Love in the time of hate

If a Hindu girl dares choose a groom outside the religion, she risks being kidnapped by the Bajrang Dal.

DIONNE BUNSHA

When childhood sweethearts Reema and Anthony eloped and ran away from Ahmedabad to Mumbai, they hoped to fade into the sunset. But the local Bajrang Dal in their neighbourhood did their best to thwart a happy ending.

Reema’s conservative family roped in Bajrang Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) leaders to get back their daughter. They planned to trap the couple. Reema’s mother met Anthony’s parents and said all was forgiven. She told his parents to ask them to come home. But the couple didn’t go back. So, she got a search warrant and made them return to Gujarat to confront the court.

It was a set up. Everything went against the couple: the police were in the hands of their persecutors. The magistrate kept delaying their hearings, without giving them a chance to speak. Bajrang Dal goons gathered outside the court everyday to intimidate them. They beat up Anthony, pushed Reema (who was pregnant) on the ground, grabbed her and put her into their car. Anthony rushed to the magistrate but he refused to help. People heard him shouting for help and stopped the car.

Soon they all were in the police station. There, the police superintendent convinced them to let Reema stay in her mother’s house for the night to ensure their safety. But that night, her family packed her off to her uncle’s house in Rajasthan. The uncle too is a Bajrang Dal leader.

From then on, her life was in their hands. They made Reema sign a statement saying that she was forced to marry Anthony. Then, they took her to an abortion clinic in Himmatnagar, Gujarat. Reema was put up in a farmhouse in Pirana where many other girls abducted from their husbands by the Bajrang Dal were also kept in captivity. When they found out that she sneaked a call to Anthony, they kept her in a Bajrang Dal leader’s house. She stayed there with even more girls who had been kidnapped.

Next, they arranged to get her married. They forced her to call Anthony’s house and tell them that she wants a divorce. But he refused. That’s when the death threats began. He fled to Mumbai. Soon after, they arranged Reema’s wedding in her uncle’s factory in Naroda. Three other girls living with her were also married off at the same time. Reema explained the entire story to her new husband. She called Anthony, hitched a ride on the highway, met him in Baroda and went back with him to Mumbai.

Today Reema and Anthony still live in exile. They are refugees from a culture of intolerance. The forced separation of these two people is symbolic of the larger separation of communities that Hindutva aims at. This mindset is most prevalent in Gujarat – the Hindutva Laboratory. Gujarat has the best network of local Sangh cadre working in every part of the state. Methods of mobilisation vary, depending on whether it is an Adivasi area, an industrial city or a Patel-dominated village. But the basic focus is to keep people apart, whether by stirring trouble or prejudice. For them, Hindu unity means the suppression of others. Minorities can live only if they accept the might of the majority. And the twain should never meet. If they do, they face the consequences Reema and Anthony did.

The divide has widened due to ghettoisation of big cities like Ahmedabad and Baroda. Muslims are increasingly seeking safety in numbers. People refuse to sell them houses in ‘Hindu’ areas. Unwanted anywhere outside their own community, Muslims tend to cluster together. There are a few large Muslim pockets in each big city – referred to as ‘mini Pakistans’, even by the Gujarati press. The term itself connotes that everyone living there is an ‘enemy’. A ‘border’ separates communities. With every riot, the walls at the border get higher and more protected with shards of glass and barbed wire.

Segregation has meant less communication. This makes it easier for Sangh Parivar organisations to propagate prejudices and stoke fear of ‘the other’. Even in elite areas, Muslims are not allowed to buy property. When a Muslims bought flats in a building in Paldi, a upmarket area of Ahmedabad, Bajrang Dal activists ransacked the building, threw a bomb which blasted the lift. The reason: Muslims cannot live in a ‘Hindu area’. Later, they forced Muslim owners to sell their flats at a pittance. In Ahmedabad’s walled city, the Bajrang Dal attacked traders who sell property to a Muslim.

Even schools are ghettoised. After the communal carnage, several schools asked Muslim students to leave. In Naroda Patiya, where some of the worst carnage occurred, children refused to go back to school after teachers made them sit separately. Many Muslim parents withdrew their children from good schools and admitted them to sub-standard schools in Muslim neighbourhoods, just because they felt that their children were safer in schools closer to home.

After the 2002 communal pogrom, even parts of rural Gujarat are ghettoised. Many refugees have been unable to return to their homes. They prefer to stay in nearby towns or villages with a relatively large Muslim population. They feel that isolation makes them easier targets. After hounding out Muslim residents, local Bajrang Dal units had proudly put up banners proclaiming them ‘Muslim free villages’.

Elderly Muslim residents who tried to return to their homes in Pavagadh, a village adjoining a religious site in Panchmahal were beaten up and chased out. Local leaders grabbed their shops en route to the temple and refused to let them return. Till today, Salim Sindhi is living in a tent in a relief camp. Even though he is the sarpanch of Kidiad village in Sabarkantha, north Gujarat. He had to sell off all his agricultural land. He will never return to his village. The killing may be over. But the injustices continue.

Every festival is dreaded, not celebrated. Festivals like Ganpati, Holi and the kite festival are often used as a spark points for violence. Recently on Moharram, Muslims in Gujarat decided not to take out tazia processions to avoid giving troublemakers any opportunity to stir up trouble. The VHP has also appropriated and organised several festivals like the Jagannath Rath Yatra in Ahmedabad. These are opportunities for people to be their boisterous best. Often that means shouting slogans or antagonising Muslims, with the intention of creating trouble. Then, blaming them for ‘attacking Hindus’.

Muslims living in Ahmedabad’s walled city send their women and children away on the day the procession passes through their area, while the men stay back to guard their homes. The Rath Yatra has often been a spark point for communal violence in Ahmedabad, including one of the worst massacres in 1969. The minute the Yatra passes out of their neighbourhood peacefully, Muslims hiding in their homes suddenly rush out to greet the police commissioner and thank him.

Since the mid-80s, the BJP’s Yatra politics has helped it gain support. Initially, the BJP supported the anti-reservation agitation by the upper castes. These agitations turned bloody and resulted in violent clashes right from 1980 to 1985. In 1985, Gujarat witnessed the most fierce caste riot that later turned communal. After that, the BJP changed its anti-Dalit stand to a communal stand, to get more supporters into the ‘Hindutva’ fold.

Its efforts to ‘unite Hindus’ mobilised lower castes. It also left a trail of destruction, even in rural and Adivasi areas, previously untouched by communal violence. During the Ram Janaki Dharma Yatra in 1987, Adivasis in Kheda and Sabarkantha districts participated in communal violence for the first time. Later in 1989, the Sangh garnered more support when its activists went from door-to-door, village-to-village, garnering support for the construction of the VHP’s dream of a Ram temple in Ayodhya during the Ram Shila Pujan Yatra. In 1990, L.K. Advani started his Rath Yatra. It sparked violence in 26 places that it passed through. In 1992, Surat and several other parts of Gujarat burned after the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Today, much of the BJP’s support is also due to the lack of any organised opposition. The Congress, which has traditionally cornered Adivasi and Dalit support, has put with a feeble fight.

At a time when workers were being laid off with the closure of textile mills in Ahmedabad, the Sangh gained from unemployed youth’s disillusionment with the Congress. They are the footsoldiers whom upper caste leaders of the Sangh use during any riot. But, upper and middle castes still control the party. In 1991, as many as 63 per cent of the state and district leaders were from upper or middle castes – Brahmin, Vania, Patidar or Rajput. (Ghanshyam Shah, The BJP and Backward Castes in Gujarat, from Caste and Democratic Politics in India)

Several powerful cults and sants like the Swaminarayan sect and Asaram Bapu also help the Sangh propagate regressive religiosity. At the local level, the VHP operates at the innocuous level of organising bhajan meetings. In tribal areas of south Gujarat, they organise ‘re-conversion’ ceremonies for Adivasis, giving them a new, Hindu identity. Through these religious gatherings, they recruit youth for their cadre, train them to use weapons and guns and teach them how to deal with riot situations or any ‘threat’ to their religion. It is because the network is so well-entrenched and organised that the 2002 pogrom against Muslims was so widespread and targeted. VHP activists had voters lists, weapons and well-trained cadre at the front.

Everyday work in the lowest shakha has made Hindutva all- pervasive in its laboratory. It’s a constant breeding of bigotry. Besides the summer camps, the Vanvasi Kalyan Kendra also runs several ashram schools in Adivasi areas. Moreover, the Sangh has managed to get its people into most important posts – lawyers, prosecutors, police, and doctors. Most primary school teachers are Sangh cadre. You can imagine the effect that has on their students. And on election results that they oversee.

The Sangh has managed to make several Hindus believe they are in a constant state of siege. That’s how the killings in the communal carnage were justified: “It was either them or us”. Minorities, who are less than 15 per cent of the population, are considered a dangerous threat. Religion has been used to create a false enemy. Irrational prejudices are repeated so often that they become a reality. It diverts attention from the real survival problems that people face. It gets people to believe that they ‘must do something to save their religion’. Nevermind that it may involve acts that the Gods would never approve of.

Reema and Anthony were hounded out because of the myth that ‘they are stealing our women’. Besides it stemming from a deep-seated delusion, it also emerges from a casteist bias, which the Sangh propagates. It’s their brand of Hinduism – Hindutva – that everyone must adhere to. For them, happy endings are only meant for those on the right side of the ‘border’.

Frontline, 13 – 26 March, 2004 Also available here