Ayodhya aftermath: Against all odds
Despite the multiplicity of powerful factors responsible for communalism, there are enough initiative to show how strong leadership and communication can prevent incidents from taking an ugly turn.
In every neighbourhood, there are always those who want to prevent communalism and others who seek to encourage it. A peace initiative will succeed if the former can take the leadeership role, gain the trust of their community and rapidly build bridges with similar leaders of the other communities. But this is not always easy or possible. Not surprisingly, several peace initiatives were undertaken and abandoned almost immediately. This happened in both the Vijay Nagar Housing Scheme in Surat and in Bombay’s Dharavi slum.
During the initial rioting in Dharavi, the Rashtriya Ekta Samiti (RES), a voluntary organisation led by Bhim Rashar, had created a very favourable impression among the slum-dwellers through its relief and rehabilitation work. But when tension heightened towards the end of December among the residents of Muslim Nagar, a Dharavi locality, they approached the RES to help form a peace committe, which would have representatives from all communities and ethnic groups.
Rashar suggested that as a sign of goodwill, Muslim Nagar residents should propose that everyone lay down their weapons. He immediately became the target of hostility. “Are you suggesting,” sneered one of the residents seeking his help, “that we surrender our arms and become sitting ducks for the Hindus?”
Rashar’s estrangement from the very people he was attempting to help highlights the problem of “outsiders” trying to organise neighbourhood attempts to resist communal violence. Initially, at least, it seems that attempts to keep the peace depend for success almost entirely on the neighbourhood’s internal leadership, resources and initiatives.
Though Rashar failed to form a peace committee in Muslim Nagar, former legislator D P Kamble, who lives in a cluster close to Dharavi, succeeded in organising the elders and the youth of his are – both Hindu and Muslim – to operate a regular system of keeping vigil. Shiraj, one of Kamble’s neighbours, commented, “We could trust Kamble because he lived in the area. Everyone was convinced he would not allow anything to happen, because his own house and safety were at stake.”
But a local leadership which can inspire confidence may not exist in a particular locality. The pahra system, which is operating efficiently in Bhagalpur, does not exist in Chandheri village, just 18 km away, though both places were rent by rioting in 1989. The seven Muslim families who live in Chandheri amidst 400 Hindu families are increasingly restive. Bibi Mustari, whose husband is a farm labourer, says with a shurg, “We are Mohammedans. We go to only those who are Mohammedans. That’s all.”
Interestingly, it is the Muslims of Chandheri, including those who have sought safety in nearby Muslim villages, who say that the pahra institution cannot be implemented in their village because there is too much distrust between the two communities.
Elderly Muhammad Ahmad, who is eager to return to Chandheri, says he is torn between his realisation that local “netas” have made him a refugee and what he sees as the desperate need for outside intervention. But will that intervention ever come? “I have asked the local MLA, Mahes Yadav, and the MP, Chunchun Yadav, to come. Maybe, they will one day,” he hoped.
If peace is to be maintained, the “walls” of a neighbourhood must be strong enough to withstand the powerful push of communalism, which mobilises people in a way that allows no dissent. No one could escape, for instance, the maha arti ceremonies which the Shiv Sena organised on most Bombay thoroughfares. Pedestrians were required to stop and those trying to pass by the maha arti were questioned menacingly, “Hindu nahin hai, kya (Are you not a Hindu)?”
Neighbourhood peace initiatives thus face the twin challenges of sheer survival on one hand and of resisting powerful and totalitarian ideologies on the other. The fact that even some initiatives can survive and succeed despite the odds they face shows their inherent potential. Rampant communalism can and must be fought through neighbourhood initiatives because, in the final analysis, the ultimate aim of communalism is to destory the neighbourhood itself and replace it with ghettos of warring communities.
The economy factor
According to Ghanshyam Shah, director of the Centre for Social Studies in Surat, it is a “simplistic notion” that economic growth can ensure communal harmony. “People can share economic fruits or, equally, fight over them,” he argues. “As yet, there is little definitive information about how sections of people can resist enveloping communalism.”
Delhi University historian Gyanendra Pandey points out, “The battle against communalism is a struggle to establish a new society and, therefore, cannot be delinked from the task of redefining nationalism.” As such, he is opposed to “any ideology or faith that forces people to become mere Indians, devoid of any content from their real lives and sealed from all social meaning, social bases and social consequences.”
His point is developed by Ashish Nandy of the Centre for Studies in Developing Societies in Delhi, who dismisses “modern-minded secularism” because he contends it does not take into account heterogeneous local traditions and identities and “indeed utilises them fully against communalism.”
Several social scientists are agreed that in the short run, maintaining and preserving “local lines of communication” become imperative if localities and neighbourhoods wish to protect themselves from communal invasions.
The truth of this contention was borned out in Bhagalpur, when miscreants removed a Hanuman idol from a secluded patch of land in the Hindu-dominated Parbatti area and then spread rumours that Muslims from the nearby Tatarpur area had committed the sacrilege. But in the ensuing dialogue, the testimony of the pahra patrols in the two localities proved that no such transgression had occurred.
When communication between communities in a neighbourhood breaks down, the effect on all the residents is traumatic. In Delhi’s Seelampur area, which also went up in flames in the post-Ayodhya period, Hindus merely shrug off reports of the burning down of Muslim homes near the local Khajurwali mosque. But a Muslim householder literally dragged a Down To Eath reporter to her home that had been burned down and screamed, “Now, go and tell them what you have seen.”
Communalism in Seelampur has become even more crystallised with the increased social amorphousness of the neighbourhood. Some of the Hindus there, who had sheltered Muslims in the past, now say they would like them to go away. Says Tija Devi, “Friends and relatives of our Muslim neighbours come to the gali (lane) and abuse us. I have become afraid of my Muslim neighbours. They have arms and ammunitions in their houses.”
The obvious need is to develop adequate insights into the social, political, economic and cultural processes that allow men and women in a neighbourhood who share living spaces and work places to maintain their differences on local and national issues. There is an urgent need to discover participatory processes that recognise these differences as genuine, legitimate and acceptable.
Accepting differences
The process of communalisation is clearly a vicious attempt to homogenise the multiple cultures of India and subject them to irrevocable decisions on all aspects of their personal and public lives. Hence, the need for alternative processes that accord equal respect to all cultures and communities becomes imminent. Until these alternatives are found, the efforts of neighbourhoods to protect themselves against communalism will continue to be an unending and debilitating war. But they deserve all the support they can get.
In the current round of communal violence, the fact that some people came together and successfully withstood the onslaught, regardless of the fragility of the forms of of solidarity they evolved, must be recognised as worth emulation.
The actions of the savage mob that attacked the Dhobiatala Muslim Camp in Calcutta also caused 550 Hindu families in the same locality to flee along with Muslim families. For all the inhabitants of Dhobiatala, huddled together in a makeshift camp, it was a time of sharing. One of them, Mohammad Anees, recalled, “Whenever we had food, we shared with the Hindus. When we had none, we shared our helplessness.”
