Many Hindu voters read the election results quite differently. They saw it just the way many voters saw the election of Donald Trump in the United States a few months earlier, as a vote for majoritarian triumphalism, a vote against Muslims and minorities, a vote that legitimised prejudice and hatred. I saw a Facebook post of a notice pasted in villages of Gorakhpur district in Uttar Pradesh.
 

 

It starts with the rallying slogan of the Ram Janam Bhumi movement – Jai Shri Ram. It goes on to give notice to the Muslims of the village that they must leave the village by the end of the year. It warns them that if they do not comply, then they themselves will be responsible for the consequences. It goes on to warn them that they will be treated in the way that they are being treated in Trump’s America, because a BJP government will be installed in Uttar Pradesh. Decide quickly, the notice says, because you do not deserve to live in the village. It is signed by the Hindus of the village, whose sanrakshak or patron is said to be Yogi Adityanath, Member of Parliament from Gorakhpur.

But by selecting Adityanath, one of its most belligerent anti-Muslim campaigners, given to unapologetically coarse hate speech and skirmishes, as chief minister of the country’s largest state in terms of population, Modi and Shah have gestured unambiguously and brazenly their frank and unashamed resort to hard-line Hindutva as the calling card of their party.
 

Hate speeches

The election speeches of Modi and Shah already signalled the direction the party has chosen. Adityanath’s hate speeches are in-the-face and dangerously toxic. Ever since he was hand-picked by Modi and Shah as chief minister, the social media is full of his pronouncements. I rely here on only one such compilation.

His intent is unambiguous: “I will not stop till I turn UP and India into a Hindu rashtra”. He blames Muslims for communal violence: “In places where there are 10 to 20% minorities, stray communal incidents take place. Where there are 20 to 35% of them, serious communal riots take place and where they are more than 35%, there is no place for non-Muslims”.

Despite numerous reports that deny the claim of the “exodus of Hindus from Kairana”, he still claims in the spirit of “post-truth” that “the population of Hindus which was once 68% has come down to 8% there”. He blames this on alleged policies of “pseudo-secularism and appeasement” followed by successive governments in Uttar Pradesh, which “speak against the majority community in the name of secularism”.

A falsehood that even Prime Minister Modi was to echo was that “governments in UP give land for kabristans (graveyards) but not for shamshanghats (cremation grounds)“. “Issues like the exodus of Hindus from Kairana, love jihad and women’s safety”, he claims are threatening to turn “western Uttar Pradesh … into another Kashmir”.

Even more sinister are his open threats to Muslims. “Every time a Hindu visits the Vishwanath temple, the Gyanvapi mosque taunts us. If given a chance, we will install statues of Goddess Gauri, Ganesh and Nandi in every mosque”. The Ram Mandir is high on his agenda. “When they could not stop karsevaks from demolishing the Babri Masjid, how will they be able to stop us from carrying out the construction of the mandir?”
 

Any of these declarations amount to gravely provocative and culpable criminal hate speech. Adityanath has a number of hate crimes lodged against him. These are not the utterances of an outrageous fringe rabble-rouser. He is the man chosen by the country’s prime minister to lead the country’s largest state in terms of population, which if it were a separate country, would be the world’s fifth most populous country of over 200 million people. Among these, a fifth or around 40 million are people of Muslim faith.
It is a frightening time to be a Muslim in Uttar Pradesh today. It was bad enough that the election results reflected the unification of most Hindu caste and class groups against the Muslims and that the BJP found it unnecessary to field even one Muslim candidate from a fifth of the state’s population and that the prime minister and, even more, his party chief and other candidates openly resorted to a communally charged discourse. But if some among them were still hoping that with such a large majority, at least after the elections, there would be a move to more responsible governance in the state, the choice of Adityanath as their chosen leader leaves no ambiguity about their status.

The Muslims in UP, it seems, must learn the same lesson that Muslims in Gujarat have been forced to learn so painfully since 2002. This is that they would be “permitted” to live in the state, but only as second class citizens, if they accept the political, cultural, economic and social superiority and dominance of their Hindu neighbours. It is the further fruition of the vision for India of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, less than a hundred years since it was constituted in 1925.
 

Secular culpability

This is indeed a victory for the RSS, its ideology and cadres and for Modi’s muscular and crushing leadership. But the victory of a brawny politics of communal hectoring and name-calling, hate and division and the defeat of the constitutional values of fraternity and equality, cannot be laid only at their door. Equal credit, or culpability, lies with the parties of the opposition, which have long abandoned any real commitment to secular values, or even the defence of the country’s minorities.

I will illustrate their multiple failures with their role, or the lack of it, in Muzaffarnagar in Western Uttar Pradesh, which I observed closely in the course of our work with the survivors of the mass communal violence of 2013.

We must begin with the pernicious role of the BJP, and the cadres of the RSS, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal, in stirring the communal cauldron in these regions which had an unbroken history so far of communal amity, even during the Partition riots and the turbulent movement for the demolition of the Babri Masjid.

It is proved beyond doubt that BJP MLA Sangeet Som circulated a fake video of two youth being lynched by a crowd of Muslims. He claimed mischievously and dangerously that the lynch mob was of Muslims of the region, and the men who were brutally killed were two Jat brothers who were trying to defend the honour of their sister from the sexual harassment of a Muslim youth. It mattered little in the post-truth world of command prejudice led right from the top, that all of these assertions were falsehoods, that the video was of a lynching in Pakistan, and that the Jat brothers and Muslim youth killed each other not because of any sexual predation but following a skirmish stemming from a motor-cycle accident. These falsehoods resulted in the largest episode of communal violence in a decade (along with the attack on Christians in Kandhamal).

Between 70,000 to 1,00,000 Muslims fled from their villages in terror after their neighbours of generations suddenly turned against them, burning and looting their homes, raping women of their village, killing even elders and children. The role of the RSS was not different from what it has been since the Partition riots – fomenting communal hatred and violence through hate propaganda and rumours. But the role of the Samajwadi Party government led by Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, and other parties that claim to be secular, requires much closer interrogation.

I found the character, the part played and the attitude of the state administration in Uttar Pradesh hardly different in most ways from that of the state administration in Gujarat in 2002. It could have prevented the scale of hate attacks on Muslims if it had been firm and steadfast in not permitting the mahapanchayats in which hate speeches were made against Muslims based on the RSS-created rumours. It was a mahapanchayat that led directly to massive crowds being mobilised and provoked and incited to inflict hate violence against their Muslim neighbours.

The soft-pedalling by the administration did not just suggest criminal administrative incompetence: if it was just this, it would be bad enough. The real doubt was that it secretly believed that it would benefit along with the BJP from the polarisation between Muslims and Hindus in a communal riot, a harvest that both parties hoped to reap in the 2014 general elections.
 

Payments to stay away

Even more shameful was the neglect, and even hostility, of the Uttar Pradesh state administration to the refugees from hate violence in camps. I visited the camps on many occasions and found them little different from the relief camps I had seen in Gujarat in 2002. In both, the state administration refused to establish and run relief camps for those displaced from their homes by hate violence.

It left this mainly to the battered community itself, as though the responsibility for taking care of these hate refugees was not of the state but of organisations of Muslim people. With nowhere to go, people endured the winter cold, the hot dusty summers and the rains under plastics, with reports of children dying, but the state administration remained unmoved. As in Gujarat in 2002, we found little presence of the state in these camps: it did not organise sanitation, health care, child care or police outposts to record people’s complaints.

The only real departure of the practice of the Uttar Pradesh administration from that of the Gujarat administration 11 years earlier was in the payment of five lakh rupees as compensation to those persons who undertook that they would not return to their original villages. This policy had no precedent in India. For people displaced by hate violence, the duty of the state administration was recognised to be to create conditions that were conducive to enabling people to return to their original homes. This required the administration to take the lead in attempting to rebuild social bonds between the estranged communities, and to ensure the security of those who returned.

Far from doing this, the action of the Uttar Pradesh state government in effect accepted that Muslim and Hindu populations would no longer live together peacefully, and even incentivised their separation. In earlier large episodes of rural communal violence, as in Bhagalpur and Gujarat, we found that social fractures tend to be enduring, and Muslims are ejected from mixed settlements. The state should have fought and resisted this, promoting the restoration of mixed habitations, rather than for the first time actually incentivising separate living on religious lines. This was an utterly bankrupt state policy adopted by the Akhilesh government, with communal underpinnings, one that has no precedents in past communal riots.
 

Premature closing of camps

Just three months after the carnage, the state government officially terminated all relief camps, again as happened in Gujarat, even though several thousand displaced persons were still in fear and dread, and unwilling to return home because they continued to feel unsafe. Whereas displaced persons in camps should be officially assisted and supported to return to their original homes by promoting reconciliation and security, to force them to do so by premature closure of camps resulted only in thousands being left without even the meagre food and health support which the government had extended in the camps.

The sense of fear and alienation of the survivors was enhanced by distressing reports of organised social and economic boycott of Muslims after the mass violence, once again just as in Gujarat. Many men testified that if they went back to their villages, they were told they should cut their beards off if they wished to live in their village. People also reported similar hate exchanges in buses and public spaces. Survivors recounted intimidation and boycott in employment as farm labour, or economic activities like pheris¸ or selling cloth and other goods from house to house.

The Akhilesh Yadav-led state government did little to create conditions in which survivors felt safe to return to the villages of their birth. Without any public remorse by their attackers, any official or community initiatives for reconciliation, and any attempts at justice, these hapless people were unable to return to the villages of their birth. Sometimes with small grants from government or NGOs, but mainly with usurious loans from private moneylenders, they bought house-plots in hastily laid out colonies in Muslim majority villages on what were cultivated fields. Seizing the opportunity to make windfall profits, local large farmers and real estate developers sold these plots at exorbitant rates to these luckless displaced persons.
 

Living Apart

The indifference of the state government was reflected also in the fact that there was no official record of these mostly self-settled colonies, let alone official plans to ensure that they were able to access basic public goods and citizenship entitlements. In a survey undertaken by Aman Biradari and Afkar India Foundation, we discovered as many as 65 refugee colonies, 28 in Muzaffarnagar and 37 in Shamli, housing 29,328 residents, described in Living Apart: Communal Violence and Forced Displacement in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli, a book about the conditions of the survivors, written jointly by my colleagues Akram Akhtar Chaudhary, Zafar Eqbal and Rajanya Bose, and me.

In hellish slum-like settlements, these internal refugees are bravely building their lives anew. Perhaps our most striking survey finding was the almost complete absence of the state from these efforts to begin a new life of the refugees. Apart from a 5 lakh rupee grant given only to households directly hit by the violence (and none to the much larger number who escaped their villages because of fear of attacks), the state took no responsibility for helping them resettle in any way. The displaced were forced to either abandon or sell their properties at distress prices in their villages of origin, and the state compensation for the loss of their moveable assets was negligible. The colonies were settled substantially with the self-help efforts of the impoverished and battered refugees themselves. This again mirrors the story of the violence-affected people of Gujarat.
 

No justice

The confidence of survivors to return to homes was further shaken because of the very low numbers of arrests and convictions of the men accused of murder, rape, arson and looting. Without justice, as we have learned from survivors in many sites of communal violence, neither do wounds heal nor can fresh violence be deterred.

Police and even the judiciary in Uttar Pradesh often displayed communal biases similar to their Gujarati counterparts. Of 6,400 persons accused of crimes in 534 FIRs, charges were ultimately pursued against only 1,540 persons. Most of the cases of murder were closed without a charge-sheet or trial claiming the accused were “unknown persons”. Even a year after the carnage, only 800 people were arrested, and most of those who were arrested were quickly released on bail. One reason given for low numbers of arrests by the police administration was that large numbers of women blocked the entrance to the village entry whenever police vehicles drove there for arrests, or farmers parked tractors to thwart police passage.

Survivors on the other hand believed that police themselves informally tipped off the villagers before arriving to make arrests, otherwise how would so many assemble at short notice to blockade village roads? This allegation was difficult to independently verify, but no self-respecting police administration could accept this kind of public blockades to persist when it came in the way of their fulfilling their official duties.

Only three of the 25 men accused in six cases of gang-rape were held. In one rape case, all the accused men have been acquitted. In another, after three years no one has been arrested. And in the other rape cases, all the accused men are out on bail. There was enormous pressure on the witnesses to rescind on their statements, and a large number of witnesses have turned hostile in court.

Although Indian criminal law does not permit “compromise” in heinous offences, this remains a routine practice after mass communal violence. Since the accused freely roam the same villages, either evading arrest or on bail, they are free to intimidate the complainants and victims. It does not help that the majority of the complainants are impoverished farm workers or brick kiln labour, critically dependent economically on the large Jat landowners for work and loans.

The police was particularly soft in acting against politicians who were allegedly directly involved in the rioting. They have at best been booked in very minor sections like Section 188 of the Indian Penal Code. Most of them did not even see the inside of a jail. There were also other distressing signs of judicial bias, because most arrested persons have been granted bail almost the next day or soon after their arrests. This ignored the gravity of hate crimes, and the susceptibility of the survivors to intimidation because of their vulnerable situation after mass targeted violence has spurred large-scale fear, destruction of livelihoods and habitats and migration.
 

Absent political parties

When the carnage unfolded, and in the crucial months that followed, the Congress Party headed the United Progressive Alliance government in the centre. But it never directed or advised the state government in Uttar Pradesh to fulfil its constitutional duties to the violence affected people more responsibly or compassionately, nor did it reach out to them directly in any way.

As a party, I found Congress workers completely absent from the relief camps, in Muzaffarnagar as much as in the Gujarat camps a decade earlier. This is where the Congress Sewa Dal (does it even exist?) should have been visible, extending discernible solidarity and service to the people displaced by hate violence.

Equally, Mayawati never once reached out to the hapless violence-hit people. She mostly maintained her imperious silence, indicating indifference. What credibility would she carry when years later, she reached out for an alliance with the Muslims of the state, as she did before the Assembly elections?

The only political party that did reach out in any way to the violence-hit people of Muzafffarnagar was the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which helped establish a resettlement colony. But even this assistance was much smaller and less visible than the role that the Communist Party played in the early communal riots after Independence.
 

No credible alternative

The lesson, then, is that the runaway electoral victory of the BJP in the elections to the Uttar Pradesh assembly in the spring of 2017 is as much due to the BJP’s polarising campaign and Modi’s charismatic but divisive leadership, as it is due to the failure of any authentic and credible secular alternative.

Secularism is not treating Muslim minorities as a hapless, powerless, dependent client population whose votes can be taken for granted at election time and forgotten for the rest. Secularism is not a selective, opportunistic policy, to be played with a continuous timid eye fixed on not upsetting majoritarian communal sentiment. It is an article of faith, which rises above all immediate electoral considerations.

The enormous tragedy of India’s secular majority, as much as of India’s minorities, is that India today lacks an authentically secular political opposition. This emboldens a resurgent and triumphalist political right, led by Modi and Amit Shah, to display their communal fangs with the selection of communal firebrand Yogi Adityanath as the leader of Uttar Pradesh.

It is ordinary people who must act as the opposition. Our large so-called secular political opposition has betrayed us profoundly, and the people if India are paying the cost. The hot winds of communal hatred of the past three years can be expected to grow now into a blinding sandstorm.

This article was also published on Scroll.in

I have found that the most vulnerable among them are the widows. Their spouses, children and elders are killed and, almost overnight, their homes, their livelihoods and earnings are wiped out. They are uprooted from familiar environs into new ones and, all at once, they are saddled with the responsibilities of rebuilding their lives and caring for other survivors. And, like most other widows in India, they battle memory, loneliness, want, as well as the negligence and cruelty inflicted upon them by society.
 

Despair constantly stalked the 21-room apartments allotted to widows and their children in a colony erected by relief-workers on the outskirts of the village Delol, near Godhra, for the survivors of the 2002 massacre in Gujarat. The spirit of the residents of these small homes and their sense of hope remained fragile even years after the carnage. A gust of memories, a boy’s quiet weeping, a girl’s terrified screams in her sleep, a widow’s unacknowledged loneliness, the barbed taunts of neighbours, worries about the future of children, the humiliation of continued dependence on charity – each was enough to obliterate hope.

Feisty, fierce, resilient, compassionate, impetuous and sometimes unwise, yet often defenceless in her loneliness, 31-year-old Naseebbahen Mohammedbhai Sheikh emerged as a natural leader in the colony. She had lost an incomprehensible total of 26 members of her family in the massacre, including her husband, her 12-year-old daughter, her parents, and almost every living relative in her parents’ and her husband’s home except one brother and a son.

Yet hers was the steadiest voice in the colony, one offering comfort and strength. “You have to now make two hearts beat in your breasts,” she never tired of telling the other widowed women, “one that of a mother, the other of a father.” She would urge the women, “Live for your children but also for yourself. Make sure that your children study.”
 

Memories of a massacre

Naseeb and her one son survived only because of a chance of fate. She had been admitted into a government hospital in Delol for a hysterectomy on February 27, 2002, just one day before the massacre engulfed her village and villages in 20 districts of Gujarat. She did not know, until much later, about the burning of the Sabarmati Express at Godhra railway station that same day, barely 20 km from where she lay on the operation table, or that the horrific deaths in the train compartment had sparked such widespread and barbarous mass communal extermination.

Her husband, Mohammedbhai, visited her grim-faced in the evening after the operation. He did not tell her that their home had been plundered and burnt down by mobs, their television smashed, that everything they had lovingly accumulated over 15 years of married life had been destroyed in minutes. Their locker had been broken into, too, and their life savings of Rs 70,000, with which they had hoped to buy agricultural land, had been looted. Mohammedbhai only gave her home-cooked food in a tiffin-carrier, asked after her health and held her hand. He then left. It was the last time that she saw him alive.

The following night, Koyobhai, an Adivasi worker from her village who had tended to their fields for many years, brought her 10-year-old son to the hospital. There had been some communal disturbances in the village, he told her briefly. Some Adivasi agricultural-workers had given her extended family shelter in their homes, he said, and they were all safe. Naseeb’s son had wept incessantly for her and he had therefore carried him to the hospital to leave him with her. Naseeb was very troubled, but Koyobhai reassured her that there was no cause for worry.

On the morning of March 2, 2002, Naseeb awoke to the roar of frenzied crowds milling around the hospital. She stumbled out of bed and ran to the gates. In the distance, she saw an overturned Tempo van being set on fire by a mob. Naseeb screamed when she thought she saw her own brother Yakubbhai among the passengers trying to escape the burning vehicle. Even as he struggled desperately, a horde of men overpowered Yakubbhai, poured petrol upon on his clothes and set him on fire. At this point, Naseeb fell unconscious. She was spared the sight of her sister-in-law being stripped naked and raped by the men even as she begged for mercy. She did not see her brother’s two terror-stricken children run screaming for safety towards the hospital and being overpowered and burnt alive.

When Naseeb regained consciousness, she found herself back in her hospital bed. To save her life, the nurses had dressed her in a sari, stuck a bindi on her forehead and spread vermilion in the parting of her hair. Her traumatised son sat frozen by her bedside. Mobs were scouring the hospital wards for Muslim patients. The doctor convinced them that she was a Hindu and they passed her by.

The doctor, Hasmukh Machi, was an elderly gynaecologist who had treated generations of women from Naseeb’s family. After the mob left the hospital, he reassured the shuddering and sobbing Naseeb that the man she had seen killed was not her brother, and that all her relatives were safe. But, as days passed and no one came to see her in the hospital, fear and panic mounted. However, the doctor told her that he had made enquiries. All the members of her family had taken shelter in relief camps. They were unable to visit her only because of the curfew and the unchecked violence.

After she was discharged, Dr Hasmukh took Naseeb to his own home where his wife and mother gently nursed her and restored her to health. It was the longest that Naseebbahen had lived in a Hindu household, she said. They treated her as one of their own. Finally one morning, twenty days after the violence first broke out, the doctor and his wife sat by Naseeb’s side and, in low, shaking voices, shared horrifying news, worse than the worst of her nightmares.
 

Horrific end

After their home was destroyed by the rioting mobs, the Adivasi workers – who had been employed for many years by Mohammedbhai’s family – sheltered her extended family in their huts, a total of 11 women, men and children, for three nights. But the bloodshed and butchery refused to die down. When others in the village discovered them, they advised the men that it would be safest for them to shift their families to the relief camp in Kalol, Gandhinagar. They assured them safe passage.

The entire family set out that evening in the fading twilight. They walked a short distance, then decided that it was too dangerous to continue and hid in a shallow pit on the bed of the Goma River until nightfall. Although the villagers had assured them that they would remain unharmed, they still trembled, clinging on to each other, hoping to see the dawn. But this was not to be.

A crowd of men armed with swords approached stealthily from the rear and surrounded the family. The attack was swift and surgical. They first cut off the head of Naseeb’s mother-in-law. They then attacked her husband Mohammedbhai. They hacked off his arms and, as he cried out to Allah, fatally stabbed him in the stomach. The death of their 12-year-old daughter was even more merciless: they cut off her arms, feet, hair, and only then ended her life. In this way, one by one, nine of them fell to the mob’s swords as their blood collected and coagulated in the riverbed and their screams filled the stillness of the approaching night. They burned alive two small children.
The doctor’s account did not end there. Frequently breaking down, he told Naseeb that it was indeed her own brother whom she had seen from the hospital gates.

While their home was being looted and torched, her parents’ extended family of 15 remained hidden in the fields. After cowering for two days among the standing crops, enduring hunger, thirst and fear, her brother had decided that they could not continue like this indefinitely. The storm showed no signs of passing and he felt that there was no option but to drive everyone to the relief camp in Kalol.

Somehow, their Tempo van had been left unharmed and they all piled into it and left. In Kalol, they found that the roads had been blocked with crude, hastily put up barriers made out of stones and mounds of sand. Naseeb’s brother tried to desperately drive over the barriers but, at one point near the hospital where Naseeb was recovering from her operation, the van swerved and overturned into a ditch. Naseeb was witness to some of what happened afterwards.

Naseeb, now utterly distraught and incredulous, begged the doctor that she be allowed to visit the relief camp and look for survivors from her family. The doctor drove her there himself. With her son clutching her shaking hand, she walked unsteadily through the camp. The only relative that Naseeb could find was her husband’s elder brother Abdul and his wife. They had survived only because they lived in another town, Dehasar, where their homes had been destroyed but their lives had been spared. They all held on to one another and wept inconsolably. Such was the lamentation in the camp that this little family gathered around, weeping, became just one among numerous others.
 

No help

The state government had refused to manage the camp, or provide any assistance beyond supplying foodgrains barely enough for a subsistence-level existence. In this situation, unlikely leaders emerged. Moved by the suffering of the thousands who had survived slaughter, rape and plunder, and who were now internal refugees abandoned by their own government, many pushed their own sorrow and loss aside. Bands of young people gathered and set up makeshift shelters out of plastic sheets and bamboo sticks, cooked and distributed food, carried water for bathing and drinking, organized milk for infants and medical care for the wounded, and helped survivors file complaints with a recalcitrant and openly hostile police.

A week after Naseeb arrived in the camp, Abdul took a room on rent in Kalol and moved there with his wife and children and his sister-in-law and her son. Naseeb lived with them for three months but finally returned to the camp.
She returned because she was humiliated and wearied by her sister-in-law’s insinuations. She unrelentingly taunted Naseeb, “Your whole family died, how did you alone survive?” She reviled Naseeb particularly because it was a Hindu doctor who had left her at the camp. “Why did that Hindu doctor shelter you for 20 days?” she asked. “What did you do for him?”

At the camp, they slept on the bare floor and were able to bathe only every 10 or 15 days. The camp organisers had hired a tanker to bring in drinking water but this was never enough, and the temperatures soared mercilessly all summer.
 

Stigma at every step

Naseeb could not shake off the stigma and vulnerability of being a widow even in the camp. Earlier, before she had left the camp to live with her brother-in-law’s family, their religious leader, the maulana, had insisted she observe the ritual iddat of 40 days, prescribed in Islam for all widows, with complete confinement in her brother-in-law’s home.

Her brother-in-law had stoutly supported her resolve to defy this custom, even if it meant excommunication from their faith. How could a woman who had lost everything, including 26 members of her family, and now charged with raising her only surviving child, be expected to withdraw from the world for 40 days? But back at the camp, the maulana returned to his haranguing: she had been rescued by a Hindu doctor, he said, and had refused to observe iddat. There could be nothing worse in his view. There were 15 widows at the camp and they all lived together, extending to each other a sisterhood of comfort and support. None observed iddat. None escaped the maulana’s recriminations.

One day, Ransinghbhai, a Hindu vegetable dealer with whom her husband used to do business, visited them at the camp. Appalled by the conditions, he offered to take them to his own home. Naseeb declined because she was afraid of gossip, but gratefully sent her son with him.
 

‘We had a happy home’

Alone in the camp, Naseeb’s thoughts would frequently wander back to her husband. “Compared to my parents’ home,” Naseeb told me, “we were not so well off. But we had a happy home. My husband was a good man. He would always inform me before he left home, about where he was going, and when he would return. Not many men do that. He never beat me, and fed me well.”

Naseeb had very fond memories of her grandfather. It was he who had given her in marriage to Mohammedbhai, her mother’s sister’s son, even though the family was poor, because he wanted her to always live close by so that he could see her flourish before his own eyes.

He was a well-off landowner, with 100 bighas of irrigated land; he employed 20 farm-workers with whose help he grew vegetables and castor. He had been on the Haj thrice, each time spending a Rs 1.5 lakh . They owned three tubewells. From one, he offered a free supply of drinking water for two hours daily to any villager who needed it, regardless of community or caste. This act was exemplary in a village in which divisions of caste and religion ran very deep. He had also dug a trough of water for animals and birds. Her grandfather never foisted purdah upon the women in his family. He also encouraged them to participate in Hindu festivals like the Navratra.

Naseeb’s two brothers studied up to Class 10, but the girls were allowed to only attend the local madrassa, up to Class 7. Naseeb had wanted to study further but the religious school offered, in her words, “more Quran, less schooling.”

Naseeb was 16 when she was married off to her cousin Mohmmedbhai. He was more educated than her brothers, having studied beyond secondary school, and having acquired a diploma in electrical engineering from the local Industrial Training Institute. But he ended up in the business of dairying, with a single buffalo, which was augmented after their marriage by the second buffalo her grandfather gave them.

Her father also encouraged and assisted his son-in-law to sell the vegetables grown in their fields. When Naseeb would gather grass from her father’s fields for their buffaloes, he would never allow her to carry the load back on her head but would send her on his tractor. Naseeb and Mohammedbhai sold milk mainly to their Hindu neighbours, and vegetables to Hindu traders. Her mother-in-law was always full of praise for her, said Naseeb. “Naseeb is true to her name,” she would say, “she has brought us good fortune. Only after she came to our home has our poverty and want ended. Today we have every kind of happiness.”

As Naseeb lay on the uneven floor of the relief camp, with no clothes except the ones that she wore, surrounded by crowds of weeping children, bereaved women and dispossessed men, battling mosquitoes, the hot sun and despair, all of this seemed a distant, shadowy dream.
 

New normal

The state government forced the relief camps to close six months after they had been set up. Normalcy had been restored, local authorities claimed. And as elections to the state assembly were due, people must return to their villages. No one bothered to explain to the tens of thousands people sheltered in the relief camps how they could go back to their villages where neighbours remained violently, implacably hostile, where they had no prospects of employment and tenancy, where their homes and livelihoods had been destroyed, and when the state government had refused to offer anything more than a pittance as compensation and nothing as rehabilitation grants and loans.
Naseebbahen was given a compensation of Rs 90,000 for one member of her family. The remaining 25 were declared “missing persons”, and she was informed that she would have to wait for seven years before she would be paid compensation for their deaths.

By then we had created Aman Biradari, a collective for peace and justice work, bringing together survivors of the carnage and also working-class Hindus from the villages and towns which had been engulfed by the violence. Peace-workers from Aman Biradari met Naseeb, and she decided to join their efforts. Her work as a peace-worker brought her solace. She was entrusted the responsibility for six villages in Godhra.

In each village, she gathered around women, and Muslim and Dalit youth. “I have not come to give you anything,” she said to them. “I have only come to join hands with you, to see if we can build peace, justice and unity in places where there is communal hatred.”

Everywhere, people were moved that a woman who had lost 26 members of her family could still speak of peace and love. Many joined her. She encouraged and supported women to fearlessly give evidence to the police and in courts, and to speak up about the rape, the looting and the killing. In each village, Naseeb also asked about the Hindus who had protected their Muslim neighbours during the carnage. There were many, and she invited them to be leaders of Aman Biradari’s peace groups in their villages. Together they tried to instill faith in those whose homes and livelihoods had been destroyed, and to encourage them to return to the villages of their birth, to take heart and start life again.

The maulana remained hostile to Naseebbahen’s work. “You go about with your head uncovered and speak to strange men,” he would lecture to her. “It is because of women without shame, like you, that riots occur in the first place.” He felt that the only respectable course for Naseebbahen was to remarry and even suggested suitable men to her. (He did this to the other widows as well.) Naseeb was only 31 years old and not averse to marrying, provided the right man asked for her hand. But her first priority was her work and her son.

Naseeb’s extraordinary work as a peace-worker in Aman Biradari was recognised when she was nominated among 1,000 women leaders from across the globe for the Nobel Prize.

But her own life fell apart all over again when she alleged that the leader of their relief colony had tried to rape her. This leader had grown into a respected and influential humanitarian and justice-worker in his own right. He hotly denied Naseeb’s charges. Peace activists were bitterly split in their support. I stood resolutely with Naseeb. The man against whom she had alleged rape and sexual harassment left the relief colony and moved to Ahmedabad, where he continued working with leading organisations for the cause of peace. Naseeb was bitter but remained unbroken.

But that story is Naseeb’s to tell. It is enough to say that this episode inflicted one more wound after the many that life had dealt Naseeb, but it could not fell her.

In the years that passed, she raised and educated her son into a fine and caring young man, and found a bride for him. The widows of the colony would still turn to her in difficult times. She did not remarry because she did not find the right man. But in her work for peace and with the widows, she has often said to me, “I feel that I have a new family.”

Excerpted with permission from Harsh Mander’s new book Fatal Accidents of Birth: Stories of Suffering, Oppression and Resistance, Speaking Tiger

This article was first published on Scroll.in

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Bharatiya Janata Party President Amit Shah, the government and its supporters continue to put up a brave face while talking about the demonetisation move in public, claiming that the vast majority of Indians support it. But behind closed doors, there are signs of unease in the ruling establishment.

With a fifth of the country’s voters going to polls in the days after the budget – elections to five states are being held between February 4 and March 8 – the ruling party felt compelled to shed its image of being uncaring of the poor and allied to the interests of the super-rich.

This year’s Budget was therefore one of exceptional interest and expectations, with some commentators believing it would contain dramatic and high-visibility measures for welfare and developmental equity.
 

No yield for farmers

However, a careful study of the Budget reveals that it gives away little to India’s long-suffering poor and takes away even less from its super rich. It hopes instead that rhetoric alone will suffice to convince the mass of India’s workers and farmers that their government is committed to their well-being.

Take firstly the claim, repeated for a second year in a row, that this is a farmers’ budget and that it will double their incomes by 2022. The route by which farmers’ incomes will double has of course not been clarified – as in the last budget – neither has the government specified if it is speaking about real income adjusted for inflation.

But the severe reality remains unchanged that although agriculture still employs more than 50% of the country’s workforce, it is allotted a miserly and shocking 2.38% of Union government expenditure.This amounts to just 0.3% of the Gross Domestic Product. Even if we combine allocations to the Ministry of Rural Development and Ministry of Water Resources, this is still as little as 0.98% of the GDP – even below the level of 1.07% of the GDP in Arun Jaitley’s first budget of 2014-’15.

Much was also made by the finance minister of the “record level” of Rs 10 lakh crore in 2017-’18 for farm credit. “For a good crop”, Jaitley declared, “adequate credit should be available to farmers in time”. But as with much else he claimed to do for India’s poor, this announcement was somewhat disingenuous.

Firstly, farm credit is not funded from the budget from tax resources: it is a target set for banks. Second, this target is not much higher than the revised one of Rs 9.5 lakh crore in 2016-’17. And there is no roadmap for bringing in small, marginal and tenant farmers, who constitute more than eight out of 10 farmers, into the formal banking sector. These farmers depend mainly on usurious private money-lending. Interest subvention also bypasses this mass of vulnerable farmers – many of who are women farmers with the growing feminisation of agriculture – as they are unable to access bank loans.
 

 

It is once again these small and tenant farmers who are excluded substantially from crop insurance under the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana. Government admits that only about a quarter of farmers have been covered under the scheme and aims to increase this to 40% in the current year.

But, as pointed out by Yogendra Yadav, former Aam Aadmi Party leader who founded the Jai Kisan Andolan, it is not clear how the government will do this because the Budgetary provision for the scheme has come down to Rs 9,000 crore in the coming financial year, from Rs 13,240 crore in the last budget.

Moreover, these percentages exclude a majority of tenant farmers and sharecroppers who are most vulnerable but rarely recorded. We also need careful studies on whether the premium under this central scheme is benefiting insurance companies or if it is actually being extended to farmers and what the business model of this insurance scheme is.

Most of all, the claims of this being a farmers’ budget rings hollow because it side-steps three major requirements of farmers. The first is for effective farmer income protection, either through a minimum support price guarantee or a subsidy for every acre cultivated. The second is to repair the near-broken system of agricultural extension (educating farmers in the latest scientific developments in the field) and public-funded research and development for sustainable agriculture. The third is the massive need for watershed development and other measures for raising productivity of rain-fed small and marginal farmers.

Instead, the Budget announcement supporting the advance of contract farming, wherein the farmer enters into an agreement with a buyer on what to produce and how much, can also deepen the disquiet of small farmers, with another threat – of corporate takeover – adding to their multitude of everyday challenges for survival.
 

Rural employment

There was another dubious claim of “record” allocations in this Budget speech, regarding the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. The irony of the government boasting of making the “highest” allocation to a programme that Prime Minister Modi had famously lampooned in Parliament as a “living monument” Congress’ misrule is hard to miss. But there’s another paradox in this claim too.

Last year’s initial budget allocation for NREGA was Rs 38,500 crore. At first glance, this seems like a significant 25% increase. However, the reality is that after a series of raps by the Supreme Court, the total allocations in 2016-’17 were raised to Rs 47,500 crore. Therefore, the effective increase this year is just by 1%. And we factor in inflation, this year’s allocation does not even match the previous year’s.

There have been widespread reports of job losses in the informal sector and many people are turning to MGNREGA to tide over these bad times. The Right to Food Campaign comments that the allocations are “woefully inadequate” to cope with the fall-out of demonetisation. They noted in a statement:
 

“The Economic Survey suggests that the number of migrant labour is to the extent of nine million. If we presume that 25% percent of them have been adversely affected and are unlikely to be absorbed in labour market in near future, they need support through MGNREGA. The additional minimum requirement would be for Rs 4,500 crore. Therefore total minimum allocation for MGNREGA should have been not less than Rs 60,000 crore keeping in view annual wage increase with commitment for need based extra allocation, if not Rs 80,000 crore as was demanded by concerned citizen groups. The budget therefore fails to ensure food security of tens of lakhs of poor migrant labour who have been adversely affected by the demonetisation exercise. By allocating Rs 48,000 crores and projecting this as highest ever the finance minister has misled the nation.”
 

Under-nourishing children

The claim of the budget serving the interests of the poor could have carried some credibility if the government had made significantly higher allocations in sectors other than agriculture, such as education, health-care and social protection. But here again, there is a stagnancy, and in real terms even a decline in allocations.

The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan sees a 4% rise in allocations this Budget and for mid-day meal schemes, the increase is just 3%. If we account for inflation, which is around 5%, this is a decline. Costs norms for school meals and Integrated Child Development Services meal plans (allocation for which too has been increased by just 5%) have not been revised for many years, despite sometimes galloping food inflation. In real terms, children are being fed less and less.

The Centre for Budget Accountability and Governance, in its customary careful and insightful analysis of the Budget, notes that as a share of the total Union budget, allocations for education have remained stagnant at 3.7%. The share of school education has actually fallen from a very low 2.4% to an even lower 2.34%.
 

Higher education, although also very poorly resourced, has in comparative terms been prioritised over school education as has technical education over general education. The share of Union spending on education as a percentage of GDP fell further to 0.47%. Even the budget rhetoric regarding education was watered down. In his last budget speech, Jaitley spoke of “education, skill development and job creation” as one of the pillars that would transform India. This year, he only spoke of education as something that would transform the youth and did not discuss Right to Education.

With his continuing neglect of education, the finance minister has chosen once again to ignore the constitutional obligations placed on government under the Right to Education Act. The public school system is in a shambles and widely lacks the infrastructure and trained teachers that the RTE Act prescribes.

The Centre is therefore defying and disobeying laws passed in Parliament that oblige it to commit sufficient budgetary resources to enable all people to access their legal rights to education, rural wage work and food. There are specific provisions for educating children outside the formal schooling system who are in the toughest circumstances, such as street children, migrant workers’ children and child workers.
 

Ailing health sector

The public health sector does only marginally better. The Centre for Budget Accountability and Governance observes that the Centre’s allocations for the health sector as a proportion of the GDP saw a marginal increase to 0.30%, from 0.26% in 2016-’17.

However, this falls distressingly short of the long-standing demand to increase allocation to the health sector to at least 2.5% GDP, despite the fact that India has one of the most shamefully privatised systems of health care in the world. National Sample Survey Organisation data tells that nearly 70% of out-of-pocket expenditure is on medicines. Making free medicines available in all public health facilities would substantially reduce distress due to health costs and improve the access and the credibility of the public health system. But this Budget misses the opportunity of ensuring the availability of free generic medicines in all public health facilities.

Stagnating social spending particularly hits those sections of the population that are most vulnerable and actually deserve the greatest state support. The National Social Assistance Programme (which covers old age pension, widow pension and disability pension schemes) has been allotted Rs 9,500 crore rupees in 2017-’18 – the same level as 2016-17.

In real terms this is a decline. With nine out of 10 workers in informal and mostly uncertain employment, it is only the state that can secure pensions for all through public spending. It is unconscionable that government covers only those older people that it designates through its notoriously poor targeting to be BPL or below the poverty line, and that too with a Union government contribution of as low as Rs 200, unchanged for several years. Contrast this with the small percentage of us in the formal sector who will retire and receive half their last drawn salary continuously, indexed for inflation.

Likewise with maternity benefits. The National Food Security Act mandated the payment of Rs 6,000 to most women during pregnancy, but the Union government refused to fulfill its legal obligation for this. Modi chose to use his much-awaited end of 2016 speech – in which he was expected to give the country a report card on demonetisation but instead offered homilies and some welfare promises – to announce near-universal maternity benefits. But despite the imperatives of the law, and the prime minister’s prime-time announcement, the budget provision for maternity benefits is only Rs 2,700 crore for 2017-’18.

The Right to Food campaign estimates that about Rs 16,000 crore (0.2% of the GDP) is required for near-universal maternity benefits (Rs 9,600 crore from the Centre, as the amount is divided 60:40 with states). I have argued earlier in Scroll.in that the law provides for 26 months of fully paid leave for all women working in the formal sector. Rs 6,000 would be less than a quarter even of statutory minimum wages for unskilled work for 26 weeks. Even this has come so late and so reluctantly, and yet the Union government has not made the necessary budgetary provisions for this despite the law and the prime minister’s public pledge.
 

Pro-rich Budget

Overall, India remains what development economist Jean Dreze memorably described as the “world champions of social under-spending”. As the Lokayat, a socialist group of activists in Pune, observes in a scathing press statement on the Budget, the total social sector expenditure of the government (Rs 4,92,635 crore) as a percentage of the GDP is only a lowly 2.92%.

This is even lower than the 3.23% level budgeted by Finance Minister Jaitley in his first budget of 2014-’15, and 3.43% in the 2010-’11 Budget of the United Progressive Alliance government. The total social sector spending of the governments at the Centre and states combined is a mere 7% of the GDP, which is far lower than not only that of industrialised countries (where it is upwards of 30%) but also other emerging market economies, like the Latin American countries, which spend about 18% of their GDP on the social sector.

In the end, below a very thin veneer, this remains a routine pro-rich Budget, with as little to offer the farmer, the worker, the woman, the child, the aged and the disabled as past budgets. To expect differently from this government would mean it was willing to move far from its ideological moorings of market fundamentalism and fiscal prudence.

In the first place, this would have required the government to substantially raise the levels of public spending. However, as calculated by the Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability, the total Union government expenditure as a percentage of the GDP has further fallen from 14.2% in 2012-’13 to 12.7% in the current budget.

The tax effort of the UPA government was already very low by global standards, but the BJP-led government contracts this effort further. The refusal of the government to expand its tax base means there just aren’t enough public resources for agriculture, education, health care and pensions. In the global recessionary context, it makes even less sense for India to adhere to the neo-liberal dogma of contractionary fiscal prudence. Higher levels of public spending will boost economic growth.

But a larger tax effort would require the government to tax big business much higher than it does at present. Economist Amartya Sen has criticised the budgets over the last several years for “revenues foregone” or gigantic tax holidays to the private sector of over Rs 5 lakh crore annually, enough to fund universal health care and substantial improvements in public education.
Since criticism mounted as these tax holidays grew further under the Modi government – with no convincing evidence that this proportionately benefited the economy – this regime responded to these criticisms typically by simply changing the system of calculations and presentation of figures in the current budget document. However, experts observe that there is no evidence these tax concessions have been withdrawn or reduced.

Massive unpaid dues by big corporations also continue to be handled with kid gloves and taxpayers’ money. As the Right to Food Campaign observes, the government continues to use public money to safeguard the interests of big business by bailing out banks that have huge non-performing assets. The finance minister said government has provided Rs 10,000 crore for the recapitalisation of banks and has also raised the allowable provision for non-performing assets from 7.5% to 8.5% “in order to give a boost to the banking sector.” For corporate tax as well, there have been concessions with a reduction of tax rate to 25% for 96% of companies.

A truly redistributive budget would require the government to marshal the courage to tax the country’s super-rich higher, more resolutely and more transparently, with an inheritance tax or higher corporate and wealth taxes. The government would also have to reduce significantly the many tax exemptions and subsidies to the rich, instead of offering them sky-high tax concessions.

The influential French economist Thomas Pickety made a strong economic and moral case for an inheritance tax, but there is little chance of this becoming a reality in India in the foreseeable future. There are also no signs on reviving the wealth tax.

As I have observed elsewhere, I am anguished by the newest Budget of the Modi government, but not surprised. Even with its back to the wall, I do not expect this government to muster the moral and political resolve required to undertake large redistributive expenditures for India’s poor masses. To do so would run entirely against its ideological grain.

This article was first published on Scroll.in

As impoverished people across the country are grappling these days with formidable challenges of daily survival, caused by the precipitate withdrawal of 86% of the country’s currency, it is natural for us to forget the last official outrage, and the one before that. But it is imperative that we do not forget, because with each assault the edifice of constitutional governance in the country is being damaged further.
 

Back to Gujarat

I travelled to Bhopal two days after the killings, and felt as though I was caught in a time warp, swept back a dozen years to the city of Ahmedabad. There, too we were witness to a series of extra-judicial killings of “dreaded terrorists” (never even alleged terrorists, although their crimes were never established in a court of law before their lives were taken). Those killed by the police in Gujarat in those years included a 19-year-old woman, a petty criminal and his wife, and the only surviving witness to their custodial killing. The details of these encounter deaths divulged by the police seemed from the start to have big holes, but those who raised doubts about the truth of these official killings were quickly dubbed anti-national sympathisers of terrorists who almost by definition had to be covertly sympathetic to Islamist ideologies, or cynical purveyors of vote-bank politics.

The collective impact of these repeated killings of alleged Islamist terrorists helped consolidate and widen the already profound divide between religious communities in Gujarat, and also promote a public image of siege of those political leaders, especially the then Chief Minister Narendra Modi, who positioned themselves as the only leaders with the courage to fight the Muslims, the fifth columnist “enemy within”. This strategy manifestly paid rich political dividends in Gujarat, and later nationally. It appears today that the same Gujarat model is now being extended to Madhya Pradesh.

Chief Minister Shivraj Chouhan combatively described the men eliminated by his police force as “dreaded terrorists who could have wreaked devastation”, although none of this is proved, either that they were terrorists or that they were about to wreak terror violence. He jeered that they enjoyed chicken biryani during their long incarceration, again an emotive and deliberate falsehood by the head of the state administration. His suggestion was that delayed trials and prolonged detention of terror accused are not unconscionable injustices but signs of state softness, and only the muscular state would respond fittingly – by killing them.

I recall the feverish election speeches in Gujarat after 2002. After the killing by the Gujarat Police of petty criminal Sohrabuddin and his wife Kausar Bi was confirmed to be illegal and extra-judicial, this shook the liberal public conscience in the nation. In one of his election speeches, Modi declared defiantly, “Congressmen say that Modi is indulging in [illegal police] encounter[s], saying that Modi has killed Sohrabuddin. Friends from Congress, you have a government at the Centre. If you have the guts, send Modi to [the] gallows [translated from the original by India’s Election Commission].” When he asked the crowds what to do with Sohrabuddin, the crowd responded feverishly, “Kill him! Kill him!”
Chouhan asked an audience a similar rhetorical question in Bhopal and got the same blood-thirsty answer from his audience. This is why I feel caught in a time warp in Bhopal, swept back to a dangerously and deliberately divided Ahmedabad a dozen years earlier.

In Ahmedabad then, as in Bhopal (and indeed much of the nation) now, raising questions about whether these killings of alleged terrorists were actually acts of self-defence by the police or cold-blooded murder were and are seen as disloyal and unpatriotic acts. Some suggest that such scepticism reeks of sympathy with terrorists and their ideologies. This stigmatisation has suppressed a great part of public interrogation and scrutiny. But some human rights defenders persisted in Gujarat, and unexpected heroes emerged from outside but also within the criminal justice system.

Junior magistrate SP Tamang established with impeccable and irrefutable evidence and arguments that 19-year-old Ishrat Jahan’s killing in 2004 was in cold blood. And brave and fair investigations by officers such as Satish Verma and Rajnish Rai led to the arrest of their own colleagues in uniform, and ultimately even Home Minister Amit Shah. (It is another matter that after the change in government at the Centre, most of these criminal cases against the ex-minister and policemen have been closed and the officers have been released, reinstated and promoted).
 

The impossible

The official versions of the Sohrabuddin, Kausar Bi, Ishrat Jahan and Tulsiram Prajapati encounter killings were riddled with huge holes that were exposed through public vigilance and by diligent officials. But the story of the Bhopal jailbreak and subsequent killings are even more audacious in their improbability. There are not just wide holes in the story, the story is entirely one wide hole.

Challenging our credulity to its limits, the Madhya Pradesh home minister wishes that we believe that highest-security jail locks were broken by keys fashioned out of tooth brushes and knives out of spoons, and tall walls were crossed by tying together bedsheets, which are never issued to prisoners. Lawyer Parvez Alam asks pertinently how the prisoners managed to make 10 separate keys (eight for the individual cells they were locked in and one each for the two wards) out of toothbrushes. And even if they did it, where did they get tools and equipment to do this?

Once out of their cells, according to the official version, they brutally killed one of the prison guards patrolling the courtyard with a knife fashioned out of their steel plates. They then scaled one 25-foot wall and the final 35-foot prison wall by constructing a ladder out of 35 bedsheets, with wooden planks as rungs. The state government further claims that just that night, all the numerous 360-degree cameras inside the prison, including in the terror cells, were not working or disabled and the prison was shockingly understaffed.

For the defence of India’s constitutional values, it is imperative that human rights defenders as well as upright women and men in the police and courts fight resolutely to expose the truth about both the alleged jailbreak and the encounter killings on a hilltop near Bhopal. A group of nine young concerned people, many of them alumni of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, did just that. They visited Bhopal and on November 30, a month after the killings, released a highly damning and detailed fact-finding report that further illuminates the utter improbability of the state government’s claims.

The fact-finders were unsurprisingly not allowed inside the prison. But instead, they interviewed a jail undertrial, Kabir (name changed), who had been released on bail a week earlier. He was housed in the same B Wing of the prison where all the eight men who were killed had been detained. He testified that each of the eight slain men was housed in separate solitary rooms in the most highly secured terror cell. The terror cell is in the centre of the jail with three layers of boundary walls – like a box in a box in a box – and closely monitored by cameras and security officers.

Kabir testified that “in order to have escaped from the prison, each of the inmates would have had to unlock their own individual cells, then unlock the door of their ward, then overpower the six jaagiyas (guards assigned to keep an eye all night on the terror wards) as well as the two guards patrolling the terror cell, and evade detection by anyone from the headquarter office, which is right opposite the terror cell”.

This, he declared, was next to impossible because with the slightest noise, the entire system of guards, alarms and other security measures would get activated. “Even if they break the terror cell, kill all the jaagiyas and the two security guards, they would then have to scale the 25-foot wall of the B wing,” he said. “It is not possible to cross it with clothes or blankets. Now, even if they did cross that wall, they would land right in the centre of B-ward prison compound facing the medical ward inmates and guards, leaving no possibility of remaining undetected. After this, if they reach the compound wall without being seen by any guard or prison official, they would have to then climb the 35-foot wall of the Bhopal Central Jail. After this, they would have to cross the third wall, which is an external wall, again undetected by any officials.”

Kabir told the fact-finding team, “I can challenge, that if all security and surveillance is removed and an Olympian is asked to cross the wall, he would still fail. The jail can’t be broken.”
 

Tell-tale videos

I visited the hilltop that was the site of the encounter and was shocked at first to find that it had not even been cordoned off. No police personnel were visible anywhere. Journalists and curious villagers were walking over the smudges of blood on the rocks and the police chalk markings of where the corpses lay. It was evident that the state wished for the destruction of all evidence. Contrary to protocol, the post-mortem forensic investigation of the bodies was also not done in the presence of a judicial magistrate. The large rock where the men were killed by the police ended in a cliff edge so steep that if the men had been surrounded by the police, they would have had nowhere to run except to their death.

The amateur videos and audios that have surfaced suggest that they wanted to surrender, that they were deliberately killed at close range. And the forensic reports that most wounds were above their waists add to the apprehension that the police killed them instead of capturing them alive. The chief of the state police’s anti-terrorism squad admits now that the slain men had no firearms. Therefore, there is no basis to believe they were killed in self-defence by a force left with no options.

The fact-finding team described the two videos (taken from different angles). One showed policemen “shooting an already collapsed body of one of the accused victim. In one video, the firing has been done from a very close range, to an already dead (or half dead) body. Voices can be clearly heard saying ‘hit him in the chest. Finish him,***** (abusive words)’. In another video of the same incident, we see more than one bullet (at least two) being fired at the already collapsed body. Bodies of other deceased are lying very close to each other. Earlier in the video, one policeman is shown recovering a shining sharp weapon resembling a chopper knife from the waist of one of the deceased.”
It went on:
 

“The deceased [all eight] are lying very close to each other, wearing clean clothes [almost brand new] fitting perfectly the body sizes of the deceased, their faces [all eight] are clean shaved. [They] are wearing watches, belts and very clean shoes. In another video, five men standing atop the cliff can be seen raising their hands. The video is shot from a point very close to where the police personnel are standing in the valley. They can be heard saying loudly on the walkie talkie, ‘We can see five people, they want to talk. Three are running, one is leaping’.”
 

The videos raise many disturbing questions, elaborated carefully in the fact-finding committee’s report. Where did the accused men acquire the clean clothes, watches and shoes that they were wearing, which undertrials are not issued or allowed to wear? If there were handlers who provided them with all of this, who were these handlers and why has there been no effort to get hold of them? If they could organise clothes, shoes and watches, why wouldn’t the handlers arrange vehicles for them to escape as well? Why did the men stay together after escaping, instead of dispersing into ones and twos in different directions, by which strategy finding them could possibly have become as difficult as searching for needles in a haystack? The village near where they were shot dead is well populated. To reach it from the Bhopal Central Jail, the fugitives would have had to cross three highways. Why would those fleeing the law choose to cross three highways and then climb a cliff, thereby making themselves visible to the entire village?

The team also pointed to the fact that the bodies lay so close to each other. If all the accused were standing next to each other, the greater possibility is that of them offering to surrender, rather than being locked in a bloody gun battle as claimed by the police (one in which no policemen were injured). The fact-finding team also saw videos of the bodies shot by the family members of the dead men – they showed over 25 bullet wounds on the bodies but hardly any in the lower parts. Mostly, the shooting was systematically focussed above their waists. A few bullet marks were found on the back of their skulls. The bullets seemed to have pierced the body and left big holes, suggesting they were fired at close range.
 

Being a patriot

There can, therefore, be little doubt that the intention of the police was to kill the men, not to capture them alive. Nothing justifies cold-blooded killings, legally or morally, even if the men were terrorists, or had escaped from jail and killed a guard. They should have been captured and made to face the majesty of the law. The policemen who killed the eight men have committed brazen cold-blooded murder in uniform. The law demands that they be arrested and face trial. But this is highly unlikely to happen.

“We should stop this habit of raising doubts and questioning the authorities and police,” Union Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju declared. “This is not a good culture.”

Chief Minister Shivraj Chouhan agreed, pronouncing that the “government and the public and the nation are foremost”. He appealed “to stop playing dirty politics”, adding, “Patriotism is important.”

In moments like this, it is worthy to recall the counsel of American historian and activist Howard Zinn. He reminded us that patriotism is not “blind obedience to government… but rather as love of one’s country, one’s fellow citizens (all over the world), as loyalty to the principles of justice and democracy”. Patriotism is not standing up when the national anthem is played, even less beating up people who do not stand. Patriotism is not blind obedience to government. Patriotism would require us to disobey our government, when it violates those principles. Yes, patriotism especially in moments like this, is our highest public obligation.

This article first published on Scroll.in and republished with Authors permission.

This article was first published on Indian Express, re-published with authors permission