BY RAKESH KUMAR
You really must meet Jugalji,” insisted my friend. We were
at an activist meeting in Delhi. My friend indicated a middle-aged man,
slimly built, with a broad half-moon forehead, an unkempt beard and
closely cropped greying hair, handing out leaflets to people filing into
the lawn. He wore a thin cotton shirt and a simple white handspun dhoti.
“He’s a priest from Ayodhya and is in the thick of the battle against
Hindutva.”
A man – a temple priest no less – taking on the Hindutva
brigade at its very epicentre! I scrambled across the lawn to meet him. I
simply had to hear his story. I introduced myself and we got talking. I
listened, humbled and stunned, as Jugalji began to tell me about himself,
his life, his vision of and for the world and, most especially, about his
valiant struggle against communalism and institutionalised religion. By
the time he had finished – two hours later – I had all but completely
fallen in love with him.
Jugalji was born in 1954, in a village along the
Indo-Nepalese border in Bihar’s Sitamarhi district. His father, a poor
peasant from the Yadav caste, insisted that his son must receive a decent
education. He was sent to school, and then to college for Sanskrit
studies, for which he shifted to Ayodhya where he lived in an ashram and
earned the coveted Shastri degree. There, sometime in the mid-1970s, he
joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. “I was a young, energetic lad then
and loved playing games,” he reminisced. The local RSS shakha
(cell) had devised a clever way of trapping young Hindu boys by organising
sports events. “That’s how I fell into their snare.” He rapidly moved up
the RSS hierarchy till he was appointed as a full-time pracharak
(propagandist) in Barabanki, a town in eastern Uttar Pradesh. Impressed
with his dedication to the Hindutva cause, he was appointed as the
district organiser of the Hindu Jagran Manch, one of many RSS front
organisations, and then, in 1983, as the secretary of the Vishwa Hindu
Parishad (VHP)’s unit in Faizabad district where Ayodhya is located.
At this time the Bharatiya Janata Party had not as yet
become a virtually unchallengeable political force in Uttar Pradesh
although it was rapidly winning converts in an increasingly communally
surcharged atmosphere. But Hindutva, the ideology of brahmanical
supremacism, was not represented simply by the BJP alone. Various forms of
it, including some that appeared somewhat diluted, were shared by many
Congress leaders and supporters. One of these was a certain self-styled
shankaracharya allied to the Congress who asked Jugalji to work with him
in an outfit which had a single point agenda: to ‘restore’ the disputed
Babri mosque structure in Ayodhya to the Hindus.
It was around this time – when Hindutva forces had begun
galvanising Hindu opinion and communal hatred across the country in the
name of ‘liberating’ the Babri Masjid – a project in which he was himself
involved – that Jugalji began developing second thoughts about the outfits
that he had for so long been closely associated with.
“I discovered that these groups were all dominated by
Brahmins and that they cared nothing for the poor, for the so-called low
castes. They actually stood for a vicious system of caste discrimination
while slyly denying this in public for fear of alienating their
oppressed-caste supporters whom they routinely employed to attack and kill
Muslims,” he said. “I found their understanding of religion bore little
resemblance to that of my own people back in my village where
inter-communal relations had generally been peaceful. These outfits, and
the hatred they were spewing in the name of religion, were actually
becoming a major burden on my own little head.” They presented themselves
as saviours of all Hindus but even the hardcore Brahmin Hindutva activists
Jugalji knew made him eat from separate plates kept apart for ‘low’-caste
people like himself if they invited them to their homes for a meal. “I
came to realise that what these people were propagating in the name of
religion was raw hatred, greed and caste supremacism,” he said.
In 1986 Jugalji joined the Rachnatmak Samaj, a group of
social activists headed by the late Nirmala Deshpande. He was put in
charge of the group’s work in the Faizabad district. By this time he had
established himself in Ayodhya as the manager of a small
temple-cum-monastery not far from the Babri Masjid. It was there – where
he still lives – right in the middle of the Hindutva dragon’s den, that he
began fearlessly protesting and mobilising public opinion against the
Hindutva forces. Obviously, this was no easy task and the intrepid Jugalji
had to face stiff opposition, including from priests in the literally
hundreds of temples scattered across the town. Many of these, he claimed,
were actually criminals, including murderers, who had donned saffron robes
to pass off as ‘holy men’. A day before the Babri Masjid was torn down
Hindu mobs besieged his office, located in his temple premises, and
threatened to bomb it.
In 2000 Jugalji met with noted social activist and winner
of the Magsaysay Award, Sandeep Pandey, and also with the noted Arya Samaj
leader, Swami Agnivesh, both of whom were in the forefront of the struggle
against Hindutva and communalism. Inspired by their work, he set up a
society, Ayodhya Ki Awaz (‘The Voice of Ayodhya’), to promote communal
harmony and address the plight of the oppressed castes, whom he now came
to regard as the principal victims, along with Muslims and Christians, of
Brahmanism parading in the guise of Hindutva. Today this organisation has
some 50 members, mostly Muslim, Dalit and backward-caste youth in Ayodhya
and surrounding villages and towns.
Over the years activists of Ayodhya Ki Awaz have been
closely engaged in struggles against communalism, particularly against
Hindutva aggression. It brings out a Hindi monthly magazine edited by
Jugalji and organises regular meetings in villages, aiming particularly at
Dalits and backward-caste youth (who, Jugalji noted, are routinely used by
Hindutva brahmanical forces as foot soldiers to attack Muslims in what are
euphemistically termed ‘Hindu-Muslim riots’), using innovative means such
as bhajans that evoke popular oppressed-caste icons such as Kabir and
Babasaheb Ambedkar. “We tell them that even if a grand Ram temple is built
in Ayodhya, they won’t gain a thing from it. It will be controlled by
Brahmin priests who will make a living eating off the donations of the
credulous. We tell them that they won’t find salvation in a temple of
stone and mortar,” he explained.
Over the years Jugalji and his team (which now includes
activists from different religious and caste backgrounds from across the
country) have organised numerous sadbhavna yatras – rallies
for communal harmony – the latest being last year when they travelled all
the way from Ayodhya to Ajmer, seat of the shrine of India’s most revered
Sufi, Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, stopping in towns all the way to address
public gatherings.
I try and imagine myself in Jugalji’s place, fighting
Hindutva (or any other form of fascism for that matter) while living in
Ayodhya, right in the lion’s lair – I know this I couldn’t dare. I want to
touch Jugalji’s feet in respect and awe, so overwhelmed am I by his
sincerity and passion, but he restrains me and holds me back. He recounts
the opposition that he has faced in the course of his crusade for communal
harmony over the years. He tells me about his experiences as chief guest
at a rally organised in Lucknow in 2006 by a group of oppressed-caste
activists of the Vishwa Shudra Mahasabha (the name having been
deliberately chosen to counter the claims of the Brahmin Vishwa Hindu
Parishad to speak for all ‘Hindus’). “I garlanded a picture of Ram, the
brahmanical god-king, with shoes, because Ram, as the Ramayana
says, lopped off the head of an innocent Shudra named Shambhuk for daring
to violate the draconian law of caste,” he goes on. For this he was
arrested and spent almost four months in prison while enraged
‘upper’-caste men brutally assaulted the lawyers (both ‘low’ castes) who
defended him.
Unfazed by the opposition he faced, Jugalji continued his
battle against Brahmanism even inside Ayodhya. Sometime in 2007 he took up
the issue of a board in a public park in the town, named after Tulsidas,
author of the Ramayana, which was maintained out of government
funds. The board had boldly declared: ‘A Brahmin, no matter how despicable
his deeds, is worthy of being worshipped. A Shudra, no matter what good
deeds he does, is ignoble.’ Enraged by the slogan, Jugalji sent a notice
to the commissioner and the director of parks, demanding that the board be
taken down. “I wrote to them that 80 per cent of Indians, including
myself, are so-called Shudras and it was an insult to all of us.
Tulsidas’s Ramayana, that preaches hatred for the Shudras, was an
affront to our dignity. The slogan was also against the Constitution of
India,” he explains. If the board was not removed within a fortnight, he
threatened that he and his supporters would tear it down themselves.
Buckling under pressure, the board was removed but that
did not settle matters. The local unit of the Sanatan Brahmin Samaj rose
up in protest, organising a demonstration and threatening to take revenge
on Jugalji. A senior VHP leader even announced a sum of a lakh of rupees
on Jugalji’s head.
I ask Jugalji to tell me his views about the Babri Masjid
controversy that continues to rankle unsolved. “It was a mosque, no
doubt,” he insists. “There was no temple on the spot before. Indeed Ram
was not even worshipped in ancient times, the cult of Ram being a
relatively new invention. So there’s no question at all of the Mughal king
Babar having destroyed a Ram temple and building a mosque in its place.”
Jugalji continues, “No one knows if Ram was ever born, or even if he was a
historical figure at all. The Puranas claim he was born nine lakh years
ago or so but, of course, no recorded history exists from that period.”
But that is not all, he says. “As far as the Shudras, who form 80 per cent
of India’s population, are concerned, Ram is simply unworthy of worship.
He worked to uphold the brahmanical social order and the degradation of
the oppressed castes though Brahmins and other so-called ‘upper’ castes,
who live off the sweat and blood of the Shudras, might believe him to be
divine.”
I am eager to learn what Jugalji believes to be the cure
for the curse of communalism. “Ultimately,” he insists, “the only lasting
solution is for human beings to identify themselves as just that – simply
as humans. As long as we continue to regard ourselves as Hindus or Muslims
or whatever, the menace of communalism can never be cured. We have to move
towards a stage when identities are no longer premised or bracketed with
religion. Our only identities should be that of being human. The final
antidote to communalism is humanism.”
Jugalji handles my irksome questions about his own
religious faith somewhat indirectly and with tact but I suspect that he
is, like me, something of an agnostic. “You should be a good,
compassionate person and that is enough as far as I am concerned,” he
answers cryptically. “Righteous action, as the Buddha says, is what
ultimately matters, not what caste you are born into or what religious
beliefs you profess or what name you call the divine, if it does exist,
by.” He evokes Buddhist wisdom again: “The Buddha taught his companions
not to blindly follow whatever he said. Rather, they should ponder on his
words and accept them only if it appealed to their intelligence and
conformed to their welfare and that of the majority, the bahujan.”
“All institutionalised forms of religion place their
scriptures above human intelligence and block human freedom and that is
where the problem lies,” Jugalji goes on. “They soon become cages,” he
continues, “especially once they develop a system of priesthood,
intermediaries or scholars who claim to have privileged access to the
truth. Some might appear to be gilded cages, or made of silver, but cages
they remain. But it is the bird that flies in the open sky, using its own
intelligence, that alone is truly happy.” n
(Jugal Kishore Shastri can be contacted at [email protected].
This article was posted on the alternative news site Countercurrents.org
on June 30, 2010.)
Courtesy:
www.countercurrents.org