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Targeting Minorities
January 2001
Minor Relativism The Sangh
does not hate just one minority. It hates them all
By John Dayal On Wednesday 10th January 2001, Star News reported the
curious case of a school in Gorakhpur, a distant town in Uttar Pradesh closer to
Bihar and Nepal than to New Delhi. I mention the distances because the incident
has not found place, not even in the inside pages, of any national newspaper. Words cannot have the force of the images, and the spoken sounds
that came through in the report. The local Bharatiya Janata party member of the
Lok Sabha mouthing imprecations against the Christian community. He said he
would not tolerate anyone trying to turn young boys into traitors subverting
Indian culture. And so he was going to stop youth from coming to a local school
run by an evangelistic missionary group. A spokesman of the group faces the camera to say that the school
filled a need in the underdeveloped area, that the community wanted it, and that
no parent had ever found fault with the school. There has not been single
conversion in the school, he said. A smiling district collector corroborated the evangelist’s
statement. There indeed has been no conversion, just an innocent school. But,
said the collector, he was taking no chances, and was strengthening
precautionary measures to ensure there was no physical clash. The NDTV cameraman and reporter then walked over to a
makeshift school run by the local Hindutva group. Children who had been
prevented from going to the Christian school for fear they would be converted,
had been given a bath in Ganga–water, had been draped with saffron cloth towels
printed with holy words, and were mugging up shlokas. Indian culture was
safe. Good story. Star TV has done its social duty. A few days earlier, its
camera had gone to the border of Gujarat and the Udaipur district of Rajasthan.
This is one contiguous area populated by tribals, separated by the technicality
of the former Udaipur principality. This is part of the larger Banswara region
of Rajasthan, which earned notoriety several years ago (just before the main
volcano of anti–Christian violence burst in its fury of lava) when the sangh
parivar threatened to make the area "Christian free" by the turn of the last
century. NDTV recorded the gory details of the injuries suffered by
two evangelical priests who were beaten close to death by a bunch of VHP–Bajrang
Dal goons soon after they had screened a Jesus film in a village in the
district. The two were not foreigners, not outsiders, but first generation
Indian Christians, going about their work peaceful, without triumphalistic
slogans, armed with nothing more than their Testaments, and a popular film. TV
camera had close–ups of their bleeding heads, their haunting eyes still in tears
with the terrible brush with death, and with intolerance. Reports say that the police have been able to arrest a couple of
culprits, of the three dozen who assaulted the Christians. The All India
Christian Council leadership in Gujarat, which took up the cause of the injured,
says the state government is shielding the culprits. The government of
Rajasthan, whose home minister has often in the past shown a Sangh streak in his
political demeanour, has yet to give solid assurances to a traumatised
community. There has, of course, been no public statement out of the
National Commission for Minorities. It does not often take suo motu
cognisance of anti Christian violence, whether it is in BJP–ruled Gujarat and
Uttar Pradesh, Congress ruled Rajasthan, or Biju Lok Dal–BJP coalition in Orissa
where the sensitive Phulbani district is again rumbling with anti-Christian
sentiment blatantly stoked by the sangh parivar. Nonetheless, there is reason to congratulate at least one member
of the minorities commission, the tall Tarlochan Singh who served Giani Zail
Singh as a public relations man in his tenures as Union home minister and later
President of India, and then worked in the state government of Delhi before
being nominated to the commission as its vice–chairman. Tarlochan has been
signatory to the commission’s earlier reports which trivialised violence against
Christians. But of all the members, he has shown at least a sense of history in
the alacrity with which he has challenged the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s
shenanigans in the Punjab. In fact the RSS–Sikh confrontation is unique in the response it
has begotten — a singular unity between the commission, the Akali Dal as a
political party and all its rival Dal factions, the Sikh intelligentsia and the
religious hierarchy of the Akali Takht and the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak
Committee. It will be good to recall that the Akali Dal, a constituent of
the ruling central coalition and which is in government in the state of Punjab,
has moved the Justice Venkatachaliah national commission reviewing the
Constitution of India, to ensure that the Sikh identity as a separate religion
is reaffirmed in the statutes, and no attempt is made to rob the community of
its distinctive identity by branding it as a sect or cult within the larger
Hindu fold. It was on June 30 last year that RSS boss Kupahalli Sudarshan
again joined issue with Sikh organisations and asserted that Sikhism was a part
of Hinduism. He had added that after accusing the RSS of being anti–Muslim and
anti–Christian, some "forces" had launched a propaganda to dub the RSS as
anti-Sikh. The minorities commission immediately conveyed its concern to
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee over the "anti–Sikh" remarks of the RSS
leaders. The RSS brass has been called on January 16 for its first encounter
with the commission. Commission’s vice–chairman, Tarlochan Singh, who says the
RSS’s attempt to amalgamate the Hindu and Sikh religions could pose a "serious
threat" to peace in Punjab, in fact personally met with Vajpayee on the issue
after writing to him saying Sudarshan had not withdrawn his inflammatory
statements. Singh told the PM an "uncalled for" controversy has been
generated by the RSS statements that the Sikhs were a part of Hindu religion.
"The hard–liners amongst the Sikhs were lying low after peace prevailed in
Punjab. Now these groups have got an agenda and are going on organising meetings
and protests in the state," Tarlochan told Vajpayee. "Such pronouncements are
interpreted by the Sikhs as being hostile to the Sikh religion and identity. Everyone is aware of what happened in Punjab in the eighties and
nobody should try and create bad blood again. Sudarshan should withdraw the
statement he made earlier and recognise that Sikhism is a separate religion and
Sikhs a separate identity." It remains to be seen if the RSS will respond to a
commission summon to be available for a discussion next weak. Happily, Tarlochan
has not suggested a ‘dialogue" between the Akal Takht and the RSS to resolve the
issue. The sangh parivar has never really hidden its agenda
against the Sikh community. The Congress may have been the main guilty party in
the chaos and trauma of Punjab, and its terrible repercussions during the 1984
anti Sikh riots. But the Sangh hand has also been clearly visible in the
troubles, up to and including the massacre of the Sikhs in Delhi, Kanpur and
several other cities. People have not forgotten the anti-Sikh rhetoric of grassroots
Sangh workers and their leaders in Punjab and Delhi at the height of the
extremist movement in the border state. If the spotlight after the massacres
focused only on the Congress, it had much to do with the desire to indict the
goons of the then ruling party’s Delhi unit. Later, it was too late to enlarge
the scope of he inquiries and the public debate to also indict the sangh parivar.
Many guilty have gone away scot free because of this lapse. So what is the lesson in this ‘sporadic unconnected incidents’ —
as the Prime Minister may perhaps style them? What is the common thread that
connects the physical and psychological wounds of the Christian in Udaipur,
Phulbani and Gorakhpur, the anxiety of the Muslims as they await the Dharma
Sansad’s decision in the Kumbh at Allahabad on the date for the launch of the
construction of the Ram Temple on the rubble of the Babri masjid, and the Sikh
fear that it is being robbed at political gun point of its very identity? Kupahalli Sudarshan keeps no one in any doubt about what his
Sangh wants in the country. There can be no place for minorities unless it is as
domesticated pets, living at the whims and fancy of the Sangh’s definitions of
nationhood and patriotism, of its narrow concept of culture and its perversion
of an Indian ethos. The Sangh does not hate just one minority. It hates them
all. |
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