First Babri, now Dadri

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, October 11, 2015

• PTI

 

First there was Babri; now there is Dadri. And in between, Godhra. Since 1992 and the demolition of the Babri Masjid by Hindutva fanatics, India has moved steadily and inexorably into becoming an intolerant country where the majority rules and minorities live in fear. That process has hit an important marker, one we will not forget, with Dadri, where Mohammed Akhlaq was brutally bludgeoned to death on the mere suspicion that he had beef in his house.

On his recent visit to Silicon Valley, the Prime Minister tried to sell the world the promise of a Digital India and declared that the 21st Century would be India’s. That is a distant dream; the hate politics that exemplifies the murder of Akhlaq is the current reality. And for this, the responsibility lies not only with fringe groups but equally with a government and a ruling party that has legitimised interference in all aspects of our lives by promoting a culture of bans and prohibition. It has claimed the right to decide what we eat, what we wear, what we read, what we view, who we meet, who we marry, who we worship and ultimately what we think.

If senior Bharatiya Janata Party functionaries can pass off Mohammed Akhlaq’s cold-blooded murder as an “accident” and an “unfortunate incident”, the same justification will be used when women are sexually assaulted for crossing the moral line determined by people with the same mind set as those who killed Akhlaq. Once you breed this type of suspicion and hatred, and justify the violence of your actions, no woman or man who thinks or acts differently is safe. Is this the India we want?

We might think that such things happen more frequently in the communal cauldron of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. But look south. Look closely at what is happening in a State like Karnataka. For decades there was peace. Yet, the pace of communalisation has picked up and accelerated in the last decade to the point that the district of Dakshina Kannada, in which the cosmopolitan city of Mangaluru is located, has become the epicentre of communal tension.

The fallout of this is felt most by women who have become the targets of a twisted form of moral policing. In a district where 67 per cent are Hindus, 24 per cent Muslims and 8 per cent Christians, where the sex ratio is skewed in favour of women (1,020) unlike in the rest of the country, where female literacy is as high as 91 per cent, where a human development indicator like the infant mortality rate is substantially above the national average, young men and women are virtually forbidden from hanging out together. If they take the risk, they might have hell to pay.

Recent reports speak of random attacks on young people hanging out at malls, going to restaurants or going on a college trip in a so-called “mixed group”. If Hindu girls are found with Muslim boys, the latter are threatened and even beaten up while the former are warned. If girls, regardless of religion are found drinking alcohol, they are dragged out and shamed, as was done in the attack on a pub in 2009. If young men and women organise a private party, that too is targeted by moral vigilantes as happened in 2012 when one such birthday bash was broken up and the entire incident televised.

So are we going forwards, or steadily backwards? And how will this generation of young women, educated, looking forward to careers, having access to information and communication through the Internet, survive in a world where every step they take is watched? In Mangaluru, a city with a huge population of young people thronging the scores of high quality educational institutions, such an atmosphere must be stifling, hardly conducive to learning or creativity.

Today these are stories from Mangaluru; tomorrow they will happen elsewhere in India. In fact, they are happening but are not always reported.

Why should one worry about the response, or rather the lack of it, by the Central government to this growing culture of intolerance and violence? After all, law and order is a state subject and in the case of the Dadri murder, the State government of U.P. has intervened. But the combination of a silent Prime Minister and an unrestrained, insensitive and unapologetic Culture Minister (who readily expressed his regressive views on what women can and cannot do), adds up to a virtual endorsement of such actions.

Dadri is not a random incident; it is part of a larger picture that is emerging of the kind of India some people want to make. This is not the India envisioned by those who fought for its independence from the British. In 1947, we looked forward to a democratic, secular, plural India, where all religions are equal, where women have rights, where freedom of expression is guaranteed. Join the dots and you can see clearly that the idea of India that is now being pushed envisions a monoculture where you are given no choice but to conform.

And again... And again...

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, August 5, 2012

When we need more than just strong laws... Photo: Mohammed Yousuf

Yesterday, Guwahati. Today, Mangalore. Tomorrow, where else?

The outrage over the Guwahati incident has done nothing to stem the flow of similar incidents being reported from across the country. The naming and shaming of the perpetrators of the crime, the fact that the police managed to catch them and arrest them appears to have made little difference. On the contrary, it is almost as if the repeated footage from Guwahati played on television channels has encouraged others to do the same.

We must not forget that while the media went into over-drive on the Guwahati case, in another part of Assam, a young girl who went out to collect firewood was “molested” by Army jawans. She was saved when villagers heard her cries for help. How many more such cases take place each day in other parts of the troubled Northeast?

In action again

Almost matching Guwahati was what happened in Mangalore. We should not be surprised. In 2009, the self-appointed guardians of morality, the Sri Ram Sene, set about dragging women out of a pub, pulling their hair, hitting them — and all of this in full view of television cameras. On July 28, a mob belonging to the Hindu Jagaran Vedike decided that a group of boys and girls enjoying a birthday party were attending a “rave” event. Do they know what is a “rave”? Certainly not. But definitions do not matter because these upholders of public morality decided that what was happening was “immoral”.

Armed with cameras from local television channels, the men barged into the venue of the party, dragged, hit and molested the women, punched and hit the men, including the birthday boy, and made sure every minute was captured on film. There is a pathetic shot of several girls cowering on a bed, trying to cover their faces and bodies with pillows while the cameras continue to film. Even after the police intervened, the cameras did not switch off and kept trying to literally “uncover” the women as they left.

Still in the South, at Bhoovanapadu beach, a popular tourist spot in Srikakulam district, Andhra Pradesh, a gang of five young men pounced on a couple seeking a private moment. The man was beaten up while the woman, a 20-year-old college girl had her clothes ripped off. According to the police, the men had pinned her to the ground, had taken off her gold ornaments and were getting ready to record what would follow on their mobile phones when the police arrived.

In all these cases, the victims are deemed “immoral” while the attackers believe they are the torchbearers of decency and morality. We keep hearing this repeatedly, even from those who should know the law, given that they are the lawmakers. Yet recently, when a man at a Kolkata railway station attacked a girl returning from tuition classes, the Trinamool MP Chiranjit Chakroborty had this to say about the crime: “Eve-teasing is a very old thing. It has been going on for ages. One of the reasons behind the increase in incidents of eve-teasing is short dresses and short skirts worn by women. This in turn instigates men.” Really? “Eve-teasing?” Has no one informed the honourable MP that there is no such word?

The horror stories do not end. In Mandya, Karnataka, a 19-year-old garment worker was thrown out of a moving train when she tried to resist a gang of men who were harassing her. She is now in a hospital with multiple injuries, having fallen 25 feet from the train onto a rocky riverbed. She said none of the other women in the compartment intervened even though they saw the men harassing her, offering her money for sex.

Not enough

Even as these attacks on women were being reported from different parts of the country, the cabinet has approved the Criminal Law Amendment Bill that suggests changes in a whole range of laws that have a direct impact on women. Space does not permit a detailed discussion on the changes contemplated. But suffice it to say that while the law must be strengthened, it will not work as a deterrent unless the law-enforcing machinery actually enforces the law.

At the same time, the law-enforcers cannot become a moral police, literally giving a license to any other group that chooses to follow suit. The example of some in the Mumbai police is a particularly bad one in this regard and the outgoing Inspector General of Police in Mumbai has rightly emphasised that “enforcement of law is meant to uphold human rights.”

A new and stronger law will also fail so long as we allow and encourage a culture of impunity, where one group of people decides that it will enforce its own version of morality. In the long term, it is the Taliban-like actions of groups like the Hindu Jagaran Vedike, and the example they set, as well as the oxygen of publicity that the media appears to be granting them, that is cause for serious concern for the future. 

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