“M Y son Junaid was too young to understand that he should not have worn a skullcap,” his mother, Saira Begum, lamented. A little earlier, Junaid had been murdered in what became a ghastly public spectacle of a 16-year-old’s lynching aboard a train near Delhi.
The activist Harsh Mander along with the senior journalist-activist John Dayal went to meet Junaid’s father, Jalaluddin. Mander says: “We felt compelled to say to his bereaved family that we grieved with them after Junaid’s brutal lynching. We knew these words may mean little to a family that has been so brutally dispossessed, but for whatever they may be worth, we felt that these words still must be spoken.”
In the prologue of Partitions of the Hearts: Unmaking the Idea of India , Mander recounts his experience of trying to be one with the family in silent solidarity. He writes: “We sat on string cots outside. People spoke of how frightened everyone is of travelling outside their village, walking, on trains or in buses. Frightened of wearing a skullcap, a beard, a burkha. Frightened of looking Muslim.”
This is probably the cruellest lasting legacy of the Narendra Modi government. What was the fate of Sikhs in 1984 is the fate of Muslims in the Modi era. “Frightened of looking Muslim”, much like many Sikh men chopped off their hair and shaved off their beards during the early 1980s out of fear of being stigmatised because of their appearance.
As for Junaid, “The Ramzan of 2017 he proudly recited the entire Quran from memory, to pious gatherings of his own village, over twenty days.... In appreciation, the villagers had made small offerings of money to him. His father added his contribution, and with a total sum of Rs.1,500, he set out with his brothers to the old city of Delhi to purchase new clothes, prayer mats and some gifts.... he wore jeans, unusual for him, for his shopping adventure to the big city. But he also wore a skullcap on his head. This was to be his fatal undoing.”
He looked a Muslim and, in these increasingly pernicious times, became an easy target for those nursing hatred towards the community. After their Eid shopping, Junaid and his brothers, Shakir and Hashim, took a train from Sadar Bazar station in Old Delhi. The brothers got seats. A little later an old man entered the train. Junaid vacated his seat for the old man. Soon, a crowd that had entered the train started roughing up his brothers for seats. When they refused to yield, they were slapped and beaten, their skullcaps thrown off, and the beards of the older boys were pulled. They were called Pakistanis, beef-eaters and much worse. Soon, the attackers took out their knives and stabbed the three brothers. Junaid and his brothers screamed for help, but to no avail. Nobody came forward. Some took videos, while others egged on the assailants. Among them was the old man Junaid gave up his seat for.
Mander writes: “There are moments in history that will compel later generations to ask, what is it that you did at that time? I believe that we are living through one such moment of history.”
In this moment, India is being unmade, nibbled at, pierced through. Hatred and bigotry are becoming the new normal. Proof is self-evident and all around us at railway stations, markets, offices and television studios. All closet communalists are out, masquerading as great nationalists, indulging in hate speech, terrorising the innocent and partaking in mob violence. Muslims and Christians are treated as second-class citizens; a Bharatiya Janata Party spokesman on a television show makes a naked threat to rename a mosque after Vishnu, another objects to Christmas choirs in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. Even Dalits and women are demonised.
The soul of India—which extolled Asoka only after the Kalinga war, which sought to emulate Akbar and not Aurangzeb, and which felt inspired by the words of the Mahatma while consigning those of V.D. Savarkar and K.B. Hedgewar to the dustbin of history—is under relentless attack. It is to this wounded soul of India that Mander draws our attention. His heart bleeds for Junaid, whom he calls “my son”. He sheds a tear, too, for Pehlu Khan, the dairy farmer who was lynched by a mob when he was returning from a cattle fair. Worse, the State police charged them with cow slaughter. A family whose head was butchered by a mob being held responsible for cow slaughter. Such are the times we are living in, the times the succeeding generations will ask us questions about.
Mander says: “Their anguish was amplified exponentially because the police in January this year filed charge sheets not against the killers but instead against the young men Azmat and Rafeeq who had been attacked along with Pehlu Khan, barely escaping with their lives. The police charged that they are cow smugglers. Directly after Khan’s lynching, the State’s Home Minister and the District Superintendent had also dubbed Khan and his sons and companions as cow smugglers, in effect building a cynical and dangerous alternative moral frame to justify the lynching.”
Yet, Partitions of the Heart goes way beyond instances of lynching and state apathy, even collusion. The author talks in detail too about encounter killings, love jehad, a series of communal riots and goes as far back as the Gulberg Society massacre that took place before the Gujarat model was promoted as an ideal of development.
Among the victims of the Gulberg massacre was the former Member of Parliament Ehsan Jafri, a man who had experienced communal violence early in his married life in Ahmedabad.
In 1969, his small house was reduced to ashes and his family given shelter by his Hindu friend Rama Seth. After spending some time in refugee camps, the Jafri family moved into a one-room dwelling offered by Seth and rebuilt their life from scratch. Many advised him to move into a Muslim-dominated area of the city to avoid a similar fate again. Jafri had greater faith in India’s pluralist tradition and steadfastly ignored all such advice. He would say: “Everything I believe in would lose meaning if I felt I could be safe only among Muslims.”
This was a faith that was not shaken even when communal riots began to take a heavy toll of life and limb in Ahmedabad in 2002. Jafri and other residents of the largely Muslim society believed nothing would touch them. Yet again, their confidence proved misplaced. The society was burnt down, its residents slaughtered. Among them was Jafri.
Writes Mander: “2002 was the year when large parts of Gujarat were ripped apart by one of the most brutal and bloody communal massacres since India attained freedom. More than 1,000 persons—unofficial estimates are as high as 2,000—the large majority of whom were from the minority Muslim community, were slaughtered. On February 28, Jafri was gruesomely murdered by a feverish mob. Slaughtered along with him were around 70 women, children and men who had taken shelter with the man whom they had believed was influential enough to save their lives from a colossal armed mob baying for blood. He was their only hope. But he was dragged away… his limbs were cut off from his body before he was burned.”
The modus operandi remained the same some 16 years later in Sitamarhi, where an 80-year-old Muslim man was similarly mutilated and burned alive by a mob that was part of Durga Puja celebrations in the town. Between Gulberg in 2002 and Sitamarhi in 2018, nothing has changed for India’s principal minority.
Taking into account many instances of communal riots, from 1969 to 1984 and on to 2002 and beyond, Mander questions the Hindu supremacists who claim monopoly over nationalism, in fact, their version of nationalism. He wonders why all Indians should adhere to one faith, speak one language, eat the same food, marry the same way. Casting his net wide, he uses an eagle’s eye to point out the flaws of such a reasoning.
Happily and steadfastly pitching for India’s pluralist tradition, he writes: “For them, nationalism first requires acceptance of India’s Hindu identity. And since Hinduism is an intensely heterodox and pluralist faith system, this entails that a true nationalist accepts the version of Hinduism—belligerent, militant and intolerant—that the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh] and its associate organisations subscribe to. This requires, for instance, the violent defence of the cow, restraint on assertive and independent women who cut their hair, wear Western clothes, drink liquor and mix freely with partners they choose with or without marriage, acceptance of caste as the principal organising principle of social relations, prohibitions on same-sex love, and reverence to the primary deity of Ram. And that too a warrior Ram.”
In all such moments of death and denial, displacement and deprivation, the past comes fast forward, all the ache and agony somewhat dimmed with the passage of time comes surging back. And old wounds begin to bleed as eyes well up. It is a past India must learn from. It is a challenge India must confront so that we do not repeat the mistakes of Partition. The partition of the heart in 2018 provides a steep challenge.
Kudos to Mander for writing a book that hitherto existed only in little notes of remembrance in all of us. It takes an extraordinarily sensitive man to pen this saga. It deserves equally responsible and responsive readers.
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