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Understanding the Beast

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Delhi 1984        Courtesy: Ram Rahman
 
Communal Violence in independent India

 
Painful yet proud birth
India won her political independence in 1947 amidst a cataclysm of bloodshed and violence which targeted men, women and children only because of their religious identities, and left a million people dead and ten million people permanently displaced from their homelands. This ancient country, traumatically reborn after two centuries of colonial bondage as a secular democratic republic, laid great store therefore in its Constitution on the equal citizenship, security and rights of its religious minorities. 

However, beginning with a communal conflagration in 1961 in Jabalpur, 14 years after independence, many parts of India have witnessed sporadic episodes of communal violence through most years since. There has been no year of complete nation-wide communal peace. There have, on the other hand, been periods during which this violence has spiked, especially since the 1980s, targeting Bengali Muslims in Assam, Sikhs in Delhi after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, and Muslims in many parts of India during the Babri Masjid movement which gathered steam in the late 1980s, setting off the massacre in Bhagalpur in 1989 and peaking in the carnage in Gujarat in 2002. The selective mass migration of Kashmiri Pandits from the valley in 1989, after brutal calls to violence from Islamist groups,  also rendered thousands of this community wrenched from their homeland.

These recurring episodes of post-independence communal riots are marked by disproportionate loss of life and property among religious minorities. The targets were, in large part, mostly Muslims, but in 1984 the violence was against Sikhs, and the last two decades in particular have witnessed growing attacks against Christians. These episodes typically constitute targeted hate killings, gangrapes, arson, large-scale looting and destruction and desecration of places of worship.

Universal Impunity
Two other features are common to all these episodes. The first is almost universal impunity, by which we mean the failure of the criminal justice system to punish – and often even bring to trial –those who commit these communal hate crimes. If at all, it is the foot-soldiers who committed these crimeswho have been charged, but the law almost never catches up with those who instigate and organise these mass attacks. These include senior members of the police, civil administration and political leadership who deliberately fail to prevent, enable through inaction, encourage and sometimes actively participate in these acts of mass violence. The second feature of all episodes of communal violence in independent India is the failure of the state to extend reparations to survivors of the violence at levels which enable them to rebuild their lives, livelihoods, habitats and social relations.

In extensive research undertaken in the Centre for Equity Studies on major episodes of communal violence, we find remarkably common trends of failure of legal justice, failure of reparation and failure to hold public officials accountable.Despite the fact that the episodes under study were widely separated by time and geography, and on occasion by the religious minority which is targeted by the violence, we find similar trends and strategies which systematically deny justice to minorities. We therefore can only conclude that the denial of justice and protection to India’s minorities are not simply random institutional failures, but reflect endemic, widely prevalent and deep-rooted institutional bias against minorities in all arms of the criminal justice system. These denials of justice are not the arbitrary result of chance but are systematic and planned. We also find consistent evidence of the state’s failures to help extend reparations and support to survivors of communal violence, extending their suffering for long after the violence has ended, even across generations.

In South Asia, episodes of violence in which persons are attacked because they belong to a particular religious identity are commonly described as communal riots. The word ‘communal’ in other parts of the world has quite different and often positive connotations, viewed as a source of integration and social solidarity, and its breakdown a major sourceof violence and strife.In South Asia on the other hand, the word has a specific negatively charged meaning of social and political mobilisation of persons based on their religious identity, usually in opposition (sometimes violently) to persons of other religious identities. Prof. Ashutosh Varshney, in Ethnic violence and civic life, 2002 suggests that ‘whenever conflicting groups from two different religions, which are self–conscious communities, clash, it results in a communal riot. An event is identified as a communal riot if (a) there is violence, and (b) two or more communally identified groups confront each other or members of the other group at some point during the violence‘.
 
It is commonplace to use the word ‘riot’ to describe communal violence, in popular usage, reportage and scholarship. But we have grave reservations with this usage, especially if the word riot is understood in its literal sense, which suggests implicitly that people of two communities battle each other, usually spontaneously.But this may not actually be the case, for instance if the communal violence is one-sided, or engineered by dedicated social and political groups, and as we shall see, this indeed is very often the case. For instance, it is an obvious travesty to describe the violence against Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 as anti-Sikh riots, because it was exclusively the Sikhs who were the victims of violence in almost all the attacks. The same is the case with many other episodes of communal violence.

This ancient country, traumatically reborn after two centuries of colonial bondage as a secular democratic republic, laid great store therefore in its Constitution on the equal citizenship, security and rights of its religious minorities.

The use in reportage as well as survivors’ own testimonies of other terms,including metaphors such as ‘like a storm’, etc are now more popular. The Gujarat survivors we speak to widely describe the mass violence in 2002 asa ‘toofan’,or storm – but this alternate terminology is more evocative than analytical. The suddenness of monumental disruption and destruction suggested by the metaphor of the storm is what catches the imagination, but analytically this doesn’t sufficiently reflect the planned, intentional violence that we will argue characterise most ‘riots’. Other terms like carnage, slaughter, massacre or bloodbath, are more apt descriptionsevoking the actual character of such violence.

The pertinent analytically rigorous terminology for this phenomenon could be hate communal violence or targeted communal violence, and these terms are mainly what we use here. Even so, we still sometimes describe episodes as riots, because this is how these have been described in judicial reports and scholarly studies. However although sometimes we do use the term riots, it is not to suggest anywhere that these are spontaneous clashes between people of diverse religious communities.

It is also important to recognise that hate and targeted violence can be directed at people not only because of their religious identity, but also because of their caste (as in anti-Dalit atrocities), ethnicity (attacks on north-eastern Indians in Delhi and other cities), gender, region (attacks in Mumbai by the Shiv Sena on South Indians and later from UP and Bihar), language (riots against Hindi in Tamil Nadu), sexuality (attacks against homosexual men and transgendered persons), and occasionally stigmatised ailments (attacks on people living with leprosy or HIV/AIDS). These groups of victimised people can also be conceptualised as communities, just as self-conscious religious groups have been. However, because of the peculiar history of India’s bloody partition on religious grounds and the continued fractures created across South Asia by religious identity, when we speak of communal violence we are concerned conventionally with a specific kind of hate violence which targets people for their religious identity.

The word ‘communal’ is also closely tied up with the idea of communalism, or social and political ideologies and mobilisation of people on the basis of their religious identities. In Prof. Bipin Chandra’s view in Communalism in modern India, 1984, communalism as an ideology comprised of these three basic elements or stages; each element functions as an assumption upon which the next is based. The three also form a continuum, feeding into each other. The intensity of hostility against other religious groups increases as people move from one stage to the next. The first stage of beliefs in this continuum is that people belonging to a religious group (rather than a socio-economic – class, caste, occupational – or gender, linguistic, regional, age, disability or other cultural or political categories) have common secular interests.  The belief is that people can act politically and protect collective interests only as self-conscious members of these communities. Religious leaders for each community become the only people who can protect the groups’ interests.
 
The next level of communal beliefs is that secular interests – economic, cultural, social and political – interests of followers of one religion diverge from those of others. ‘Liberal’ or ‘moderate’ communalism, as Chandra terms it, is when an individual could publicly profess that (often) conflicting  identities and interests are capable of existing in harmony and can be accommodated simultaneously, while holding on to essentially communalist views which privilege religious identities over all others and homogenise people following a particular faith. During India’s freedom struggle, Madan Mohan Malviya, Lajpat Rai and Jinnah, according to Chandra, in India’s struggle for independence (1857-1947), which he co-authored in 1989,functioned under liberal communal frameworks. The third stage and final stage of ‘extreme communalism’ is reached when interests of followers of different religion-based communities are seen to be incompatible, antagonistic and mutually exclusive. Extreme communalists use the language and instruments of hate and violence against people, cultures and beliefs of the antagonist ‘other’ religious community. It is this third phase which spawns communal violence, although the grounds for its emergence is paved by the first two stages. Chandra goes on to argue that communalism is not specific to India, comparing it to movements such as fascism and anti-Semitism in other countries, which he suggests were produced by similar belief systems.

We also find consistent evidence of the state’s failures to help extend reparations and support to survivors of communal violence, extending their suffering for long after the violence has ended, even across generations.

A few more points are in order in the language of scholars and lay observers regarding communal violence. One relates to the prefixing of the word ‘mass’ to communal violence. When does a communal targeted hate attack become a mass attack? Is it merely a question of numbers? Is communal killing of one person not mass violence, whereas if three are killed is it mass violence?But this demarcation is in the end subjective. Also it can render invisible seemingly discrete small acts of communal violence, each not ‘mass’ in character when seen individually, but which actually are part of a larger orchestrated plan. Finally, there is the question of what constitutes violence as distinct from discrimination or segregation. There is a great deal of discrimination to which religious minorities are commonly subjected. These include a number of disabilities in accessing housing, jobs, credit, entry into educational institutions, access to basic services in their habitations such as drinking water. These were well documented in the Prime Minister’s High Level Committee set up the UPA government in 2006, presided over by Justice Sachar (link: http://www.minorityaffairs.gov.in/sachar), on the social, economic and educational status of the Muslim community in India.These can also be seen analytically as forms of passive violence. Even more pertinently, there can be communally charged taunts and insults – in classrooms, workplaces, and places of community gathering.The Centre for Equity Studies’ India Exclusion Report describes many instances of communally charged taunts against Muslims in classrooms, by both teachers and peers; Sikhs children were also routinely subjected to this in the 1980s. There can be active hate propaganda, such as in the literature of communal organisations like the RSS and the Jamaat-e-Islami, or the speeches and writing of Bal Thackerey during the communal carnage in Bombay in 1992-93.  And then there is active physical targeted and hate violence, involving attacks on the body and property on persons of the designated ‘other’ religion, involving culpable heinous offences such as murder, injury, arson, and looting.

It is important also to focus on the particularly gendered nature of hate violence targeted against women.  Women are regarded within patriarchy as the property of the men of that community, and sexual violence is the ultimate humiliation of the community and its men. The social and legal impunity for sexual violence is so deep rooted that until recently, sexual violence in the aftermath of targeted violence was in the large majority of cases not investigated, recorded or punished. Often it was not even acknowledged, because victims were openly or subtly coerced by social shame to obliterate these histories. It is entirely due to the intellectual and political struggles of women in social movements in this country that sexual violence is now better acknowledgedand understood, and the layers of impunity that covered it are being peeled away. As a result, India’s rape law hasbeen re-examined and amended.  During targeted mass violence, sexual violence is used as a double edged weapon – while women bear the torture of rape, it culturally emasculates the men who embody the guilt of not being able to ‘live up’ to gender expectations: ‘I couldn’t protect my wife…,’  a masculine lament we often hear from survivors.   

Which of these various forms should one include in a discussion of communal violence? Usually scholars separate questions of discrimination from active physical hate violence including sexual violence, and hate propaganda stands in a somewhat twilit zone in between. Many recognise that hate propaganda incites violence, and therefore regard it to be criminally culpable violence, even if it is not active violence in itself, because it still instigates such violence. But there are those who are much more fundamentally convinced of the absolute value of free speech and expression, and would not like legal bars and state monitoring of hate propaganda, because this is subject to official interpretation, and can be used equally against people who oppose hate propaganda.

Scholars of communal violence construct diverse and often adversarial interpretations of what the roots of communal violenceare, but remarkably most are united in one view: they regard communalism to be a product of modernity, arising out of conditions existing in colonial India and the enterprise of nation-building.  In Bipin Chandra’s viewin India’s struggle for independence(1857-1947), ‘communalism is not a vestige of the past; it might use ideas that have roots in medieval/ancient times, but it’s a modern technology and political trend that expresses urges and serves political needs of particular social groups. Its social roots, economic, social and political objectives lie in the modern period of Indian history.’ Nehru too had noted, ‘One must never forget that communalism is a latter-day phenomenon that has grown up before our eyes.’
 
Many had hoped that Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination for his courageous and principled espousal, against enormous odds and opposition, of the equal rights of minorities, would stun the nation into a settled undisputed acceptance of the secular idea of India after freedom. But India’s continuing history of both communal violence and mobilisation, peaking at various moments such as the current time of writing in 2015, are reminders that communal violence today has evolved into a cynical but powerful ploy of political mobilisation through social division, and constitutes modern India’s democracy greatest threat.
 
 
References:

  1. Who is to Blame, Communalism Combat, March 1998 (https://www.sabrangindia.in/sabrangthemes/who-is-to-blame)
  2. Srikrishna Commission Report,  http://www.sabrang.com/srikrish/sri%20main.htm
  3. Concerned Citizens Tribunal Report, Gujarat 2002, http://www.sabrang.com/tribunal/

India’s Top bureaucrats speakout

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“It is an unfortunate fact that in successive communal riots in independent India, justice has not been done to the victims. In many cases the guilty have gone unpunished. There have also been allegations of biased handling by our police. These factors only increase alienation. Let’s not forget our peculiar circumstances – we have a neighbour whose intelligence wing is waiting to manipulate such alienation. It is potentially a very dangerous situation. The state and every section of civil society must urgently look into it

B.G.Deshmukh
Former cabinet secretary
 

“We put justice as the first principal of our Constitution, but how many of us believe in it today ? We will pay a heavy price for relegating justice to the far corner. Why cannot we see that impartial justice is meant to prevent individuals or groups from taking the law into their own hands to secure it? Why does communal rioting continue in the land ? Why did the Coimbatore bomb blast shatter and kill?

KF Rustomji
Former DGP, BSF Padma Vibhushan
 

Archived from Communalism Combat, March  1998, Year 5  No. 41, Cover Story

 

Policemen speak out

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Julio Ribeiro
Former commissioner of police,Bombay and DGP, Punjab

““We must remember that fundamentalism of the majority, by sheer virtue of the numbers involved, is much more dangerous than the fundamentalism of the minority. It therefore needs to be singled out and targeted first because it is through this fundamentalism of the majority that the politics of hate gets exacerbated. What were the two major incidents of bomb blasts at Bombay and Coimbatore but a terrorist response. And what is terrorism but violent actions, in retaliation, that target innocents? Terrorism doesn’t pick and choose its targets. It’s a man-eating tiger, that’s why it is so dangerous. Terrorism is the response of those who cannot really fight . This was the message from Bombay and Coimbatore: ‘We cannot fight you so there’…..It is about time that the state sat up and took notice.

The experience of the minority during riots , which is to a great extent based on real-life, true experiences has resulted in a complete loss of faith in the law and order machinery. Unless the police shows through attitude and action that they are impartial, this faith cannot be restored.


Satish Sahney
Former commissioner of police, Bombay

“Muslims must really experience that they have a stake in this system that wants them here and is there to protect them. Or else, we will be creating more disgruntled youngsters like the young Jalees Ansari . Ansari , in his affidavit before the Justice Srikrishna Commission enquiring into the Bombay riots and the bomb blasts, has shown how a youngster, if he feels that he is denied rights of free and fair existence, drifts towards fundamentalist outfits. The biography of this youngster also reveals how from making crude explosives, his training grew into making more and more sophisticated explosives.

We are all aware that Pakistan’s ISI does have a one-point programme of causing eruptions here since it believes that this is an effective proxy war to conduct against its neighbour. But what was the spark that ignited the young Ansari into doing what he did? The feeling that as a Muslim, he and his religion are not safe and free from attack, so he had to learn to protect himself. This is a potentially very dangerous situation.

It is vital from the point of view of both justice and national security that we begin to take cognisance of this dangerous reality.”


Vibhuti N.Rai
Inspector General Border Security Force

“ “In Bombay during the post-Babri Masjid demolition riots (December 1992 and January 1993 ), it was quite evident that state failed to provide security to the minorities. Many hundred Muslims were killed, the whole community was left at the mercy of Hindu communal goondas.

In Coimbatore, also, after the assassination of a traffic constable, Selvaraj, about two dozen Muslims were killed in a manner which puts into very serious question the neutrality and professionalism of the Tamil Nadu police. The failure of the state in providing protection to the minorities will always lead disgruntled elements to become instruments in the hands of agencies such as ISI who will be only too happy to utilise them in blasts like Bombay and Coimbatore.

We should not forget that the failure of the state in the anti-Sikh riots after the assassination of Mrs Indira Gandhi provided thousands of volunteers to the separatist movement launched by Sikh militants. The sooner we learn lessons from the Coimbatore blasts the better.”

We have now been witnessing not riots but tendencies towards ‘ethnic cleansing’

Shankar Sen
Chairperson, National Human Rights Commission, former IPS officer

“The manner in which members of the minority community are branded ‘anti-national’ is wrong and incorrect. The other regrettable fact is that in very few cases are the perpetrators of crimes during communal riots ever punished. Scores of cases are withdrawn under the guise of ‘preserving communal amity’.

The broadening of the composition of the police force is a must. This need not be through reservations but in a situation where there is an abysmally low representation of minorities in the police force, through affirmative action. We must urgently strive to have a more mixed and representative police force in the country. We have now been witnessing not riots but events that are marked in their tendencies towards an “ethnic cleansing.” Such a situation reflects not only a gross failure of the state’s law and order machinery but lays the country and sections of our populace vulnerable to take recourse to unlawful acts in retaliation.”

The question of alienation (in mino-rities) must be addressed’

Padma Rosha
Former Director General of Police

“In Bombay during the post-Babri Masjid demolition riots (December 1992 and January 1993 ), it was quite evident that state failed to provide security to the minorities. Many hundred Muslims were killed, the whole community was left at the mercy of Hindu communal goondas.

In Coimbatore, also, after the assassination of a traffic constable, Selvaraj, about two dozen Muslims were killed in a manner which puts into very serious question the neutrality and professionalism of the Tamil Nadu police. The failure of the state in providing protection to the minorities will always lead disgruntled elements to become instruments in the hands of agencies such as ISI who will be only too happy to utilise them in blasts like Bombay and Coimbatore.

We should not forget that the failure of the state in the anti-Sikh riots after the assassination of Mrs Indira Gandhi provided thousands of volunteers to the separatist movement launched by Sikh militants. The sooner we learn lessons from the Coimbatore blasts the better.”

Archived from Communalism Combat, March  1998, Year 5  No. 41, Cover Story,

 

Demanding justice, 31 years later

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Courtesy: AP

31st Anniversary of the Bhopal Gas Leak, December 2, 2015
In the words of the victims and defenders

 
The tragedy, what actually happened ?
The escape of about 40 tonnes of methyl isocyanate (MIC) – a highly toxic chemical – from a storage tank on the premises of the pesticide plant of Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) in Bhopal – the capital of Madhya Pradesh – on the night of December 2/3, 1984 resulted in disaster of mammoth proportions. Due to culpable criminal negligence manifest in an absence on the part of the plant management in taking adequate safety precautions, water and other impurities – that cause MIC to react violently – entered one of the MIC storage tanks resulting in exothermic reactions and forcing MIC and its reaction products to escape in the form of froth and lethal gases. The escaping poisonous gases, which were heavier than air, spread across 40 square kilometres of the area of Bhopal, covering about 36 of the 56 municipal wards, leaving in its wake more than 20,000 dead (over several years) and inflicting injuries in varying degree on about 550,000 others. About 900,000 persons had inhabited Bhopal then. The pernicious impact on the flora and fauna in the affected area was equally grave. UCIL was then under the control of Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) – a U.S. multi-national company, which is currently wholly owned by the Dow Chemical Company (DOW), USA. 

The struggle for justice and accountability by, with and for the survivors has encompassed issues of medical relief, rehabilitation, compensation, environmental remediation and justice. Over three decades, consecutive governments, state and central have simply rejected legitimate demands for a comprehensive assessment of the ramifications of the disaster to enable just remedial measures. The limited settlement of February 14/15, 1989 was rejected by survivors and rights groups representing them as paltry and a sham. Each gas-victim today, has been finally awarded less than one-fifth of the sum allotted even as per that settlement.

Year 2015 brought little progress during 2015 on the most pressing issues concerning the Bhopal gas-victims. This remains a matter of serious concern. The current status of issues such as health care, enhancement of compensation, rehabilitation, prosecution of the accused, remediation of the environment, etc., may be briefly recounted as follows:         
                                                                                                               
Basic right to health denied
The gross indifference on the part of both the state and central governments to the health needs of the gas-victims continues to be as grim as ever. Apart from the fact that a fairly large health-infrastructure has been built in terms of buildings and number of hospital beds due to the pressure exerted over the years by organizations supporting the cause of the Bhopal gas victims, the quality of health care in terms of investigation, diagnosis,  treatment, research and record-keeping continues to be abysmal. The persistent apathy of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the government of Madhya Pradesh in monitoring the health status of the Bhopal gas victims has been shocking.

Bhopal gas disaster survivors do not have the simple benefit of proper medical records (of each person) and even a health-booklet each to enable monitoring and treatment. Despite the showcase hospital infrastructure, clinics with computerization this simple and organised basic right remains unfulfilled.

The limited settlement of February 14/15, 1989 was rejected by survivors and rights groups representing them as paltry and a sham. Each gas-victim today, has been finally awarded less than one-fifth of the sum allotted even as per that settlement.

No proper protocol for treatment of each gas-related ailment has been evolved even 31 years after the disaster reflecting the chronic callousness and apathy of concerned authorities. Mere symptomatic treatment, over-medication due to lack of proper monitoring, and dispensing of sub-standard and spurious drugs has resulted in increasing number of renal failures among the gas-victims. Bhopal-disaster-related medical research, which the ICMR had thoughtlessly discontinued in 1994 and which the ICMR was compelled to revive in 2010, is yet to be pursued with the necessary vigour. The fact is that neither the ICMR nor the state government has any idea of the number of gas-victims suffering under each category of disease arising from respiratory, ophthalmic, gastro-intestinal, neurological, psychiatric, and other problems.

What is equally shocking is that even 31 years after the disaster, most of the gas-victims seeking treatment continue to be classed as suffering from ‘temporary injury’ in order to deny them compensation for permanent injury.    
         
Legal Accountability
It was because of this utter insensitivity on the part of the union of India and the state of Madhya Pradesh that BGPMUS, the Bhopal Group for Information & Action (BGIA) and BGPSSS (as petitioners numbers one, two and three) had filed a writ petition (number 50 of 1998) before the Supreme Court on January 14, 1998. The petitioners pleaded for restarting of disaster-related medical research, monitoring & recording the health status of each gas-victim, improvement in health care facilities, appropriate protocol for treatment of each disaster-related ailment, etc. Fourteen years after the onset of the litigation, and after several interim directions, the Supreme Court finally issued a comprehensive directive on August 9, 2012 acceding to the above prayers of the petitioners. Necessary directions were issued to the union of India, the state of MP and to other concerned institutions in this regard. The petitioners were further directed to pursue the matter before the high court of Madhya Pradesh (MP) – writ petition number 15658 of 2012– a task that BGPMUS & BGPSSS are actively engaged in at present.

Governments defy SC directives
Shockingly, even 39 months after the Supreme Court had passed the said order dated August 9, 2012, neither the central nor the state government(s) has taken the necessary steps to comply fully with all the directions of the Court. What is most appalling and disheartening is that even 31 years after the disaster, proper health records of the gas-victims are not being maintained and, although claims are being made to the contrary, the fact is that gas-victims do not have a hard copy of his/her complete medical record in his/her possession.

It is because of this failure of the respondents to comply with the said order of the Supreme Court dated August 9, 2012, BGPMUS & BGPSSS were compelled to file a contempt petition (No.832 of 2015) on May 15,2015 against the concerned officials of the government of India and Madhya Pradesh and allied institutions such as ICMR, NIREH and BMHRC.

Chronology of the contempt petition
May 15,2015     contempt petition against concerned officials of the government of India and Madhya Pradesh and allied institutions such as ICMR, NIREH and BMHRC filed by BGPMUS & BGPSSS

October 27, 2015      contempt petition admitted, notice issued, petitioners asked to filed rejoinder

September 16, 2015   the chief secretary, government of MP, and the secretary, Bhopal Gas Tragedy Relief & Rehabilitation Department (BGTRRD), who are respondent numbers 3 & 4, had already filed their reply

November 30, 2015 since, the responses in the Reply filed by the said Respondents were mostly false and misleading, petitioner no.2; BGIA filed an application under article 266 of the Constitution urging the high court to take suo motu action against respondent nos.3 & 4 under sections 191 and 193 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) for committing perjury. The application has been admitted. The next date for hearing is January 12, 2016

The persistent apathy of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the government of Madhya Pradesh in monitoring the health status of the Bhopal gas victims has been shocking.
 
Illegal Drug Trials
In 2008, a shocking discovery came to light. The illegal manner in which secret drug trials were being conducted on gas-victims at BMHRC in the period between 2004-2008. Following the exposure, authorities at BMHRC have been making every effort to shield the culprits. BGPMUS & BGPSSS have sought a detailed inquiry into this unsavory incident of using the gas-victims as guinea pigs and have demanded stringent action against the guilty. To legally pursue the matter, BGPMUS & BGPSSS have become interveners in writ petition (C) No.33 of 2012, which was filed to oppose unregulated drug trials in the country, especially by multinational drug companies, and it is currently pending before the Supreme Court.  

Compensation
Twenty-one years after the unjust Bhopal Settlement of February 14/15 1989, the union of India had decided to file a curative petition [curative petition (civil) number 345-347 of 2010] before the Supreme Court on December 3, 2010. This followed a huge public campaign and public outcry (even by the electronic media that has been fairly silent since). This petition challenged the terms of the settlement on grounds that it underestimated figures of both the dead and injured. The UOI has sought enhancement of compensation by an additional Rs.7728 crores over the 1989 settlement amount that was merely about Rs.705 crores. The petition has been admitted but has not yet been taken up for hearing, five years down.

There are significant points of difference in the two interventions. The BGPMUS and BGPSSS do support the UOI’s curative petition especially with regards the total casualty figure (i.e., 5,73,586 victims, including dead and injured) and on the modalities for enhancing compensation (i.e., that it should be based on the dollar-rupee exchange rate that prevailed at the time of the settlement). However, BGPMUS and BGPSSS have serious differences with the central government’s stand on the number of dead (just 5295 according to the curative petition) and the seriously injured (only 4944). The two survivors and human rights organizations also oppose the centre’s paltry claims for relief and rehabilitation and for environmental remediation.

Well documented figures by these organizations (BGPMUS and BGPSSS) put the dead at 20,000+ and seriously injured at 150,000+. These are also the figures (explained in detail) in the special leave petition (SLP No.12893 of 2010) currently pending and which will be heard only after the disposal of UOI’s Curative Petition.  It is to remedy the attempts at dilution of the tragedy both in terms of numbers dead and gravity of the fallout that the organizations concerned have on October 24, 2013 filed an interlocutory application in the centre’s curative petition pointing out the serious inadequacies.

The centre’s conduct, when examined in detail, gets more and more murky. No attempts were made to place the relevant ICMR reports before the claim courts to enable them to fairly assess the types and gravity of injuries suffered by the Bhopal gas victims. In the absence of proper health booklets, which the ICMR and the state government had failed to provide to each gas-victim, circumstantial evidence would have been very valuable in determining the likely degree of injury suffered by a gas-victim.

On all these serious issues, this 31st anniversary of the tragedy, the organizations and Survivors make a collective plea that the curative petition, pending before the Supreme Court for the last five years, should be heard without delay. Before this, the health booklet with his/ her complete medical record should be issued to each gas-victim. Without this, the victim survivors would not be able to access fair compensation that is awarded in terms of the category and degree of injury that can be seen from the individual health record. Today the victims simply do not have the empirical means to prove the extent of injury and the category it falls under.

Hence, the computerisation of health records and coordination between the records contained in various hospitals and clinics treating gas-victims before providing each gas-victim with his/her complete medical records is an immediate need.

Environmental Remediation
Toxic waste that was generated during UCIL’s operation from 1969 to 1984 was dumped in and around the plant leading to severe soil and water contamination. A comprehensive study to estimate the extent and gravity of the damage has not yet been carried out by either the centre or the state government, though thirty one years have passed. Instead, the magnitude of the problem has been grossly underestimated by making it appear that the total toxic waste that needs to be safely disposed of is only about 345 tonnes that is stored at the plant site.

This issue has also been agitated before the Supreme Court both independently in the SLP as also in the intervention in the curative petition.

Survivor organizations have argued that the current proposal to incinerate/bury the toxic waste near Indore is wholly misconceived and it would only result in shifting the problem from Bhopal to Indore. On the contrary, in a preliminary study that was jointly carried out by the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI), Nagpur, and the National Geophysical Research Institute (NGRI), Hyderabad, during 2009-2010, it was estimated that “the total quantum of contaminated soil requiring remediation amounts to 11,00,000 MT [metric tonnes]”(p.68). Since the Government of India has submitted that the private incinerator at Pitampur (Indore) has been suitably upgraded to prevent any toxic emission, the Supreme Court has permitted test-incineration of toxic waste currently stored at the Bhopal plant. The results of the tests are awaited.

Bhopal gas disaster survivors do not have the simple benefit of proper medical records (of each person) and even a health-booklet each to enable monitoring and treatment.

Based on the “Polluter Pays Principle”, it is the duty and responsibility of the Dow Chemical Company, USA, which currently owns UCC, to meet the cost of remediating comprehensively the affected environment in and around the UCIL plant with the latest available remediation technology. Similarly, the cost of providing safe-drinking water to the affected population residing in and around the former UCIL plant too has to be borne by DOW. However, the responsibility for providing safe drinking water to the affected population is entirely that of the state government. However, the state government is yet to fulfill that responsibility since supply of safe-drinking water to the affected areas is still very erratic. Moreover, the victims of contaminated water have still not been made eligible for free medical treatment.         
                                                   
Remediation of the estimated 11,00,000 MT of contaminated soil is a far more difficult task. At the initiative of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), Delhi, a preliminary attempt was made in April 2013 to bring together on a common platform the various stakeholders (including BGPMUS & BGPSSS) and experts to prepare an Action Plan to remediate the degraded environment. While a draft Action Plan has been worked out, it requires further refinement as well as inputs from other experts and stakeholders, including the government of Madhya Pradesh. The stoic indifference of the state government to this daunting task is alarming. In situ decontamination of the toxic waste (including the contaminated soil & groundwater) using closed-loop remediation technologies is a possibility. With inputs and technical help from UN Environment Programme, cleaning up of the contaminated site in Bhopal is quite feasible. However, the entire costs for the cleanup should be ultimately borne by Dow Chemicals.

Relief and rehabilitation                                                                                       
The State Government has failed to address adequately and with sensitivity a host of socio-economic problems that confronts the chronically sick, the elderly, the differently abled, the widowed, and other vulnerable sections among the gas-victims. The pittance, which was disbursed as compensation in most instances to these sections was never enough to take care of their daily needs. Finding gainful employment in accordance with the reduced capacity to work and to lead a dignified life has been a serious challenge. The state government needs to give far more attention and provide far larger support to the most vulnerable sections of gas-victims than in the past. 

On the 31st anniversary of this man-made-disaster, the Bhopal Gas Peedith Mahila Udyog Sanghathan (BGPMUS) and the Bhopal Gas Peedith Sangharsh Sahayog Samiti (BGPSSS) pay their homage to the deceased victims and reiterate their determination to continue to uphold the cause of the survivors and to seek justice for the hapless victims.

 (This article has been prepared based on the detailed press release by Abdul Jabbar and ND Jayaprakash of the BGPMUS and BGPSSS respectively. They can be contacted at jabbar.bhopal@gmail.com / jaypdsf@gmail.com)

Are Indian Christians safe under NDA II Rule?

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Courtesy: John Dayal
 
Yes, says John Dayal who outlines 168 incidents targeting Christians including the sordid rape of a nun in West Bengal

It does not happen to “other people”.  It happens to “us”, though this may not be apparent at first sight. This is the sort of saying that social-psychologists, cultural anthropologists and even environmental scientists have been stressing on a range of issues as diverse as the impact of climate change to that of cinema on peoples and communities. Faith communities cannot, and do not, remain untouched with what is happening around them. In fact, their response to these developments pretty much defines their future cohesiveness and growth, and the robustness of their faith in their God. In many ways, the Christian community in India, a mere 2.3 per cent of the population, coalesced in a few areas of Southern and North-Eastern regions of the country and scattered in vulnerable segments in other parts of the country, best reflects this link between cause and effect at a very critical juncture of the nation’s history.

We are a faith of people divide by race, ethnicity, language, denominations and economic strata, unlike the more homogenous populations in other parts of the world. Add to this issues of caste, and the presence of two very large religious communities, the overwhelming Hindu population and the world’s second largest Muslim group, and the Sikhs who are about as many in numbers as the Christians but far more economically and politically powerful, and one can see the complex societal matrix in which followers of Jesus Christ find themselves 15 years into the 21st century.

The recent universal religious growth survey by the US-based Pew Foundation has predicted a very bright future for Islam, universally, and in India. Globally, by 2050, it may be just a whisker less that the Christian population, but by 2070, it may well be the largest single religious group. In India, Islam will grow and while it becomes the world’s largest national group, it will still be far below the Hindu population, which will hold its own both globally and in the political borders of the country. In fact, Hinduism will grow very much abroad, in the US and Europe, and in other countries, where it already is sizable if not a majority faith, such as Mauritius, and various other Indian Ocean, Pacific and Caribbean islands.  

Pew does not predict any large comparable growth for the Christian population that is organically linked with many international factors, especially in relation of the situation of the Church in Europe. Claims by the more triumphal church plants remain just that – claims. And those Dalits who love Christ by their heart and soul, but understandably also love the benefits accruing from government laws for reservation of seats in the Parliament and legislature, government employment and educational institutions, will continue to be recorded as Hindus in the official records till the Supreme Court outlaws the notorious Section 3 of Article 341 of the Constitution. Going by the statements of the ministers in Mr. Narendra Modi’s cabinet, that does not appear possible for a long, long time. It needs to be remembered that it was the Congress that closed the doors of Dalit Christians anyway. 

It is, however, not an issue of numbers that is important. More important is that neither international nor Indian researchers and missiologists have made any deep study of how political developments, and the growth of Hindutva – which is seeing phenomenal impetus in the second coming of the National Development Alliance (NDA) government with Mr. Modi at the helm — will impact the Christian community in the short and the long term. It impacts almost every sphere, the growth of the faith, the educational, livelihood and economic status and competitiveness, and the future of the Dalit Christian and Adivasi communities within the faith. This needs to be done, and perhaps on an urgent basis. Relationships within village communities, and perhaps even extended families will be impacted. 

The Modi government, it is becoming increasingly clear, intends to remain focused on expanding the national penetration of the religious nationalism ideology of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), the fountain-head of Hindutva, whose cadres and polarizing hate campaigns against Muslims and Christians brought it to power a year ago. Its secondary objective is to try to keep alive the flow of foreign investments and the Indian corporate sector, even if it means whittling away whatever safeguards there are to protect the environment, land and forest rights and basic constitutional rights of association, such as trade unions.  

Since May 2014, when the Modi government was sworn in, there has been a marked shift in public discourse. The past 18 months have seen an assault on democratic structures, the education and knowledge system, Human Rights organisations and rights defenders and coercive action using the Intelligence Bureau and systems of the Foreign Contributions Regulation Act (FCRA) and passport laws to crack down on NGOs working in areas of empowerment of the marginalised sections of society, including Dalits, Tribals, fishermen and women, and issues of environment, climate, forests, land and water rights. 

Environmental norms have been diminished to an extent that now they will be almost non-existent, threatening the environment and the climate. Land acquisition laws are being changed to benefit crony capital. States such as Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh which have reasonable population of Tribal and Dalit Christians will be impacted.

Neither international nor Indian researchers have made any deep study of how political developments, and the growth of Hindutva – which is seeing phenomenal impetus in the second coming of the NDA govt with Modi at the helm — will impact the Christian community in the short and the long term.

The immediate focus is on the threat to secularism, which undermines India’s modern existence as a country, and impacts deeply on the Christian existence. 

Despite a tongue lashing by President Pranab Mukherjee on Republic Day and repeated assertions of freedom of faith by Vice President Hamid Ansari – not counting the naming and shaming done by visiting United States President Barack Obama – the government has learnt little. Modi, at a public function called by the Syro Malabar Catholic church, spoke of security of minorities, but failed to name the sangh parivar as the spruce of much violence. In fact, he put the aggressors and the victims on the same platform.

His Home Minister, Rajnath Singh, a former president of BJP and like Modi, a lifelong member of the RSS, has been transparent in announcing his sympathies. He has called for a national ban on conversions, a national ban on beef, total opposition for Scheduled Caste rights for Dalit Christians and Muslims. And he too has hedged in saying he will punish the spewing of hate and coercion.

The civil society report “300 Days – Documenting Sangh Hate and Communal Violence Under the Narendra Modi Regime” lists 168 targeting Christians. Desecration and destruction of churches, assault on pastors, illegal police detention of church workers, and denial of Constitutional rights of Freedom of Faith aggravate the coercion and terror unleashed in campaigns of Ghar Wapsi and cries of Love Jihad. 

An analysis shows Chhattisgarh topping the list with 28 incidents of crime, followed closely by neighbouring Madhya Pradesh with 26, Uttar Pradesh with 18 and Telangana with 15 incidents. Of the deaths in communally targeted violence, two were killed in Odisha and Telangana, 8 in Gujarat, 12 in Maharashtra, 6 in Karnataka and 25 in Uttar Pradesh. Apart from these, 108 people were killed in Assam in attacks by Bodo militant groups. The violence peaked between August and October 2014 with 56 cases, before zooming up to 25 cases during the Christmas season, including  the burning of the Catholic church of St Sebastian in Dilshad Garden in the national capital New Delhi.

Much of the violence – 54 per cent – is of threats, intimidation, coercion, often with the police looking on. Physical violence constituted a quarter of all cases – 24 per cent – and violence against Christian women, a trend that is increasingly being seen since the carnage in Kandhamal, Odisha, in 2007 and 2008, constituted 11 per cent of the violence. Breaking of statues and the Cross and other acts of desecration were recorded in about 8 per cent of the cases, but many more were also consequent to other forms of violence against institutions.

A disturbing trend is the rising communal violence in West Bengal where the BJP and the RSS have doubled their efforts to fill what they see is a political vacancy following the decline of the Communist Party of India Marxist (CPI-M) and the Congress party in recent times. The violence peaked as was evident in the gang rape of a 72-year-old nun in a convent and school in West Bengal. The official apparatus tried to prove to the world that it was just another crime, committed by foreigners or professional criminals.

168 attacks targeting Christians. Desecration and destruction of churches, assault on pastors, illegal police detention of church workers, and denial of Constitutional rights of freedom of faith aggravate the coercion and terror unleashed in campaigns of Ghar Wapsi and cries of Love Jihad under NDA II

There are fears of a severe whittling down of the 15 Point Programme for Minorities, a lifeline for many severely economic backward communities, and specially their youth seeking higher education and professional training.  

Modi’s conditional ‘assurance’ to religious minorities is challenged and countered by Mohan Bhagwat, the head of the powerful RSS, who asserts, repeatedly, that every Indian is a Hindu, and minorities will have to learn their place in the country. Speaking at the 50th anniversary of foundation of its religious wing, Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), Mr. Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS Sarsanghchalak bluntly stated that “Hindutva is the identity of India and it has the capacity to swallow other identities. We just need to restore those capacities.” In Cuttack, he asserted that India is a Hindu state and "citizens of Hindustan should be known as Hindus".  Sadhvi Prachi, a central minister, MPs Sakshi Maharaj and Adityanath are among those urging measures to check Muslims, including encouraging Hindu women to have from four to ten children each. In Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and other states, the terror, physical violence and social ostracizing of Dalit and Tribal Christians, in particular, continues. 

The Indian government sees an absolute ban on conversions to Christianity as the only way they can control Hindu religious nationalist elements from attacking nuns, clergy and churches, big and small, from the forests of Central India to the national capital, New Delhi. And going by statements made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s senior ministers, the first contours of such a law may soon become apparent.  

The discourse reached a fever pitch as Modi prepared his party for the State legislative assembly elections in Bihar, which he lost, and Uttar Pradesh where the BJP, hopes to wrest power. These are among the biggest states in the Union of India, and the only ones in the so-called Cow belt of the Gangetic plains where the party does not control the provincial governments.

The BJP had repeatedly promised such a law made to their core constituency in their successful campaign in the General elections of 2014. This was reviving an unfulfilled dream that dates back to 1978 when Mr. OP Tyagi of the then unified Janata Party moved a private members draft legislation, ironically called the Freedom of Religion Bill, in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament In 1999, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, then Prime Minister, revived the debate on the Bill when more than two dozen small churches were destroyed, allegedly by Sangh cadres, in Gujarat’s Dangs region on the eve of Christmas 1998.  

State anti conversion laws have survived Christian challenge in the High Courts, most recently in Himachal Pradesh, and in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has upheld such laws to be valid, maintaining that while citizens had the freedom to choose, or change their faith, the constitutional right to propagate religion did not mean the right to “convert another person to one's own religion.”  

A national law will require an amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees Freedom of Faith. The government is in no position to do so with its minority presence in the Rajya Sabha, the Upper House, where it was recently embarrassed when the Opposition forced an amendment to the President of India’s address to the joint session of Parliament.  

The religious minorities have not really been able to forge a united movement against such laws in the states, and it has been left to the Christians to seek recourse in the courts. The Sikh community, despite the violence unleashed against it during a period of insurrectionist terrorism   in the 1970s and the 1980s, has not been impacted. While it attracts many Hindus to its fold, it does not actively seek converts. Muslims in India have not been accused of any magnitude of conversions, other than being repeatedly accused of increasing their population by large and polygamous families. 

Among Christians, prelates of some of the Syrian denominations in Kerala have often said their churches have not been involved in proselytization, blaming it on evangelical groups.  

But increasingly in recent years, human rights and freedom of faith activists within the Christian community, and in civil society, have felt that the fundamental Constitutional right of freedom to profess, practice and propagate religion, circumscribed only by issues of law and order and health, has to be defended to prevent a further erosion of civil liberties which could alter the basic character of Indian democracy.  

India is, at present, perhaps the only real multi-religious and multi-cultural country in Asia. Its neighbouring countries are either theocracies or democracies where the majority religion, linked with ethnicity, is overwhelmingly powerful, as in Sri Lanka which has only recently emerged from a three decade long civil war. Keeping India genuinely secular is important to regional peace.

(The author is a journalist, occasional documentary film maker and social activist)
 

To Ban or Not to Ban ?

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Congressman and Rajya Sabha member of parliament (MP), PC Chidambaram raised the issue of the ban on Satanic Verses  imposed by the then Congress government under prime minister Rajiv Gandhi on the first day of the Times Literary festival in New Delhi, being held in November 2015. Chidambaram was, in 1989, the minister of state for home and coming from him, albeit 27 years later, marks an interesting re-think. Looking at the issue of this ban in 1994 when Bangladeshi writer, Taslima Nasreen faced similar targeting in neighbouring Bangladesh, Communalism Combati in its tabloid edition of June 1994 had carried this cover story. We bring it to our viewers to better and completely understand the issue.

 
In any secular democracy, the right to equality, the freedom to practice one’s faith and the right to life with dignity go hand in hand with the freedom of expression which includes the right to dissent. If minority rights are inconceivable except in a democracy, democracy itself is unimaginable without the freedom of expression. The freedom of expression in turn is meaningless without the right to dissent. Both as a matter of principle and from the very practical question of co-existence in multi-cultural, multi-religious societies like India, there is little to choose between the frenzy of the kar sevaks in Ayodhya and the murderous fatwas of mullahs or Ayatollahs for the head of Salman Rushdie or Taslima. No one can deny to Muslims, or any other group for that matter, the right to peaceful, non-violent protest against whatever, or whoever, offends their religious or other sensibilities. But if democracy is to survive, the call to kill Rushdie or Taslima must be unequivocally condemned.
 
“Mujh ko to sikhadi hai afran ne zandaqi
Is daur ke mulla hain kyun nang-e-mussalmani?
(The West may have taught me faithlessness, But why are the mullahs of this age a disgrace to Islam?)
— Mohammed Iqbal, renowned poet.
 
“No matter how much offence Rushdie’s book might have caused, to condemn him to death for what he wrote is intolerable, inadmissible, and has nothing to do with the tolerant Islam that I was taught.”
—Tahar ben Jalloun, a prominent Moroccan literary personality in Pour Rushdie, (For Rushdie) a compilation of 150 Muslim intellectuals’ support for Salman Rushdie.
 
It was the apprehension of inflamed passions, uncontrolled anger and mindless violence that impelled many Indian secular-democrats to support, however uncomfortably, the ban on Salman Rushdie’s book, The Satanic Verses in 1989. India, a democracy, became the first country in the world to impose the ban with implicit or explicit endorsement from even proclaimed champions of freedom. Despite this, we watched aghast as violence broke out anyway. A 17-year-old Muslim youth, misled by inflammatory slogans during a procession protesting against the book in Bombay, fell victim to police bullets.
 
We appear to be in the same sorry state today. This time the problem is closer home. The target: 31-year-old, outspoken novelist from Bangladesh, Taslima Nasreen. Nasreen was, last fortnight, forced to go into hiding after the Bangladesh police ordered her arrest for alleged blasphemy. With a fatwa of 50, 000 takes on her head announced by a local mullah and with no state protection, she is in grave danger of losing her life.
 
The first fatwa against Nasreen was announced at a rally in Sylhet last September after the publication of her novel Lajja – a story on the plight of a persecuted Hindu family in Bangladesh following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992—and her bold remarks against the oppression of women under all organised religions. Her attack was not limited to the clerics alone; holy texts, including the Koran, were also the targets of her critical scrutiny.
 
Her unorthodox views on sexual relations earned her the charge of “instituting sex and sin in society” and the label of a murtad (one hostile to religion). Allegations of blasphemy were even then hurled at her and her passport impounded by the Bangladeshi government.
 
Today, the threat to her life is far graver after an interview given to the Statesman, Calcutta, last month where she reportedly urged a revamping of all religious texts since, in her opinion, within them lies the root of women's oppression. (The author has since claimed that she had only demanded a revision in the Shariat law, not in the Koran, but the reporter who interviewed her still stands by the published version).
 
Women's organizations, students, trade unionists and some sections of the Bangladeshi academia have strongly condemned this “fundamentalist attack on an individual's freedom of expression”. Internationally, hundreds of renowned writers led by the post-war novelist, Gunter Grass, have risen to Nasreen's defence and have launched strong protests with the Bangladesh government.
 
But in New Delhi, Muslim activists of the Samajwadi Janata Party have already held angry demonstrations demanding that the author be hung. Even some Muslim liberals have gone on record asserting that the statement attributed to Nasreen in Calcutta is the proverbial last straw on the camel’s back.
 
Why? Simply because, as they see it, even if earlier writings and statements of Nasreen that conjured up visions of an unfettered play of feminist sexuality could be somehow swallowed, or ignored, the Holy Koran itself is now under attack.
 
But the question is — Even if Nasreen’s views cannot be condoned, are the violent threats to her life justified? By shifting attention from the extreme intolerance evident in the fatwa for her head to the blasphemy apparently committed by the writer, do they not endorse the view that violence is the best way to settle all differences?
 
By supporting the politics of fighting words with swords (isn't that what the Shiv Sena leader, Bal Thackeray, also believes in?), aren’t Indian Muslims, wittingly or unwittingly, contributing to the growing climate of intolerance within our multi-cultural, multi-religious milieu?
 
No democratic-minded person would deny to Muslims, or to any group for that matter, their right to peaceful, non-violent forms of protest against whatever or whoever wounds their religious or other sensibilities. But if dissent is going to be countered with fatwas for violence, if that is how the Muslim community chooses to deal with a minority within it, what moral and political message is it sending to the forces of Hindutva who have very similar views on how to deal with minorities in their midst?
 

"Sab khuda ke vakil hain lekin
Aadmi ka koi vakil nahin.”
(Everyone claims to speak for God But no one speaks for the human being.)
–John Ellia, Pakistani poet

 
Is it not obvious that a vibrant, secular, democracy is the only guarantee for the security and the protection of the identity of all Indian citizens, including Muslims? Is democracy conceivable without freedom of expression? And are not the freedom of expression and the freedom to follow one's faith totally meaningless in a democracy without the equal freedom of individuals and groups to dissent?
 
In the past decade, we have experienced frequent incidents of violent responses to the written or the spoken word: 

  • Three years after a murderous attack on his life by students of the Jamia Milia university — for defending Rushdie's right to the freedom of expression – Professor Mushirul Hasan, its Pro-Vice Chancellor, cannot step into the premises. A month ago, some students have threatened again to “cut him to pieces” if he were to resume duty on the Jamia campus. He has no adequate security. Hasan, a liberal in an avowedly secular state has, in a nutshell, been held to ransom by fanatics threatening violence. *Frenzied kar sevaks in Ayodhya brutally assaulted press people, including a woman journalist obviously critical of the happenings while the Babri Masjid was being torn down. This was followed by a vicious campaign of threatening hate-mail and abusive phone calls against journalists, historians and other intellectuals in New Delhi and elsewhere, forcing one senior journalist to move to Kerala. Needless to add, from Hindutva's point of view, all pseudo-secularists' are enemies of Hinduism'.
  • The prestigious Times of India group in Bombay succumbed to Shiv Sena-BJP pressure and apologised for an article on Shivaji, the Maratha ruler and the Rani of Jhansi after copies of the Illustrated Weekly of India were burnt in July 1993.
  • The uncrowned king of Bombay's streets, SS chief Bal Thackeray periodically dictates his disapproval of personalities and happenings: a number of films (including Dharavi starring Shabana Azmi and Sholay, with veteran actor, A.K. Hangal) were ordered to be pulled out of theatres in the country's commercial capital last year.

For a secular-democrat, the issue of freedom of expression including the right to dissent is a basic principle. But even from an entirely pragmatic point of view, there is no real option in pluralistic societies like India. Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Sikhs and Parsis not only need to learn to peacefully co-exist with each other but also with agnostics and athiests who whatever their birth, have opted for independent value-systems. If we are unable to accept varied and dissenting opinions and world-views from within our own or other communities, intolerance and violence can be the only result. And, since we do not live on isolated islands, this bigotry, fanaticism and extremism must inevitably flow across the borders of faith.
 
The practice of “majoritarianism” by the self-appointed custodians of Islam, that is, the resort to violence to settle any difference over views or issues can only contribute to the growth of majoritarian tendencies in society as a whole. Both hate ridden majoritarian politics and the violent and intolerant reactions of the members of a minority towards a dissenting voice from within are flip sides of the same coin. Both deny the principle of equal treatment for all, both reject through word and deed the principle of the right to dissent.
 
Dialogue, debate, peaceful forms of protest by aggrieved individuals or groups are the very essence of democracy, fatwas and dictats its very anti-thesis. In a democratic society such as India, any religious community can have only as much right to its freedom of faith as any another community or individual. To deny the basic principle of equality of all before law or to assert a group’s right to take the law into its own hand is to undermine the very foundation of democracy. If democracy loses ground in India, or anywhere else, who gains?
 
When intolerance of individual dissent takes an extreme and violent turn — such as threats to the life of Nasreen, Hasan, and Rushdie –Muslims not merely sacrifice abstract principles of freedom and democracy; they help the growth of majoritarian politics and thus endanger their own security along with that of other minorities and individual dissenters.
 
The right to equality for all religious and other minorities in a democracy presupposes an inherent equality between the various individuals who together constitute the community. The preparedness to accept divergent opinions, beliefs and traditions within and outside both majority and minority frameworks is the only practical way through which citizens can bring abstract principles of secularism and democracy to life and only thus ensure the flourishing of a diverse, multi-cultural, multi-religious society.
 
The socio-political tremors which the kar sevaks triggered in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992, did not merely reduce the Babri Masjid to rubble. The ensuing violence claimed over 3.000 lives and property worth crores was looted or destroyed. Muslims were the major victims in this holocaust engineered by the saffron brigade. The demolition did something more. It rudely jolted the very foundations of India's secular democracy and, 18 months later, the cracks are still visible.
 
The Hindutavaadis’ hatred for what they term as ‘pseudo-secularist’ has been more than matched by the intolerent Muslim’s cry for the head of a Salman Rushdie, Mushir-ul-Hasan or Taslima Nasreen. People whom the saffron brigade calls ‘pseudo-secularist’ are those who have systematically questioned the Hindutvavaadis’ monopoly over Hinduism and resisted distortions of history aimed at promoting the exclusivist, hate ridden politics of the sangh parivar.
 
If, today, Hindutva seeks ideological hegemony over all of Indian society, Islamic extremists are similarly trying to assume the role of the thought police in Bangladesh. Both are identical as both threaten the freedom and equal rights of all those other Indians or Bangladeshis who by birth and descent are non-Hindu or non-Muslim (the minorities) respectively. Not to oppose the fatwa of the Bangladeshi mullahs is one way of supporting the growth of an identical tendency in India — Hindutva.
 
Any commitment to a genuine secular, democratic ethos (read mutual co-existence in a pluralistic society) must therefore necessarily affirm the link between the principles of the right to freedom to life with dignity and the freedom to dissent.
 
The principle of mutual coexistence based on equality and tolerance, the only guarantee for the continuance of a democratic order must, in honesty, be equally extended to the free, non-violent expression by individuals of even such thoughts and beliefs which fall outside the pale of accepted norms, customs and tradition.
 
Any denial on this freedom, whether by the majority or the minority needs to be unequivocally condemned. This may often lead to painful situations when individuals, in disagreement with popularly accepted religious or political beliefs, feel compelled to speak out against them, and thus commit ‘blasphemy’ or ‘treason’. However difficult, however hurtful the voice of dissent, peaceful, non-violent forms of protest are the only option. Otherwise, the very existence of a secular democratic order and the security of minorities (whether in India or in Bangladesh), will be in serious jeopardy.
 
Any fatwa for the killing of any individual however serious the provocation, oversteps the acceptable norms of democratic protest. That is why the hysteria and the outrage whether against Salman Rushdie, or Taslima Nasreen or Mushirul Hasan must be publicly and unequivocally condemned. If unchallenged, only intolerance and violence can grow.
 
Between the frenzy of Hindutva and the murderous fatwas of the mullahs there is, really speaking, nothing to choose. Support to Taslima Nasreen, then, is both an urgent pragmatic need and a question of an essential democratic principle.
 

 

  • Aubrey Menon's O Rama is targeted for fundamentalist attack by Hindu chauvinist sections in India (1950s)
  • The Last Temptation of Christ, a fictionalised critique of the Biblical version is the target of fury by the Christian orthodoxy, many western countries forced to ban/restrict viewing; in India too, there are protests demanding a ban. (1960s).
  • Jesus Christ Superstar, another fictionalised biography of Jesus, on the stage and films is similarly targeted. (1970s).
  • Shakepeare ki Ramayana, a play scripted by Iqbal Khwaja and staged in Bombay is disrupted by Vikram Savarkar of the Hindu Mahasabha, the playwright forced to touch Savarkar's feet in forgiveness; the play is never performed again. (1987).
  • Mohammed, the Idiot, the title given to a short story in the Deccan Chronicle generates such rage from Muslims in Hyderabad that offices of the newspaper are attacked and set ablaze. (1987)
  • Dr. B. R. Ambedkar's Riddles of Hinduism on Ram and Krishna generated violent objections from the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra which were silenced only after a massive show of strength from Dalits in support of the book. (1988)
  • Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses generates worldwide furore, a price is put on Rushdie’s head; the author has been forced into a life in hiding ever since. (l989).
  • Public showings of Ram Ke Naam, a documentary film by Anand Patwardhan that severely critiques the Ramjanmabhoomi movement have often been marred by violence and the filmmaker subjected to violent threats from various wings of the Hindutva brigade. (l990 onwards)
  • Nikhil Wagle, the outspoken editor of the Marathi eveninger, Mahanagar has thrice been roughed up, and copies of Mahanagar burnt by Sainiks for his courageous criticism of the Sena (first in 1991).
  • Professor Mushirul Hasan survives a murderous attack on his life by Jamia Milia students after he defends Rushdie's right to freedom of expression. (1992).
  • Dr. Abid Raza Bedar, Director of Patna's Khuda Baksh Oriental Library faced a violent witch-hunt from Muslim students and other fundamentalists when he made bold to say that the word kafir meant someone who rejects faith; hence Hindus should not be called kafirs but mushrik, someone who has more than one God. (1992).
  • The Rape of Sita, a critique of the anti-feminist perspective of the Ramayana is banned in Indonesia (1992).
  • Hum Sab Ayodhya, an exhibition put together by the Sahmat group Delhi faced violent objections since among many other panels, it displayed the Dasaratha Jataka that depicts Ram and Sita as siblings. (1993).
  • Activists and MLAs of the Jharkand Mukti Morcha threaten Sunil Gangopadhyay for his book, Prothom Aalo for “uncondonable derrogatory references to Goddess Kali”. (1993).
  • Taslima Nasreen faces the wrath of the Bangladeshi clergy for her book Lajja and outspoken remarks against organised religion. (1993).
  • Schindler's List, the award-winning film by Stephen Spielberg is banned by many Muslim countries because it “portrays Jews as a persecuted minority and encourages racism!” (1994)

Archived from Communalism Combat, June 1994

क्या चाहिए आपको, लोकतंत्र या धर्म-राज्य?

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आज आपको रिबेरो, सुशील कुमार, शाहरुख़, आमिर और 'सिकुलरों' को लताड़ना हो, लताड़ लीजिए. लेकिन जिस एजेंडे पर देश को ले जाने की कोशिश हो रही है, उसे समझिए. धर्म पर आधारित कोई राज्य आधुनिक, उदार और लोकताँत्रिक नहीं होता, हो ही नहीं सकता. इतिहास में, अतीत में, दुनिया में चाहे जहाँ खँगाल कर देख लीजिए, धर्म आधारित राज्यों का चरित्र हमेशा, हर जगह एक ही जैसा रहा है. खाप पंचायतों के विराट और कहीं-कहीं कुछ परिष्कृत संस्करणों जैसा!


Courtesy: raagdesh.com

सिर्फ़ बीस दिन हुए थे. शायद ही ऐसा पहले कभी हुआ हो. देश में कोई नयी सरकार बनी हो और महज़ बीस दिनों में ही यह या इस जैसा कोई सवाल उठ जाये! तारीख़ थी 14 जून 2014, जब 'राग देश' के इसी स्तम्भ में यह सवाल उठा था—2014 का सबसे बड़ा सवाल, मुसलमान!और यह सवाल सरकार बनने के फ़ौरन बाद ही नहीं उठा था. 'राग देश' के नियमित पाठक अपनी याद्दाश्त पर ज़ोर डालें तो उन्हें याद आ जायेगा. लोकसभा चुनावों के प्रचार के दौरान ही यह सवाल उठना शुरू हुआ था, जब इसी स्तम्भ में मैंने लिखा था कि इस चुनाव में पहली बार कैसे देश दो तम्बुओं में बँटा हुआ दिख रहा है और कैसे यह चुनाव आशाओं और आशंकाओं के बीच एक युद्ध बन गया है!

Is it Intolerance or agenda of Hindu Rashtra?
सिर्फ़ डेढ़ साल और एक सवाल<

!क्यों? यह सवाल देश में सिर्फ़ डेढ़ साल पहले अचानक उठना क्यों शुरू हो गया? आज़ादी के बाद से अब तक कभी ऐसा सवाल नहीं उठा? लेकिन यह इन्हीं डेढ़ सालों में क्यों उठ रहा है? ऐसा तो नहीं है कि इससे पहले देश में साम्प्रदायिक दंगे नहीं हुए! बहुत बड़े-बड़े और भयानक दंगे हुए. लेकिन यह सवाल ऐसे किसी दंगों के बाद भी कभी नहीं उठा! न 1984 के सिख विरोधी दंगों के बाद उठा, न 1992 के मुम्बई दंगों के बाद उठा और न 2002 के गुजरात दंगों के बाद! ऐसा तो नहीं है कि इससे पहले कभी ईसाइयों को निशाना नहीं बनाया गया. बहुत बार उन पर हिंसक हमले हुए. लेकिन गुजरात के डांग और उड़ीसा में ग्राहम स्टेन्स को ज़िन्दा जला दिये जाने की बर्बर वारदातों के बावजूद देश में ऐसा सवाल पहले कभी क्यों नहीं उठा?सवाल यही है कि यह सवाल अभी ही क्यों उठ रहा है? पिछले डेढ़ सालों में ही क्यों उठने लगा है? इन डेढ़ सालों में देश में ऐसा क्या बदला है कि जो सवाल बड़े-बड़े दंगों के बाद कभी नहीं उठा, वह अभी क्यों उठ रहा है. एक दादरी की घटना को छोड़ दें तो इन डेढ़ सालों में देश में साम्प्रदायिक हिंसा की कोई बड़ी वारदात नहीं हुई, यहाँ-वहाँ छिटपुट घटनाएँ हुईं, जो हमेशा होती ही रहती हैं. हर साल ऐसी सैंकड़ों घटनाएँ होती हैं, तो इस साल भी हुईं और आँकड़ों को देखें तो शायद पहले से कम भी हुईं. फिर यह असहिष्णुता (Intolerance) का सवाल क्यों उठ रहा है?

It is not a matter of Intolerance at all, but a well thought plan to change our Social Landscape!
मामला असहिष्णुता का है नहीं!

सवाल इतना कठिन नहीं है कि इसका जवाब ढूँढने के लिए बड़ी रिसर्च करनी पड़े, मोटी-मोटी पोथियाँ पलटनी पड़ें. जवाब बड़ा आसान है और साफ़ है. मामला असहिष्णुता (Intolerance) का है ही नहीं! जो हो रहा है, उसे असहिष्णुता (Intolerance) कह कर या तो आप 'कन्फ़्यूज़' हैं, या लोगों को 'कन्फ्यूज़' करना चाहते हैं, या मामले की गम्भीरता समझ नहीं रहे हैं, या समझ कर भी उसे कहने का साहस नहीं कर पा रहे हैं. बहरहाल, बात जो भी हो, पिछले डेढ़ सालों में देश में जो भी हुआ, जो भी हो रहा है, वह असहिष्णुता (Intolerance) का मामला नहीं है. हालाँकि इन मुद्दों पर आयी बहुत-सी प्रतिक्रियाओं में ज़रूर बड़ी असहिष्णुता (Intolerance) दिखी, लेकिन हम जानते हैं कि आवेश में कभी-कभी ऐसा हो जाता है!बात को आगे बढ़ाने के पहले यह बात भी साफ़ हो जाये कि यह मामला न असहिष्णुता (Intolerance) का है और न यह हिन्दुओं, मुसलमानों और ईसाइयों के बीच किसी झगड़े का है. बल्कि मामला एक घोषित एजेंडे का है, जिसे देश का एक बड़ा संगठन बाक़ायदा चला रहा है. एक ऐसे एजेंडा, जिसकी एक निश्चित योजना है, एक ख़ाका है, एक नक़्शा है, एक 'रोडमैप' है. एजेंडा भी साफ़ है, और सार्वजनिक है, हिन्दुत्व की स्थापना, हिन्दू राष्ट्र की स्थापना. और इस एजेंडे को वे लोग चला रहे हैं, जिनका कहना है कि आठ सौ साल बाद देश में हिन्दुओं की सरकार आयी है! याद कीजिए साल भर पहले, नवम्बर 2014 में विश्व हिन्दू काँग्रेस में अशोक सिंहल का बयान, जिसका आज तक किसी ने खंडन नहीं किया, सरकार में बैठे किसी व्यक्ति ने या सरकार चलानेवाली देश की बड़ी राष्ट्रीय पार्टी के किसी नेता ने न इस बयान का खंडन किया और न आलोचना की! मतलब क्या है इसका? आप कह सकते हैं कि सरकार क्यों इस तरह के 'दावों' का खंडन करे? ठीक बात है! लेकिन जब प्रधानमंत्री 'हिन्दू राष्ट्रवादी' हो (नरेन्द्र मोदी ने यह बात ख़ुद ही कही थी), जब विश्व हिन्दू परिषद के वही अशोक सिंहल जी प्रधानमंत्री के शपथ-ग्रहण समारोह में पहली पंक्ति में नज़र आयें और जब संघ, विहिप और परिवार के बाक़ी संगठनों के सामने केन्द्र सरकार के मंत्री अपना रिपोर्ट कार्ड पेश करें, उनसे निर्देश लें तो इसके बाद इसमें कोई शक रह जाता है कि सरकार किस रिमोट कंट्रोल से चल रही है!

सरकार, परिवार और रिमोट कंट्रोल
और इसी रिमोट कंट्रोल ने मोदी सरकार बनते ही ईसाइयों और मुसलमानों के ख़िलाफ़ अभियान अचानक शुरू कर दिया. अन्धविश्वास और धार्मिक उग्रवाद के ख़िलाफ़ लिखनेवाले लेखकों को निशाना बनाया जाने लगा. ज़ोर-शोर से 'लव जिहाद' का हंगामा खड़ा किया था. दिलचस्प बात है कि देश के कई राज्यों में बरसों से बीजेपी की सरकारें चल रही हैं, लेकिन इनमें से कोई भी सरकार आज तक 'लव जिहाद' का एक भी मामला पकड़ नहीं पायी! फिर यह मुद्दा क्यों उछाला गया? फिर 'घर-वापसी', चार शादियाँ और चालीस बच्चे, हरामज़ादे और मुसलमानों को पाकिस्तान भेजने की धमकियाँ चलीं. गोमांस के नाम पर मुसलमानों के ख़िलाफ़ ज़हर उगला गया. स्कूलों के पाठ्यक्रमों का हिन्दूकरण करने की शुरुआत हुई. इतिहास में जो कुछ भी मुसलमानों के नाम पर अच्छा हो, उसको बदलने का अभियान जारी है. हिन्दू त्योहारों से मुसलमानों को अलग रखने के बाक़ायदा संगठित अभियान चलाये गये. और तो और, उप-राष्ट्रपति हामिद अन्सारी की निष्ठा और देशभक्ति पर सवाल उठाये गये, एक बार नहीं, तीन-तीन बार.और सवाल किसने उठाये. संघ के एक बहुत बड़े और ज़िम्मेदार नेता ने! उप-राष्ट्रपति की साख पर बार-बार उँगली उठाने का मक़सद क्या था? क्या यह महज़ चूक थी? तो क्या एक ही चूक तीन बार हो सकती है? और जो पार्टी सरकार चला रही है, जब उसका अध्यक्ष कहता है कि बिहार में एनडीए की हार पर पटाख़े पाकिस्तान में दग़ेंगे, तो वह किस समुदाय को निशाना बना रहा है और क्यों? और जब ख़ुद प्रधानमंत्री कहते हैं कि नीतीश-लालू-सोनिया आपका आरक्षण छीन कर किसी और धर्म के लोगों को देना चाहते हैं, तो वह पूरे हिन्दू समाज को किस समुदाय के ख़िलाफ़ खड़ा करने की कोशिश करते हैं? इसका क्या सन्देश है?

पहले कब किसी ने सेकुलरिज़्म का पाठ पढ़ाया?
बताइए, आज़ाद भारत के इतिहास में कब ऐसा हुआ कि अमेरिका के किसी राष्ट्रपति को या दुनिया के किसी और राष्ट्रनेता को भारत को सेकुलरिज़्म का पाठ पढ़ाने की ज़रूरत पड़ी हो. और क्यों उस जूलियो रिबेरो को पहली बार अपने ईसाई होने का एहसास अजीब लगा, जिसने पंजाब से आतंकवाद के ख़ात्मे के लिए जी-जान लगा दी थी. क्यों पूर्व नौसेना प्रमुख एडमिरल सुशील कुमार को भी लगभग ऐसा ही लगा? हंगामा तो तब भी मचा था. देशभक्ति पर सवाल तब भी उठे थे. और हंगामा तब भी मचा, जब अभी हाल में शाहरुख़ ख़ान ने कहा कि कुछ 'अनसेकुलर' (यानी जो सेकुलर नहीं हैं) तत्वों की ओर से असहिष्णुता (Intolerance) बढ़ी है. अगर ऊपर दी गयी घटनाएँ ग़लत नहीं हैं, तो शाहरुख़ के बयान में क्या ग़लत है? क्यों हंगामा हुआ उस पर? और फिर आमिर की बात पर हंगामा हुआ. सवाल उठ सकता है कि आमिर ने यह क्यों कहा कि उनकी पत्नी इतनी चिन्तित हुईँ कि पूछने लगीं कि किसी और देश में रहने जायें क्या? आपत्ति क्या इसी बात पर थी? अगर आमिर केवल यह वाली बात न कहते, तो हंगामा नहीं होता क्या? शाहरुख़ ने तो ऐसा कुछ नहीं कहा था, फिर हंगामा क्यों हुआ? उनकी देशभक्ति पर क्यों सवाल उठे?इसमें कोई शक नहीं कि यह देश बड़ा सहिष्णु है और आम हिन्दू समाज बहुत सहिष्णु है. इसमें भी कोई शक नहीं कि मुसलमानों के लिए भारत से ज़्यादा अच्छी जगह और कहाँ होगी? चिन्ता यही है कि कुछ लोग एक सुविचारित और घोषित एजेंडे के तहत इसे बदलने-बिगाड़ने की कोशिश कर रहे हैं. आश्चर्य है कि जो लोग देश बिगाड़ने के इन षड्यंत्रों का विरोध कर रहे हैं, आप उनकी ही देशभक्ति पर सवाल उठा रहे हैं! लेकिन एक बात समझ लीजिए. आज आपको रिबेरो, सुशील कुमार, शाहरुख़, आमिर और 'सिकुलरों' को लताड़ना हो, लताड़ लीजिए. लेकिन जिस एजेंडे पर देश को ले जाने की कोशिश हो रही है, उसे समझिए. धर्म पर आधारित कोई राज्य आधुनिक, उदार और लोकताँत्रिक नहीं होता, हो ही नहीं सकता. इतिहास में, अतीत में, दुनिया में चाहे जहाँ खँगाल कर देख लीजिए, धर्म आधारित राज्यों का चरित्र हमेशा, हर जगह एक ही जैसा रहा है. खाप पंचायतों के विराट और कहीं-कहीं कुछ परिष्कृत संस्करणों जैसा! संस्कृति, परम्पराओं और पोंगापंथी नैतिकताओं के पिंजड़ों में दाना-पानी चुगते हुए जीवन गुज़ार देने की आज़ादी से बड़ा कोई भी सपना देखना वहाँ सबसे बड़ा अधर्म होता है. क्या चाहिए आपको, लोकतंत्र या धर्म-राज्य? चुनाव आपका है.

A Cry for Reform, Islam

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Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Great Mosque of Paris.           Courtesy: AFP/Aurore Marechal

The November 14 Paris attacks that killed 130 persons, fast on the heels of the Baghdad and Beirut bombings that also cost many lives, have, once again raised questions within the fold of Islam. Earlier this year, Dr Tawfik Hamid an Egyptian scholar famously wrote “From the heart of an honest Muslim” which he began with, "I am a Muslim by faith, a Christian by spirit, a Jew by heart, and above all I am a human being."

Islamic leaders and scholars are risking lives and seeking strongly, a reformation within Islam, some even saying that the political content needs to go and the compassionate and just part, emphasised. Closer home, Mumbai to Kerala, Delhi to Lucknow clerics and leaders have been sending a strong and similar message.

(Preachers denounce ISIS in Friday sermons,
http://epaperbeta.timesofindia.com/Article.aspx?eid=31804&articlexml=Preachers-to-denounce-ISIS-in-Friday-sermons-27112015011025 and In war against IS, clerics to add 1k Instagram accounts, FB pages
 http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/mumbai/in-war-against-is-clerics-to-add-1k-instagram-accounts-fb-pages/
 
In January this year, the rector of the main mosque in Paris, Dalil Boubakeur, speaking to the CNN had reverted from the French to English to make his point. He said that Islam has to reform. There is a need to take out the political content of Islam and the compassionate part emphasised.
 
In the early days of Communalism Combat when it was published in a tabloid format, we had met Dalil Boubakeur in Paris who had spoken to us of the difficult role he has had to play, teaching tolerance and respect for the belief of others to his people and struggling for the rights of a migrant Muslim population, victim of both racial and religious prejudice, on the other. This account was published in November 1997 and we reproduce it here for the benefit of our readers to help contextualise a difficult and painful issue.
 
(sub head) Fighting phobia, teaching tolerance
 
(Intro) As head of the Muslim clergy in France, a country where phobia against Islam and its followers is on the rise, the rector of the Muslim Institute and the Mosque of Paris, Dalil Boubakeur, has a difficult double role to play: teaching tolerance and respect for the belief of others to his people and struggling for the rights of a migrant Muslim population in France which is a victim of both racial and religious prejudice. Excerpts:
 
The role of religion, religious heads and religious institutions in a secular state are indeed complex. France is a democratic country where secularism and human rights are of prime concern to the state. All religions in turn respect the state. We are not to interfere in the political business of the state just as the state and its administration does not interfere in matters of faith.
 
In 1905, France passed a law making a formal separation between religion and state. For Islam, a new religion in France, also a religion of the migrant community, to realise and maintain this equation is not easy. Christianity and Judaism have reached an equilibrium after co-existing with the state for hundreds of years when Islam was not here in France. They have their churches, their synagogues. They have consolidated their institutions, the Church has for long had a sophisticated organization.
 
Islam came here much later and was, therefore, always considered an “outside” religion of the migrant worker whose focus of worship and religion was, in turn, “outside” the nation. The mosque of the Muslim worker was in Africa, their religious feast was in Africa, their women were in north Africa.
 
Only men from the community first came here to work. Families arrived much later after the French government enacted a law, the Familie Rapprochement Act through which families were allowed entry. After the families came, population grew and there has been a demographic explosion since the 1970s.
 
This caused a revolution in the suburbs of the cities of France and the authorities coped by building buildings, kilometers of them, “quick” buildings, to accommodate the growing numbers.  These were buildings without any social, human or cultural dimensions. Outside Paris and Lyon, these buildings look like barracks. This was not good. As the young grew up or came to France, they found little or nothing to welcome them.
 
Also, Islam had to make specific adjustments to integrate because the French constitution relates to the individual, with no concessions to communities of people or religious communities. All of us must integrate into the general population. This is very important and I think, very natural. If a country relates to different nationalities within its geographical area, say Italian, Indian, Spanish, whatever, what you will get is a splintered image of the mirror and no unified image will be visible.
 
There is no priority given here to anyone. No distinction in the application of laws is made, as long as you are a French citizen. Polygamy, female circumcision and other such practices are downright illegal here.
 
Now, is the French state genuinely secular towards all, especially migrants? Or does it have a bias? While the theory of secularism and the secular state exists, in reality there are many human problems. Muslims here, are poor, disadvantaged, the migrant working population is ignorant of the systems of law and the principles of secularism that operate here. Hence, they find it extremely difficult to adapt.
 
They assume, for instance, that expenses of their mosques, the salary for the imams, land for cemeteries will come from the state, little realizing that it requires legislation. A law needs to be enacted to give salaries to any section of the clergy, a law is needed to grant a piece of land for a mosque.

The question of Muslims and Islam in France is linked critically to the immigrant problem. The March 1996 amendment in French immigration law has titled the balance against immigrants, and is even being used to victimise people. As rector of the Paris Mosque, our role as mediators between our community and the state is very sensitive in this political situation.

 
There are economic difficulties faced by a disadvantaged migrant community, for whom there are little facilities. Then, there are many imams (preachers) who, coming from Africa, from a different background, who don’t always have a message of tolerance or the message for the good and wise voyage of the Muslim in this life. This is largely because there is a very low level of secular education for many of our imams: traditionally, they are just taught the Holy Scriptures.
 
In all these contexts, our role is crucial. The Mosque, of Paris has made all efforts to train 130 “good” imams, to give a religious, non-political, spiritual message to followers: to realise their ideals through education, good conduct and behaviour: to be a good Muslim, respecting all religions, other people’s beliefs, men of other religions, and above all respecting the state they are living in. This is critical for co-existence between different religions.
 
The financial upkeep of the imam, mosque and other religious institutions remains an ongoing difficulty. The imam is a religious man with a family, with childen, he too needs social security, where does it come from? The social service cell of the Paris Mosque is thus very active. We organise health camps, special camps for some Muslim migrants in prison. There are about 40-50 persons, including women, who are involved in the social service leagues that collaborate with the 20 mosques in Paris.
 
The only problem that we face are financial. We are trying to make adjustments through money generating activities like running a cafe, hamaam (public bath); there is also donation from visitors, income from the conferences that we hold.
 
The question of Muslims and Islam in France is linked critically to the immigrant problem. The March 1996 amendment in French immigration law has titled the balance against immigrants, and is even being used to victimise people. As rector of the Paris Mosque, our role as mediators between our community and the state is very sensitive in this political situation.
 
Things are very difficult now because the recent amendments, have not only stopped immigration but also placed severe restrictions on access to means of livelihood. In this scenario, it is our hope that Muslim people will behave with responsibility for only then will the negative attitude against them reduce. For example, if they don’t terrorise people in the suburbs, the negative image people have against the migrant population will slowly disappear. As rector of the Paris Mosque in this situation, I inspire the community against bad examples of terrorism and preach non-violence. The Friday sermon is a message of peace, non-violence, a lesson to Muslims on how to behave as good citizens.
 
We know that the number of Muslims here is high and an upswing in racist or xenophobic attitudes can only be tackled if our community listens to us and makes conscious efforts to respect the law, to enjoy rights just as all other French people do. We hope that there never is a “Muslim problem” in France.
 
The French national commission for women has been looking into the question of representation of Muslim women, as all others, in the different professions. The Mosque of Paris, also hopes in future to be the voice of Muslim women and seeks to represent their cause in France to the government.
 
Other related questions arise. In France, Muslim women and men who are French citizens have to live under French law, not the Shariah. This does not affect their religious laws and practices, however. As long as basic principles of law are maintained, there should be no problem in following other laws laid down by the nation state.
 
As the rector of the Mosque of Paris, in a country that sets store by its secular foundations equality of all religions – I agree that the primary French law should apply to all communities. Our religious practices are never interfered with, anyway. When it comes to marriage, for example, we first have to register then perform the nikaah ceremony. In case of any dispute, they go before the French Tribunal.
 
Women have a separate space to pray within the Paris Mosque. They move around freely, no one controls of directs their movements. Freedom is the first principle of Islam for women. Some come with only a scarf, that is their right. We prefer that the heads of the faithful be covered as a sign of respect within the mosque. But outside, all Muslims are free to dress as they choose. No one inside will try and dictate or control their behaviour outside. They are free to do wear what they want, work wherever they like.
 
We recognise that women have much more capacities and capability than only that of the homemaker, though of course this is also important. In France we find Muslim women generally showing great aptitude for academics and have a particular talent in the field of diplomacy.
 
Crucial for any community is the nature and quality of the institutions it generates. The mosque is meant to be the veritable hub, the centre of the community just like the first mosque of Islam at Madina was. The first statutes of Islam, the relationship between Jews and Christians, issues or war and peace, etc., were all deliberated upon inside the Madina mosque soon after it was constructed.
 
The mosque of Paris, built in 1922, has a curious history. It was established first in recognition of the sacrifices of Muslims in the service of the French nation during the First World War. In the late 19th century (1870), many Muslim groups were active in France. Again, 1914, when France mobilised soldiers from Algeria, Morocco, Senegal and Tunisia it was the second major participation of Muslims in the French national struggle.
 
This painting that has its pride of place behind the rector’s chair in the mosque here depicts Muslims fighters from north Africa meeting French diplomats.
 
The design of the Paris mosque was also thoughtfully and approximately chosen. It is an amalgamation of the best of all the existing architectural traditions. It is both an Islamic institute open to everybody and a mosque.
 
(As told to Teesta Setalvad, co-editor of Communalism Combat and published in the Ethos section of the issue, November 1997)

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