Reshaping India with disdain for humanity | Humra Quraishi

29 August 2024

How many more homes will get bulldozed in the country? How many more abodes will get ruined and demolished and destroyed? I am of the opinion that bulldozing of homes is a barbaric rejoinder to crime, where not just the supposed or alleged or suspected culprit is punished but his or her entire clan. And in the latest case in Rajasthan’s Udaipur, even the landlord’s home wasn’t spared! Was there any valid justification of bulldozing the landlord’s home, whose tenants were the family of the school-going teenaged boy who’d stabbed his class fellow with a knife he was carrying to school? The sarkari version is along the strain that the landlord’s house was built on an unauthorized stretch of forest land. But the basic fact that emerged is that it was built years back with the relevant sarkari documents, and in that particular locality many homes have remained untouched, un-bulldozed! Relevant queries do come up: which particular government department gave the valid go-ahead sanction to build that particular house which was bulldozed? And with that supposed sanction, isn’t it illegal to pull down a built structure, with a mere one day’s notice? Where and how the victim, in this particular case an auto rickshaw driver, is to survive with his entire family, in this roofless-homeless condition?

The big crucial factor that also looms large is that bulldozing of homes is done along a particular political strain, ripe with the Right-Wing slants! Why is it homes of the minority and disadvantaged communities can be so very easily targeted and with that ruined for generations to come! Look around and see that homes of Dalits and Muslims and also Hindus from the disadvantaged socio- economic strata are bulldozed!

In fact, Bhasha Singh, political commentator and U-tuber, raised a pertinent point in one of her recent talks: why homes and properties and abodes of the convicted rapists and murderers with Right-Wing slants are not bulldozed! Double standards all the way!

Double Standards!

During my travels, young Muslims cited one example after another, reeking of double standards. They told me that if the BJP can show ‘artificial concern’ for ‘their Muslim sisters’ by harping on social ills like the ‘Triple Talaq’, why doesn’t it show concern for the widows of Vrindavan and Varanasi and also for women dying on account of dowry related tortures.

What upsets the young Muslims of today is that double standards prevail even where free speech stands. “We Musalmaans can’t talk! No question of dissent …any charge can be thrown at us! We are scared of criticising even the mohalla goons, but Hindutva leaders are nurturing their own senas. Who all are stuffed in private senas! Why only Hindus can assemble their brigades? If Musalmaans had done what Karni Sena or Shiv Sena does, they would be not just arrested but entire families would have been ruined. But nothing happens to them! Have you ever heard of a Musalmaan sena!â€

Muslims also pointed out that double standards prevail even where a serious crime as rape is concerned. Different treatments are meted out to rapists if they are connected to the ruling brigades or if they rape during rioting, pogroms. During the Gujarat pogrom and also the Muzaffarnagar riots Muslim women were raped and molested but little justice for the victims. Threatened by the political mafia, the victims and their families sat subdued and quiet; well aware of the ground realities where double standards prevail.

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Double standards get also writ large when encounter specialists are set free, whilst doubts still hover around those gunned down in political encounters. During the course of an earlier interview, when I had asked the New Delhi-based lawyer-activist Vrinda Grover why she had decided to fight for the young woman gunned down in an encounter in Gujarat, Ishrat Jahan, she stated - “As a human rights lawyer I often represent victims of police atrocities and violence… But after meeting Shamima Kauser (Ishrat’s mother)and her children, seeing the case file and reading the truth about Sohrabuddin’s murder, it was clear that this “encounter†was not just a crime committed by some trigger-happy cops, but rather part of the State-sanctioned and planned violence against Muslims, which was unleashed in the genocidal pogrom of 2002.†…Vrinda also detailed that it was crucial to recognise a clear pattern of targeting Muslims and demonising them as the enemy that must be eliminated, by use of State power, whether through engineered riots or staged fake encounters i.e cold-blooded murders by those in State power. “It is very important to bring out the truth behind these fake encounters because in Gujarat there is a criminal nexus between the political Executive, the police and even persons in critical positions in the I.B. both in the Centre and State. This is a very dangerous and lethal combination and before our eyes a fascist state is in the making.â€

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No end to the double standards! During the 2018 election campaign in the North East, BJP made promises to send senior citizens of Nagaland on religious trips, all the way to Jerusalem! Wooing the majority Christian population of Nagaland by setting up a senior citizen board which would annually select 50 members through lucky draw for a free trip to the Holy Land of Jerusalem. Not to be overlooked is the fact that at the start of 2018, the Central government scrapped the Haj subsidy for the Muslim community of the country. And whilst on double standards, why is it that Central and State level ministers from the North East can openly talk of their beef-eating traditions and get away with it, but Muslim cattle grazers and traders are lynched in public on the beef alibi?

Provocatively communal remarks regularly uttered by the BJP rulers but no question of their arrest or ouster… Though the likes of Sangeet Soms, Sadhvi Niranjans, Giriraj Singhs, Katiyars, Sakshi Maharajas, Togadias, Hedges have been openly and blatantly threatening, abusing, and taunting sections of the minority community, yet they move around freely.

Also, though news reports had surfaced that the VHP and Bajrang Dal were holding arms training camps in Greater Noida, Varanasi, Ayodhya and in other locales, where the young were getting training to attack the ‘enemy’, yet no bulldozing of the organisers and promoters’ properties of these camps!

And one cannot overlook the fact that the three– LK Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Uma Bharti – who were gleefully hugging each other when the Babri Masjid was getting destroyed by the kar sevaks, were allotted prime slots in the very governance of this county!

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Rulers of the day who harp on the word ‘secular’ ought to look at what’s taught in the RSS schools. I had first heard the former Delhi University Professor Nalini Taneja talk in an open forum of the history taught in the RSS run schools. It was a shocker, as she read out aloud several of the provocative passages from the textbooks taught in the RSS-run schools. The following years I have heard several academics detail what’s getting taught in the RSS schools: To quote - “The history texts are nothing but unadulterated illustration of the RSS view of history and use of history for its sectarian agenda - Aryans are the original inhabitants of India, Indian civilization is essentially Aryan civilization, the ancient period of history when Hindu rulers ruled was golden and India had enormous advantages during this period. The coming of the Mughals brought darkness, cruelty… Hedgewar, Gowalkar, and Savarkar are amongst the greatest freedom fighters. Muslims as a community are traitors. Hinduism is synonymous with nationalism. Also, caste, child marriages and sati are defended. Muslims, Christians and Parsis are called foreigners. Urdu is referred to as a foreign language."

And in 2016, during an interview given to me, the former IIT Mumbai Professor, Ram Puniyani, detailed the teachings in the RSS-run schools- “RSS has single teacher schools, Ekal Vidyalaya and bigger ones as Shishu Mandirs. The pattern of authoritarianism between teachers-taught, and senior-junior is very rigid. The main values which are promoted are those of conformism. Along with this, the books in these schools are structured around the mythical history of the superiority of Hinduism, that all was well with Hindus till Muslim aggressors came, caste is presented as having given stability to society, Muslim Kings are presented as cruel and so on. The hatred for religious minorities is drilled into the children.† 

Today, of course, there is little outcry as ministers in the BJP ruled States of the country pass orders for government school children (including those from the minority communities) to sing Vande Mataram, to do Surya Namaskar, to read religious scriptures of a particular religion.

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There is also growing disgust amongst Muslims because even before police investigations can take off to blasts or killings, the names of Muslim forums and organizations and individuals get splashed in certain sections of the media.

Realities to discrimination are not confined to only one area or sphere or region. All sorts of discriminations are on. Muslims told me they and their families have faced discrimination at various stages of their lives and careers. All sorts of discrimination: whilst buying or renting a home, applying for jobs and placements, to even civic facilities in the Muslim-dominated residential areas. And now, of course, the dark reality of bulldozing of homes!