In this column we will be featuring the writings by award winning women journalists in India found in the collection of the book ‘Making News Breaking News Her Way. It is a publication by Tranquebar Press in association with Media Foundation, New Delhi which instituted the annual Chameli Devi Jain Award for an Outstanding Women Mediaperson in 1980.
Shikha Trivedy
Reporting the communal divide
[dropcap]2[/dropcap]012. ..Twenty years since the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and ten years since the Gujarat riots. .. Two events marked by murder and rape, scarring thousands of innocent men women and children. ..creating new enemies in the neighbourhood, across the country and outside.
This mistrust is most visible in Gujarat where I kept returning, through the last decade, to track the lives of families destroyed by the 2002 violence, and report on the growing divide between the state’s Hindu population which has shown little remorse for the bloodshed, and its Muslim citizens who are repeatedly told to forget the past and ‘move on’.
After 1992, Gujarat’s Muslims, concentrated mostly in urban areas, were forced to face their economic and social backwardness. They realised that only education could make them equal partners in the state’s growth story. In the following years, the community’s literacy levels rose to 73.5 per cent -marginally higher than the state average, and far ahead of the national average of 59.1 per cent for all Muslims.But 2002 changed everything. Opportunities for Muslim youth in the private sector began drying up even as Gujarat became more vibrant.
Over the years, I interviewed several businessmen and professionals who had risen to the top on the strength of their qualifications, but who now believe the environment has changed: boys from the community can only find work as salesmen in shopping malls and as waiters in MacDonald’s, even if they are better educated than the others. Compromise is the key to their survival in Gujarat. Today the focus of young Muslims and their parents has shifted from getting an ‘ education, to earning a decent living in the unorganised sector. That’s why school enrolment of all Muslim students between the ages of 6-14 has fallen sharply. According to the National Sample Survey, it is seven per cent lower than the state average for all children and occupies the fourteenth position countryWide.
A dangerous fallout of the Godhra riots has been the total separation of living spaces along religious lines. Ghettos always existed here, but never on the scale seen now. Today, children from one community are discouraged by the authorities and their guardians from joining institutions in areas dominated by the other. Ahmedabad is covered by a vast network of municipal schools for the Poorest of the poor, which could have provided space for bonding between children on both sides, but here students are separated by language. Hindus prefer Gujarati schools, while Muslims are increasingly sending their children to Urdu-medium schools to establish pan-Indian linkages.
What is frightening for the future is that Muslim boys and girls will grow up without Hindu friends. Hindu children will remain ignorant of Muslim culture. Even though some people on both sides of the border find life in ghettos suffocating, they are afraid of getting out. It is in Ahmedabad that Gandhiji had challenged social segregation by setting up the Sabarmati Ashram where families of different castes and religions lived together. Today his model has few takers.
Many of those who lost their lives in the Gujarat riots were Muslim migrants from across the country. And as survivors fled home with stories of unspeakable horror, the anger spread everywhere, slowly growing into a deadly enemy. Recruits to the cause were easy to find from a rapidly swelling army of frustrated and jobless young men ignored by ‘India Shining’. One bomb blast followed another, taking lives in Pune, Varanasi, Delhi, Jaipur, Mumbai, Ahmedabad.
Three interviews with fathers who lost their children in these terror attacks have stayed with me. One was a Hindu, another a Muslim and a third who did not believe in God.
On 7 March 2006, Devi Das Bijlani’s son, Harish, was killed when a powerful bomb exploded outside the Sankatmochan Temple in Varanasi. His grieving family wondered why Hanuman, the presiding deity at Sankatmochan, had failed to protect him. But his father thought differently. Devi Das Bijlani who runs a small photo studio in the heart of the city told me that he did not believe in God. The only altar he has prayed at was of truth. And his truth told him that if the Babri Masjid had not been demolished in 1992, his beloved son would have still been alive.
At the time, Bijlani was convinced this was only the beginning. ‘When you harass and humiliate someone so much that it becomes unbearable, then -as Acharya Rajneesh has said -the person will either become a sanyasi or a fighter. It’s the same situation today. There are two communities in the country. One has always been at the receiving end of the system, so it’s natural for some elements in it to seek revenge, to commit crimes.’
Ramesh’s daughter, Nandini, was one of the 187 people killed in the Mumbai local train bombings in 2006. Nandini was on her way to office to a new job she was excited about and her father proud of.
Ramesh blamed politicians for not providing adequate security to the people of Mumbai. They were too busy making money, he said. Naik also believed that secularism was a curse which prevented terror suspects from being hanged. ‘It could have stopped the killers who took my daughter from me.’ The only concession he was willing to make to Indian Muslims was that the brain behind these terror attacks were outsiders. A view which was shared by Liaqat All, a trader of precious stones inJaipur, who lost all three daughters when a bomb went off in the market where they were shopping. But, mingled with the pain in his voice was fear for his neighbours, friends and the whole community.
Bomb blasts have killed innocent people of all religions, but after each incident fear stalks every Muslim mohallah of the country. Who will pay this time, they wonder, for the crimes of a few who have no religion.
That’s why in one of the most heart-breaking testimonies of loyalty to Bharat Mata, Liaqat All described his daughters as martyrs. ‘My daughters have died,’ he said. ‘I will never get them back. But I will find peace in the knowledge that they saved hundreds of lives. Otherwise there would have been Hindu-Muslim riots. It’s because of this house that there is peace in Jaipur and the country. My daughters are martyrs.’
All three believed that home-grown terror, whether Hindu or Muslim, could be defeated only if politicians showed the will to fight it.
The stories were not all about despair.
In Ayodhya, not far from the disputed site, is Gujarat Bhavan, where pilgrims from the state stay while visiting the temple-town. A small shrine has stood on its front lawn for many years, its sanctum sanctorum decorated with pictures of Guru Nanak and Mecca, idols of Christ and Shiva, Krishna and Buddha. The temple caretaker believes it has survived with the protection of Lord Ram.
Sometimes hope comes calling in mysterious ways.
The first nationalised bank opened its doors in the minority enclave of Jhuapura on the outskirts of Ahmedabad in 2008. The response was overwhelming -eleven crores in deposits in the first three months of its opening. There was no looking back, and recently the area got its first ATM.
Home to more than five lakh Muslims, Jhuapura was unsafe territory, a haven for criminals. ..until three years ago. .. when the recession broke down prejudices and transformed it into an attractive destination for businesses struggling to survive in up-market Ahmedabad. Their target? The educated Muslim middle class which migrated here after the 2002 Godhra riots, including university teachers, doctors, lawyers, retired bureaucrats and judges.
A local Muslim builder constructing a new mall in Jhuapura told me this was the only good thing to come out of the recession.
And in another comer of Gujarat, I found a small village I where Muslims, driven out of their homes in the name of Ram, had been given shelter by Hindus. If there was Ramrajya anywhere, it was here. The name of the village is Ramayan.
Shikha Trivedy started her career with The Illustrated Weekly of India, followed by a stint with The Economic Times. In 1995, she co-authored a book titled Creating a Nationality: The Ramjanmabhumi and the Fear of the Self (OUP, 1998). She won the Asian Television Award for the best news story on food security in 2004; the Indian Television Award for best documentary in 2005 for Train to Pakistan; The Indian Express Award for reporting on Invisible India in 2006; News Television Award in 2007 for the best documentary series, Small Towns Big Dreams; and the International Broadcasters Award in 2007 on the spread of AIDS in Uttar Pradesh –the only Indian journalist to have won an IBA award so far. Shikha Trivedy Won the Chameli Devi Jain Award in 2002.
