[ This is Essay # 26 in our Spotlight Series. Click here for the archives.]

In search of Ramrajya [Continued from here]

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V Ramaswamy

(4)

In his poem Yahaan Sey Sheher Ko Dekho, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the great Urdu poet of the subcontinent, talks about the ugly underbelly of the city, of exploitation, suffering, injustice. He says that once you’ve seen that, all the charms and beauties of the city do not appear so charming and beautiful any more, instead they take on an ugly hue.

Here are Faiz’s lines in Agha Shahid Ali’s translation:

There are flames dancing in the farthest corners,
throwing their shadows on a group of mourners.
Or are they lighting up a feast of poetry and wine?
From here you cannot tell, as you cannot tell
whether the colour clinging to those distant doors and walls
is that of roses or of blood.

My work in the bastis of Howrah – forever changed my perception, and alienated me completely from the society I had so far been a part of. I wait for a series of articles, in Urdu, titled Yahaan Sey Sheher Ko Dekho, which look at the situation in metropolitan Calcutta’s Muslim slums.

The educated Hindu typically really believes that Muslims are a backward and troublesome group, having only themselves to blame for their plight, which they also see as fundamentally stemming from their faith, which makes them very different – irrational, belligerent and extremist. They detest politicians for practicing vote-bank politics and appeasing Muslims. And they are ever ready to emphasise that most criminals in the land are Muslims.

The overwhelming number of the poor – are not engaged in crime. (That a large part of their life is lived outside the law – for instance in matters of obtaining water, or electricity – is another matter; this is how “governance” operates at the grassroots, in the absence of basic services.) Yes, poverty leads to crime. But that is at an advanced stage in the life of a community, when there is utter hopelessness and all-round stagnation. And the criminal activities are also closely linked to external crime lords, political parties as well as the police.

Second, the fact is that in many parts of India – in Mumbai, in Gujarat, in Calcutta and West Bengal, in Kashmir – Muslims are routinely picked up, taken into custody, tortured, their families harassed. Several people simply disappear. All Muslims are seen as terrorists – whether by the police, or the middle class Hindu society. For any crime in a neighbourhood, the police will break into the homes of poor Muslim slumdwellers in the dead of night, beat people up, pick up youths and put them into lock-up. Lacking any assistance, some would then find themselves serving a jail sentence, with hardened criminals. This is also a way of pushing youths into crime.

Hindu “nationalists’” principle of “equality” is more important to them than the real experience of inequality and deep-rooted discrimination faced by the average Muslim (and Dalit and Adivasi as well). Of course, all of their views are also typically not based on any real intercourse with Muslims. Many educated Hindus in urban India might well live out their whole lives without any substantive interaction or engagement with Muslims or Islam.

Every kind of indignity, closure, discrimination has to be faced by the average Muslim in every sphere of life. But to mention “Muslim” as a specific entity to focus on in development efforts and benefits – is called “communal”. But clearly the non-communal, purely “human” definitions and directions have not worked as far as Muslims are concerned. So why are Muslims dropped from “human”? Obviously for the same reason that a pogrom against Muslims was unleashed in Gujarat: to eliminate and crush them.

The very mention of “Muslim” – conjures up for them someone about whom all kind of stereotypical notions are emphatically believed. And what is the source of the person’s beliefs or knowledge? Simply received wisdom, gossip, socialisation, hateful bigotry. Very few go through the experience of observing their own habitual embrace of various notions; or examining honestly and systematically the extent to which these believed notions are true. They do not see anything wrong about harbouring negative views about a vast section of fellow Indians.

The average Hindu, upper caste, educated, middle or upper class person – those who have enjoyed in full measure the fruits of India’s development – would typically not know a single Muslim in any intimate fashion. Though Muslims are all around him, he chooses not to see the reality of the acute poverty and deprivation suffered by Muslims. The Muslim areas – outside which they are not allowed to live in Hindu India – are not places where the “respectable” ever go to. But he doesn’t think that this disqualifies him from holding forth on the peculiarities, idiocies, irrationalities, obscurantisms, cussedness of Muslims / Islam.

The media has of course played a demonic role in this regard. The education system too has failed. More fundamentally, India has failed to even consider the questions of how to be a plural nation; how to educate children to live in peace and partnership with other communities; how to co-exist and thrive amidst diversity.

Pluralism allows communities to see themselves through one another’s eyes. And thus grow in stature.

Do we want to be a plural nation? Do we want dignity and justice for all?

Gandhi’s Ramrajya was to be a land of compassion and justice. In order to defeat Ravana, Rama took the assistance of monkeys and bears. When the bridge to Lanka was being built, even a squirrel’s contribution was not spurned. But my India is no Ramrajya, when it turns its back to its own, where the Muslim minority languishes, is reviled, manipulated and used, and their dreams and dignity crushed under the prejudice and apathy of my countrymen.
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Awesome advances have been achieved by India too. But the Muslims of India have been left behind. All the achievements of India are rendered hollow for that.

If Gandhi had been with us today (aged 137), he would not have needed the Sachar Committee report to tell him what the plight of Muslims was, or have to read about atrocities against Dalits. He would have seen for himself. And he would have been in an ongoing freedom movement, to bring real freedom to the bereft.

(5)

Today, the ruling party in West Bengal is completely alienated from the Muslims. While they have ensured that communal riots do not take place – nonetheless, the peace here is the peace of the graveyard, as the socio-economic and human development status of Muslims in West Bengal worsens rapidly.

While paying lip-service to secularism – the reality is that the party is completely blind and insensitive to the real concerns and aspirations of Muslims, the overwhelming majority of whom are poor, low-income, lacking in education. Non-Muslim party members – tend to be communal and bigoted in their make-up, mirroring the communal and bigoted mindset of the Bengali Hindu society. Hindus and Muslims in Calcutta are completely segregated, and for the educated, middle-class Hindus, Muslims might as well be non-existent.

And in this context, any effort to articulate the problems of Muslims – is labelled communal.

I have had occasion to look, very closely – in Priya Manna Basti – at micro-domain politics, corruption, crime and criminality; as well as how things have changed over time. It would not be incorrect to say that the CPI(M) has been responsible for destroying the organic community leadership and spirit for self-improvement in a historically disenfranchised migrant labouring community. In its place there is today an enfeebled, disempowered community, living in a severely criminalised environment, entirely dependent upon the token patronage of the party.

Calcutta is also of course the city that witnessed the Great Killing which began on 16 August 1946, in which thousands of people were killed in riots. That event put the seal on the Partition of India.

Bastis were the centre of major riots during 1945-47, and again in 1950. Post-riot analyses dwelt upon the degraded conditions prevailing in the bastis, which may be seen as contributing to the build-up of rage that erupts in riots.

Langston Hughes’ poem comes to mind:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

In December 1992, some Muslim slum areas of Calcutta were rocked by communal riots following the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya. Looking from within a basti, it is possible to begin to understanding how and why riots actually take place, in the context of the politician-criminal nexus that thrives on deprivation and disempowerment.

The 1992 riots brought to light the criminalisation of the city and the political system. Poverty; lack of any hope from institutions; reliance on hoodlums to deliver anything; political patronage to the hoodlums to ensure the party’s dominance and to deliver the votes from a passive vote-bank; eventual autonomy of the hoodlums, who utilise opportunities to settle scores, engage in looting, make a point for bargaining with patrons – who takes responsibility for what is happening in the city? Many people know how things happen, but that has come to be accepted as the norm. The so-called protectors of law and order are themselves complicit in this.

Priya Manna Basti has a valuable story to narrate. A large community of migrant, labouring people, who were historically disenfranchised and unlettered, arrived in search of livelihood and settled in Howrah. They lived for decades in a degraded and unhealthy environment. They transformed into a community of people through long years of co-existence under adversity. In the 1930s, a school was started by community leaders, which ran for about a decade. Notwithstanding the disruption of communal riots and partition, during the 1950’s this community witnessed a profound new beginning, in the self-help efforts towards formal education of a historically deprived and exploited section of the population. They generated community leaders comprising of people who having obtained some education themselves, and having reached a good station in life, saw education as a key means to social advancement of the wider community. They set up local schools which generated large numbers of educated men, several of whom went on to acquire respectable and remunerative jobs. Having begun to realise the importance of schooling and education for women, they set up girls’ schools giving rise to educated women, who in turn sent their girls to school and university.

The community in Priya Manna Basti is a microcosm of the situation of north Indian Muslims. Their self-help efforts flourished notwithstanding the cloud of suspicion and discrimination looming over north Indian Muslims in post-independence India. But sixty years on, we have a situation where, even though school-going has become the rule and thousands upon thousands of boys and girls have successfully defied all the challenges arising in trying to obtain education, the pathetic state of the Urdu medium education system plays a cruel joke on students, by taking them up the path to nowhere.

It is this story that has been played out during the economic blight over the last four decades, and the political blight over the last three decades. To the extent that, today, it is very difficult to discern any positive currents, and one has to uncover the earlier story of the community to know just how significant the local sensibility towards education is, and how important it is to revive it. This community initiative, aspiration and spirit, which also meant activists and trade unionists in the community who contributed to the growing support for the communist party – has been utterly uprooted. The community has been reduced to utter dependence for even the most basic things on the crumbs that the party may throw their way, and they have become criminalised in the process. The grandsons of once revered community-based party leaders are today party affiliated crooks and fixers, among whom the elderly from earlier generations are a sad anachronism, and objects of ridicule.

This transformation is what the CPI(M) has wrought in its three decades of power within the state government.

Once again, in the words of Faiz (from the poem “City of Lights”):

O city of lights,
Who can say on which side lies
The road to your lights?
All directions stand in darkness
The lonely city seeks refuge.
Tired, everywhere
The army of aspiration retreats.

(6)

I too deeply value the fragile but unique and rich, pluralist, multicultural heritage of India. Anti-Muslim prejudice, expressed in myriad, trivial, everyday ways – I cannot, will not and do not tolerate it.

Nevertheless, my experience also made me a part of a new society: my Muslim activist colleagues from the Shibpur bastis, and elders and activists in Calcutta. My concerns and efforts led me to becoming acquainted and intimate with all of them.

There is a huge gulf separating Muslims (the overwhelming majority of whom are poor, barely educated, and self-employed) and educated Hindus in India. Its a question of perception and cognition. Very few even bother to recognise that such a gulf exists, or seriously probe into why this is so, let alone act, individually and collectively, to improve matters.

Prejudice and discrimination is very real. I am reminded of an article called “Palestinian like me” by an Israeli journalist, who assumed the identity of a Palestinian and explored the meaning of being a Palestinian. I wait for a Hindu journalist to assume a Muslim identity, and investigate first-hand what being Muslim in Calcutta or West Bengal entails, and thus write “Muslim like me” for the education of his co-religionists.

The vision of an India that gives equal and fair treatment to its minorities is a vision for a secular democratic India.

The Sachar Committee report has collated a lot of the existing information on the socio-economic and educational status of Muslims in India. Speaking of West Bengal and Calcutta, while those working on the ground know the situation all too well, reliable socio-economic data is conspicuous by its absence. In such a vacuum, the continuing work of anthropologist, MKA Siddiqui, stands out. He has studied and written about the social, ethnic and occupational composition of Calcutta’s Muslims. He has also undertaken serious studies on the socio-economic and educational aspects of slum-dwellers in Calcutta. Dr Siddiqui’s work, read together with Nirmal Kumar Bose’s Calcutta: A Social Survey, helps the interested enquirer to understand the tale and travails of Calcutta’s Muslims. Economist Zakir Husain has studied the demand for primary education among Muslim slumdwellers in Calcutta. And recently, geographer Sohel Firdaus has looked at the educational status of Muslims in a large slum in Howrah.

Education is the arena where the apartheid system of India can be seen to be most effectively in operation. With the complete failure of the Indian state to ensure uniform universal compulsory school education; the market catering only to those who can afford to pay; and NGOs still touching only a tiny part of the deprived Indian masses – the Muslim madrasas emerge as a significant provider of some form of education to the poor. In the absence of these madrasas, even this little education would not be available.

In the context of the failure of substantive civil society intervention towards education for all, this community-based initiative is the only one of significance.

Rather than direct one’s ire against the madrasas for the kind of education they are providing, ire should be directed towards the failure of the state to fulfil its duty of providing sound education to all, and thus progressively eliminating the enormous socio-economic disparities afflicting the country. Ire should also be directed towards the failure of civil society to engage with the question of education for all.

Grassroots experience reveals real barriers at every level that confront poor Muslims in their quest for a better life. Muslim citizens suffer acute socio-economic deprivation and disempowerment – as the Sachar Committee Report has documented. The conditions in Muslim slums in metropolitan Calcutta are a manifestation and outcome of the underlying, deep institutional and attitudinal barriers faced by Muslim citizens in India to integration with the socio-economic mainstream, and advancement. Apathy is widespread in the social mainstream. Unless the overall environment of social attitudes and practice is improved, grassroots efforts are severely impeded in their impact. There are also subtle links between anti-Muslim prejudice and attitudes to the Dalits.

In 2000, following my acquaintance with Dr Siddiqui, I became interested in the issue of slum-based manufacturing in Calcutta, a subject on which he has done considerable work, and also made a video documentary on. In 2006, we developed a proposal for a strategic research and planning intervention, aimed at structural upgrading of the blighted trades which employ a large number of workers, and whose future is very bleak. But we were unable to get any acceptance or support for this. Several years earlier, I had also initiated a proposal for comprehensive renewal of the blighted canal-side area of Beliaghata in Calcutta. That vision too did not see the light of day.

But the crossing of the river, and going to Howrah – transformed my life, something I could never have even imagined just before that. It provided a real human dimension to the spiritualisation that I was undergoing. Yet this was only something residing deep within me, ever since the riots of 1992, the plaintive plea of my soul, that the Almighty entrust a poor Muslim child to me, to love and nurture.

Howrah Pilot Project’s experience since 1997 – has been a long, unending experience of denial and disregard from institutions that the poor slumdwellers habitually face. The ordeal of institutional disregard has been an apprenticeship and a harsh trial. Working in a poor, degraded slum in Howrah, controlled by criminalised political cadre – patience, adaptation, and swallowing of pain is taught continuously.

An honest, selfless, idealistic, sincere social interventionist – is an aberration and a caricature in such an area of darkness. Poverty, conflict, social and environmental injustice – all degrade the human fibre, revealing man’s ugliest facets.

But the work of HPP through its centre in Priya Manna Basti continues. Talimi Haq School, a non-formal school for poor and working children, was started in 1998 and this continues. The whole programme is managed by trained community-based volunteers. A few slum youth, boys and girls, have gone through an intensive process of skill and leadership development and grown and matured as human beings. A number of volunteers from Calcutta have worked for varying periods and had a rich, transformative educational experience. A lot of goodwill has been created. The work has inspired similar grassroots efforts in other slum localities of Calcutta and Howrah.

The whole experience has been rich in learning for those involved. HPP is a live laboratory, to yield strategic, experience-based action knowledge on poverty and slum community development.

Amidst poverty can also be found simplicity, trust, beautiful dreams and aspirations, and goodness, a fertile soil to plant and nurture a small sapling of conviction and responsibility. HPP is a small, quiet, cheerful island of hope in PM Basti.
[To be continued...]

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V Ramaswamy is a Calcutta-based business executive, social planner, grassroots organiser, teacher and writer. Address for correspondence: hpp@vsnl.com.