had been
dispatched at the head of a 3000 strong army contingent to control the 2002
communal riots in Gujarat. His memoirs only confirm, what is internally well
known, that the response of the state administration was ’tardy’ and that
the army was delayed transport for over a day despite a request to the
then chief minister, Narendra Modi. The former vice-chief of the army staff said
that the sequence of events has been recorded in the ‘war diaries ‘ of the
army. General S. Padmanabhan, the then chief of Army Staff had backed the
assertions of Shah.
Thus it is that
crucial time was lost in the statewide deployment of the army while the cops
gave a free hand to the rioting mobs targeting the minorities in cities and
towns engulfed by violence. This revelation now, assumes added importance in
the light of the Supreme Court appointed Special Investigation Team(SIT) report
that had cleared Modi’s name saying that
there was no delay in ‘requisition and deployment of the army’, based on the
testimony of Ashok Narayan, additional chief secretary(Home).”Let me say again,
it is a blatant lie. When the time comes, the war diaries will be provided. What
I have said is the gospel truth”, said the retired General. It is merely
incidental that this highly acclaimed officer of the Indian Army happens to be
the brother of filmstar Naseeruddin Shah.
For many of us
field reporters who covered this distressing chapter in Gujarat’s history up
close, these are well known, also the white wash that followed and the communal
cleaving through Modi’s ‘Gaurav yatra’. Pitting the majority versus the
minority reaped instant electoral results and Modi won the State assembly polls
held immediately thereafter with a steamroller
majority.
However the
slow and insidious impact of this poison is now being felt far and wide. On October 12, in far off
Atlanta in the USA, a gujarati and his friends were thrown out of a garba celebration because his name was not found ‘hindu’
enough. It did not matter to the organisers,
Shree shakti mandir, that Vadodara astro-physicist Dr Karan Jani had won
India acclaim when he made it to the LIGO team in the US which discovered the
gravitational waves in 2016. Jani had gone with his three friends, including
two women, and were ‘thrown out’ because their surnames did not seem to be
hindu enough. A humiliated Dr Jani put
the shameful proceedings on twitter.
Nearer home in
Ahmedabad one got to see another strain of the proliferating virus at another
hindu religious gathering. Non-vegetarian food forms an intrinsic part of
Bengali food culture including those of brahmins. References to some of these
practices can be found in the sanskrit text of the ‘Kalika Purana’. The Durga
Puja, is a religious festival which has been organized by the Bengal Cultural
Association in Ahmedabad since the last 80 years. The food fest which also has
a non-vegetarian component is an intrinsic part of these celebrations. This time, Ahmedabad Education Society, the owners
of the land where the Durga Puja celebrations are held issued a last minute
directive against cooking or serving non-vegetarian food leaving the organisers
of this religious congregation no time
to shift venue. From other religions to their own, and within it from targeting cultural to social mores and now faith
itself, the dictating of percepts and practices is acquiring ingenious
forms.
As things stand
in Gujarat today , the majority hindu society is more fractured than ever
before. The patidars are up in arms seeking reservations, violence against
Dalits has seen a 50 per cent spurt over previous years and the OBC s are in
ferment with infighting breking out
amongst sub-communities.Six people were killed and one injured in violent
sparring on October 23, between Ahirs and Kumbhars-both OBC communities in
Chassra village of Mundra taluka of Kutch district of Gujarat which borders
Pakistan.
What began with
rising religiosity witnessed through the sharply growing number of people
walking down to key temples like Ambaji , Pavagadh and Chotila in north and central Gujarat as
well as Saurashtra respectively, has now grown to flaunting caste identity
through stickers on their respective vehicles and business establishments(jai
patidar, jai parushram,jai mataji(kshatriya) etc). The’ pagpada sanghs’,which
is a loose association of neighbourhoods that encourage ritualistic walking to religious places during
specified periods of the hindu calendar,
were a creation of the VHP but it has
gradually petered down to caste groupings, frequently at loggerheads with each other. Thus those
who set out to unite the hindu for electoral gains have only gone to bitterly
divide the very same components of the hindu caste matrix.
The latest
fall-out of this fragmentation which began a new chapter altogether ,was when the rape of a 14 month
old girl belonging to an OBC family in
Sabarkantha district of north Gujarat ,allegedly by a youth of Bihari origin
triggered off violence against migrants from hindi speaking states leading to
their large scale exodus. The caste you belonged to did not matter, the region
you came from did when choosing targets to attack. It was a ‘controlled ‘
political experiment with an eye on the impending elections in the neighbouring
states of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan where Congress was seen as ascendant, but
careened dangerously out of control forcing the ruling BJP to go into damage
control even as the lob and volley blame game continued between the two
principal political opponents. Thus it is that
what began as communal cleaving has over the years come to acquire divisive
, casteist permutations and destructive, parochial combinations.
When you roll a
boulder downhill , it develops a mind and momentum of its own, crushing all in
its path before fragmenting itself. Those who use cleavers and crushers could
do well to remember this hard fact !
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