Recently, the issue of "theft of offerings at the Ayodhya Ram temple" has taken centre stage on social media.
Whether "no theft occurred," or "this is the first such incident," or "the theft was limited only to cash" are now secondary questions, because the evidence has come not from the opposition, from people of other faiths, or from foreigners, but from ordinary devout believers, from saints and monks, and from sincere workers of the ruling party itself.
For leaders who dream of building a "Hindu Rashtra" by tearing apart the very Indian Constitution that was drafted under the chairmanship and leadership of Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar, the situation has become like the saying: "the dog pulls towards the village, the jackal pulls towards the wilderness." I take no personal pleasure in this turn of events, but I feel anguish at India's plight.
No one asks why a man who once served as India's Home Secretary should have to go, helplessly and humiliatingly, through the unconstitutional corridors of power all the way up to the Sarsanghchalak of the RSS just to get a receipt for his own donation. And more importantly, why does such a person, who owns seven kilos of gold worth over ten crore rupees meant to gild a religious book, not think of giving it instead to his fellow Indians who are suffering in destitution, even though he is well aware of their condition?
After independence, following the Partition of India, lakhs of refugees came to India after enduring immense hardship. Among them was a community that came from the Sindh province and came to be known as "Sindhis." The majority of them are poor. Next to my birthplace, "Shantifaliya" in Nadiad, there was a settlement of Sindhi refugees, or "nirashritas." There was a row of their small grocery shops. Among them was one, Kamla, my mother's close friend. In her six-by-eight-foot room there was a kitchen, a bathing area, and a sewing machine. Whenever my mother went there to get clothes stitched, I would go along.
Amid the harsh struggle for daily bread, "communalism" was absent there. But Advani's Rath Yatra lit the fire of communalism across the country, and the very definition of religion changed. In the communal fire that followed the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Navsarjan worked in Surat, going door to door across various areas, surveying and rehabilitating around 450 Muslim and Hindu families whose livelihood depended on handcarts selling vegetables and fruit, carts that had been burnt to ashes in the riots. I saw devastation in every lane. Perhaps on the third day after the violence began following the demolition of the Babri Masjid, I visited Surat along with Ahmedabad's former mayor Vadibhai Kamdar, Madhusudan Mistry, and Indukumar Jani. That evening, at a relief camp for victims, the police showed us two children, a four-year-old and his six-month-old brother. Both children had been found by the police on the road. The elder child's skull, slashed by a sharp weapon, had been stitched and wrapped in white cloth, and the younger child had chunks of flesh hanging from his body where he had been branded with hot iron rods. The grandparents, parents, and three sisters of these two children had been burned alive.
A few months later, I was on a flight from Ahmedabad to Delhi, and Advani and his wife came to sit in the row next to mine. The air hostess asked me to change my seat so the two of them could sit together, but I refused. When she tried to introduce me to "this eminent person," I told her I already knew him very well. Let us never make the mistake of believing that violence against children in politics is limited to Gaza. Politicians' own children never die in violence; it is only the poor who are incited to kill the poor.
This Sindhi community too has a grievance: they donated 200 kilograms of silver bricks engraved with the image of their deity Jhulelal to the temple, but have still not received a receipt. Let us not make the mistake of thinking that mountains of gold and silver exist only in temples. That same excess exists in the churches of Rome and in the Tsar's museum in Saint Petersburg in what was once communist Russia. One difference does exist, however: in Christian churches, the count of donations received is announced publicly right after the religious ceremony, something I have witnessed myself. In this age of modern technology, counting even crores of rupees is no great feat, if the intention is there.
Amid all this uproar, one remark by a spokesperson caught my attention: "It's Hindus' money, and even if Hindus steal it, why should it bother you?"
That remark seems fair to me in its own way. When deciding to embrace Buddhism, Dr. Ambedkar had said something to the effect that he had become "free," and that Hindus could do as they pleased within their own religion. Dr. Ambedkar's calculation went wrong when only a small number of Dalits actually followed Babasaheb out of Hinduism. The educated among them feared most that being counted as Buddhist would mean losing the benefit of reservation, and even after a constitutional provision was later introduced allowing caste-based reservation to continue for Buddhists, it made little difference. That said, it isn't true that simply becoming Buddhist changes one's values in life. We have seen the violence committed by Buddhists in Sri Lanka and Myanmar.
Dr. Ambedkar's life struggle was not confined merely to safeguarding reservation. His life's purpose was to destroy, at the root, the deep-seated conditioning of inequality, and it was for this reason that he credited the success of the Constitution to the degree to which its values would become woven into the very way citizens live, giving rise to a new way of life. Yet it seems the idea of erasing the deep conditioning of inequality has not found favour among Dalits and other communities who suffer from untouchability and caste discrimination, because it is nowhere to be seen: not in literature, not in art, not in culture, not in religion, not in social reform, not in education, and not in government statistics.
But the Ayodhya temple theft episode troubles me for another reason as well. The temple's funds are managed by trustees on behalf of a "trust." The institutional concept of a "trust" for public welfare work first emerged around 2,000 years ago, during the time of Roman civilisation. Trust means "vishwas," faith. "Accept my hoondi, my Lord" - what was that tradition if not an act of faith? The hoondi still exists today, but now for moving crores of rupees off the books, which is precisely why laws and the office of the Charity Commissioner became necessary. In the Ayodhya episode, every single law seems to have been swallowed whole. Poverty, blind faith, and backwardness remain, for politicians, a goldmine.
Navsarjan too is a trust. Because of its work, the law banning manual scavenging was implemented in India for the first time after independence. The first and largest survey of the practice of untouchability in Gujarat was conducted by it. It trained hundreds of young people to use the law to protect their rights. Through the Dalit Shakti Kendra, it prepared around 11,000 young people, without distinction of caste, religion, or region, equipping them with livelihoods and awareness of their rights. In hundreds of cases, it ensured perpetrators of atrocities were sent to jail, and it helped people reclaim land that had been denied to them for years. Six months ago, Navsarjan was served a notice questioning whether its activities could still be considered to serve the "public interest," asking why its registration under Section 12A of the Income Tax Act should not be cancelled. It makes no difference to an income tax official whether the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court cites Navsarjan's work in a judgment, or whether human rights organisations around the world recognise it.
After Navsarjan rejected the government's settlement offer in the FCRA case, new tactics have begun. When I worked in the Bhal region, people used to teach me that even good wheat has stones mixed in with it. Navsarjan itself is not what worries me, because it has, within its own limitations, fulfilled the genuine expectations of the truly deprived and done landmark work in this country. My concern is historical.
Shortly before his death, Dr. Ambedkar had requested a modest sum of 20,000 rupees from Jawaharlal Nehru to help publish his final book, "The Buddha and His Dhamma." Nehru passed that request on to Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, chairman of the committee for the 2,500th birth anniversary celebrations of the Buddha. But Dr. Ambedkar's understanding of the Buddha's teachings did not align with Radhakrishnan's own religious philosophy. In the end, the book could not be published in Babasaheb's own lifetime. When the government's attacks on Navsarjan began, ordinary people fought back, but many of my friends from the Durban World Conference against Racism chose to remain silent. Dr. Ambedkar's autobiography moves us (those it does move) precisely because it spans right up to the final days of his life, and because in it, the discrimination he himself endured and the personal struggle he waged to end that discrimination are woven together like the warp and weft of cloth.
Today, even though there are 131 Members of Parliament from Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, little has changed in the wretched daily life of the "ordinary" Dalit. Outrage born of incomplete knowledge and limited perspective cannot, by itself, bear fruit. And so the ghee, brought to a boil by the force of such outrage, keeps spilling over onto the vast, immeasurable plate of socio-economic, religious, and cultural power simmering beneath it. Where there is discrimination, there is no God; there is only corruption.
On this occasion, watching these narrow dreams of nation-building, and watching the leaders whom people carry upon their shoulders, I cannot help but recall the Gujarati translation (by Nagindas Parekh) of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore's celebrated poem "He Mor Durbhaga Desh" - "O My Unfortunate Country":
"O my unfortunate country,
you must bear the same insult you have inflicted on others.
Those you have deprived of human dignity,
whom you have made to stand before you yet never made room for in your lap,
you must bear the same insult as all of them.
By keeping human touch at a distance, day after day,
you have insulted the divine that dwells within every human soul.
By the wrathful anger of fate, seated at the door of famine,
you will have to share your food and drink with everyone.
Do you not see that death's messenger stands at your door,
that he has already cursed your pride of caste?
If you do not call everyone in, if you still stand apart,
and build a wall of pride around yourself,
then at the time of your death, in the ashes of the pyre, you will have to become equal to all."
I am presenting, along with this article, my painting "Rashtranirman" (Nation-Building). I have also made a video explaining the painting.
---
*Founder, Navsarjan Trust, a human rights organisation based in Ahmedabad
Comments
Post a Comment
NOTE: Hateful, abusive comments won't be published. -- Editor