Why do not we initiate a Uniform Religion Code (URC), that will ensure human justice, which is pre-requisite of gender justice?

 
 
 
Before the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power, there was no indication in the election campaign of the Prime Ministerial candidate—Narendra Modi– that the Muslim question that remained its agenda for long will be brought into play in so many ways after coming to power.
 
Within no time, after t the Party came to power Article 370, resettlement of Kashmiri pundits back in Kashmir and the beef food bogey became major issues. The cow protection issue has haunted the Muslims for decades, now. The beef ban in many BJP ruled states put them not only in a permanent fear of food security, but many of them actually lost livelihoods, small businesses around cattle, meat, leather and bone sales and purchases. Unemployment among them has gone up to unknown heights. The lynching of Akhlaq in Uttar Pradesh created a frightening reality situation for Muslims all over India.

I have been working in the Maulana Azad National Urdu University(MANUU), Hyderabad, for about six years, now. Here Muslim men and women constitute the main body of teaching faculty, non teaching staff and student community, as the Urdu language has been only nurtured by Muslims after independence. Even in the Nizam ruled region, where persons from every other community learnt Urdu, the others no longer hold on to Urdu.
 
The Reddy and Velama Zamindars who used to read and write in Urdu have given up on this rich language. From around this region, it is only Muslims who have sustained, what they call the Urdu Zuban. So my interaction in this university is with the Urdu speaking Muslim community.

The Muslim men and women who work in this university live with diverse dress codes, life styles, hair styles. There are women who wear modern dress, maintain other modes of body style and drive their own cars. Even in a large university like Osmania University I have not seen so many women driving their own cars, and working so late into the night. But they do that in MANUU. A woman professor worked as registrar. A burkha clad woman professor worked as provost of the hostels of both boys and girls for a long time. She has also contested the elections for the presidentship of MANUUTA.
 
In Osmania where there are more women teachers who are mainly Hindu, there was never one who took up the job of provost, as it involves, at times, late night duty. In the neighbouring Hyderabad Central University there are more women staff members (mainly from upper castes), some even educated abroad. But no woman has ever taken up that job.

Some Muslim girl students in MANUU even cover their whole face, except eyes, but they study well. There are men who always live in their traditional dress and have beards, wear the sherwani, pyjama and so on. I know two very conservative looking persons—one woman and a man—but their expertise in computer operation is un-matched. There are also Muslim men who wear more modern dresses than men of other communities. I tried to find out whether there are any polygamous men among teaching and non-teaching men. Hardly anybody. But I know that there are divorced women. But they remain quite confident and professional.

Before the BJP came to power the discussion on the campus used to be around the educational advancement/development of the Muslim community, their employment and the kind of poverty that Muslims people suffer from. That was also the period in which Sachar Committee Report was in every Muslim intellectual’s—man or woman—mind.
 
Now I see only more fear and silence among them. Why?

The Kashmir crisis has deepened after the election. Blood is flowing there on an everyday basis. After the Uri incident every Muslim began to be suspected he/she, of being a Pakistan agent. After the ‘surgical strikes operation’, local celebrations were not because the terrorist dens on the border had been attacked; in almost every city and locality the celebrations had turned inward, against every Indian Muslim.

‘They have been taught a lesson’ was the prevailing mood. This message was sent quite conspicuously and consciously by the sweet distributing squads.

The sudden discovery that every Muslim woman was or is a victim of ‘Triple Talaq’ and the feigned urgency to bring about a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) to save Muslim women has scared the community even more. The case of one Muslim woman pending in the Supreme Court has been highlighted and being projected as if every Muslim woman is or has been facing Triple Talaq and that the UCC is the solution. It is not insignificant that this discourse has become dominant after the BJP came to power

Now the discussion among the community,  when they speak in small groups, lunch meetings, ‘chai pe churcha’ is not about their ‘Vikas’ but about their ‘Fear’. The women teachers and non-teachers I talk to say that these are not our major problems. They say ’Our major problem are education in English and Urdu, jobs in the market. They further say ‘safety in the general society not just in the Muslim society’ is our need or requirement.

I see many of them feeling lost in the present situation. They are lost because Lalitha Kumaramangalam, Chairperson of National Women’s Commission and all other ruling Hindu women keep telling the nation that they are worried about the divorced Muslim women more than the Dalit women getting raped on a daily basis. They are also not at all worried about the young and old Hindu widows living a pre-Rajarammohan Roy life in a rat hole called Brindavan.

Every Muslim man feels that the Hindutva brigade treats them as if they are the soldiers on the other side of LOC fighting for Pakistan. Why has the situation changed so significantly after 2014 elections and so drastically? In the leading TV shops (shows) every Muslim man is setereotyped and shown as buying—particularly in some English TV shops—bombs and guns. Every Muslim woman is selling Talaq certificate and begging for protection from her cruel husband?
 
Why were not these the images of a reality before the 2014 elections? Do Muslim women of India need the Hindu Vijaya Mallyas and Christian Donald Trumps to protect them from Triple Talaqs and bad husband?

There is another campaign at large during the morning walks, lazy chai shops or Yoga training centers that the Hindutva brigade’s old and young men are on the walk the talk —Islam has destroyed Bharat. Now many of them use the Muslim designated name of the nation—‘Hindustan’ in danger. Unfortunately in all Muslim meetings this is the name they also use for this nation without knowing that this can be a source of the amendment to the Constitution that its existing name India—the Bharat, should be changed to Hindustan.

For decades Muslim politicians and intellectuals were self-destructive and now appear to have they lost all courage to combat these forces who are actually on a mission of ‘’khoon pe charcha’’. The Muslim intellectuals for long were busy with secular “coffee pe churcha” when their community was facing the music of ‘khoon pe churcha”. They never even wanted to talk about abolition of Untouchability, or permanent widowhood in Hindu society. They thought that it would hurt the Hindu sentiments.

It was actually the Muslim Irani hotels that initiated the culture of common drinking and eating culture in India. Hyderabad would provide you any number of examples where the Brahmin Bhojan Coffee hotels did not allow anybody except the Brahmins to eat and drink inside. In the spiritual domain the Muslim Durghas allowed all castes to touch and worship when no Hindu temple was allowing the Dalits and OBCs.
 
Even now they do not want to make a law that all spiritual places—Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Sikh—to ban caste practices.
 
Why do not we initiate a Uniform Religion Code (URC), that will ensure human justice, which is pre-requisite of gender justice?

The post BJP’s ‘Concern’ with Muslim Women, Some Questions appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Much more than an icon

Tackling the historical denial of freedom and expression

If we rework Shankar’s cartoon with, say, Mahatma Gandhi riding a bullock cart of democracy in his dwija (twice-born, or upper-caste) dress and Jawaharlal Nehru standing in his sanatan (upper-caste Hindu) pandit’s dress, a thread across his body, and Babasaheb Ambedkar in his suit, unhitching that cart, would Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar – former NCERT advisers – have included that cartoon for a lesson in democracy? I am sure they would not.

In 1949 when Shankar drew that cartoon – wherein Ambedkar sits with a whip on a snail that is the Constitution and Nehru stands behind, also with a whip in his hand, while the masses watch the fun – Ambedkar’s role as chairman of the drafting committee had still not been appreciated by the Indian elite. The political elite in particular were cursing him. He also did not have high standing among the people at large. Only a very few educated Dalits treated him as their worthy representative.

After Ambedkar joined Nehru’s cabinet, he was also seen as one who compromised himself for power. After he resigned from the cabinet in 1951 and after he embraced Buddhism five years later, his image and status transformed quite dramatically. And after the Mandal movement of 1990, Ambedkar’s stature assumed messianic proportions. The present Ambedkar is not a negotiator with Nehru or Gandhi. Rather, as a messiah of the large army of the oppressed people of this country, he is quite different from Gandhi and Nehru. While picking this cartoon from Shankar’s archives for the Class XI political science textbook, the editors should have understood this phenomenal change in perception, in the media, of the Dalit bahujan (majority).

Early in May, Dalit MPs cutting across party lines took up a cultural issue that related to the dignity and status of the most oppressed community and their icon. Human resource development minister Kapil Sibal did the right thing by apologising over the matter and promising immediate withdrawal of the textbook that carries the controversial cartoon.

Questions like why this issue is being raked up seven years after the book’s publication or why this cartoon is being attacked 63 years after it was drawn need to be answered with sound reasoning and a proper understanding of the level of consciousness of the Dalit leadership itself. Do these questions not sound like yet another question, namely why make an issue of untouchability and caste, as they have, after all, been practised for 3,000 years? The answer lies in the changing consciousness as also the possible avenues that are opening up for fighting the matter out. If Ambedkar had not fought for the education of the lower castes as also for reservation in politics and jobs, there would not have been any Dalits in Parliament. Had it not been so, nobody would have asked any questions even if Ambedkar’s name was removed from Indian history altogether.

The consciousness of Mr Yadav and Mr Palshikar is couched in Lohiaite-Marxist-Gandhian politics which refuses to recognise the far greater transformative status of Ambedkar. In the intellectual realm, Mr Yadav represents a typical, symptomatic socialist transformation of Lohia – similar to what Mulayam Singh Yadav and Lalu Prasad Yadav do in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Somehow they are very uncomfortable with Ambedkar. This is reflected in the selection of this cartoon in the 21st century – a time when Ambedkar has overtaken Gandhi, Nehru and Lohia in stature. What Mr Yadav and Mr Palshikar refuse to recognise is that Ambedkar was not just a writer of the Indian Constitution, not just a nationalist leader and not just a theoretician; he was a prophetic figure who revived Buddhism which was driven out of India by a whole range of social forces over a period of several centuries. Thus in every Buddha Vihara today he sits alongside Buddha.

The icon of the oppressed community cannot be compared with a god or goddess of the oppressors. Nor can the protest against the Ambedkar cartoon be seen on a par with the Hindutva protest against the painting of Goddess Saraswati by MF Husain. The May 11 protest in Parliament by Dalit MPs to remove the derogatory Ambedkar cartoon from the NCERT’s political science textbook is a demand that came from those representing the oppressed masses. This is the first ever major fight for the cultural transformation of Indian society. Earlier, Dalits were not seen as a people who could fight for their own cultural identity. They were seen as a people who fight for higher wages, reservation and scholarships. Shankar Pillai’s cartoons were friendly jokes for the upper-caste English-educated elite of the post-independence ruling class but certainly not for the Dalit/OBC (other backward classes)/Adivasi population.

Cartoons also carry with them the politics and culture of those who drew them. In fact, no cartoon is free from politics and caste/class bias. This is where the need arises for the emergence of a new brand of cartoonists from among the deprived sections, if only to induct Dalit culture into the realm of cartoons. Caste bias operates not only in religion, politics and economics but also in art, music and dance. Political scientists Mr Yadav and Mr Palshikar know this only too well.

When NCERT textbooks were written by right-wing historians and political scientists, they were criticised by left-wing historians, political scientists and sociologists. Later, the left-wing secular academics undertook a rewriting of the textbooks. However, the problem with secular, democratic social scientists is that they are not caste-sensitive. They also do not include enough caste-sensitive Dalit-bahujan social scientists. Today any discussion on caste is seen as undemocratic; and Mr Yadav and Mr Palshikar thought Nehru belonged to the fast track democratic school whereas Ambedkar drove snail-paced Constitution drafting! This kind of senseless handling of democratic casteism must be checkmated and that is precisely what happened in the Indian Parliament on May 11.

One way to train our children in ideological politics is by making use of school textbooks. When the National Democratic Alliance was in power, it prepared school textbooks with an overdose of Hindutva ideology. Later on, the United Progressive Alliance government appointed a well-known educationist, Prof Krishna Kumar, as director of the NCERT. The textbooks that have sparked a controversy now were prepared under his directorship. By and large, the new team prepared much better schoolbooks. But the problem was that the left, secular and socialist social scientists never bothered to examine the Indian caste system. Most of these men treat Ambedkar simply as one of the nationalist leaders. They also do not seriously examine Ambedkar’s socio-spiritual status and the deep emotions of the oppressed masses that were built around his Buddhist spiritual existence. It is this status that is likely to lead to many self-assertive struggles by the Dalits.

A national-level response to any desecration of Ambedkar’s statues and a similar response to remove a cartoon that depicted him in a derogatory manner are all part of an effort to put him on a different liberationist level from what an ordinary political scientist could comprehend. All the same, it is important that one respects in all humility the decision of Parliament. It is also important that one does not demonstrate an intellectual ‘Annagiri’ against Parliament. Parliament is supreme and can decide everything in this country.

This article was published in The Asian Age on May 22, 2012; www.asianage.com

Archived from Communalism Combat, June 2012. Year 18, No.166 – Controversy.

The post Cartoons and more appeared first on SabrangIndia.