Sangh Parivar

By Md. Ali, TwoCircles.net

No one term can describe her activism. Her area of work is vast and
very risky also. Initially a full time journalist attached with
newspapers including The Indian Express, she took the road of activism
after being appalled by the horrors of the Bombay riots. She is Teesta
Setalvad, a relentless campaigner for the rights and privileges of
minorities- Dalits, Muslims and women.

In an exclusive interview with TwoCircles.net, she
spoke on matters as diverse as communalism, gender rights, pseudo-
secularism of political parties in India, minorities’ rights.

Muslim women & the community

But the only common thing present in all these areas is her
praiseworthy and courageous work which she has done in the last fifteen
years or so.

She mentions some of the cases in Uttar Pradesh on which she is
working, particularly the Shravasti mass rape case where the Muslim
women of the village were attacked and raped on 10th July 2007. The
case is pending in Allahabad High Court.

She points out that the issue of minority rights in a democracy is
very important that is why they are constitutionally guaranteed, but
“as important as that are the rights of the minority within the
minority,” referring to Muslim women. Women are doubly marginalized not
only in the socio-political power equations, but also in the areas very
essential for the progress of any community, education for instance.

She says the Muslim community will have to realize that half of its
part is women and these women are tremendous potential for that
community. You see the merit lists of all state board examination:
Muslim girls are doing well; they are doing well in every field. They
want to go ahead, and ready to compete with everyone.

So Teesta points out the urgent need for the community elders, the
religious leaders, and the family to seriously encourage the
participation of women in the affairs of the community. Because, she
points out, no community in the world history has ever been able to
progress without its women standing on its side.

Ghettoisation

She says her organisation has experimented with this idea in
Gujarat. In a city like Himmat Nagar, it has formed a joint force in
which Muslim, Dalit and Hindu women have worked together side by side.

Teesta Setalvad says that this intermingling is also very important
today because it helps rebuild the traditional linkages between the
communities, because these linkages and cultural bridges between
different faiths negate the communalist sentiments.

Communalism has broken the old associations and cultural linkages
between different communities which have been replaced by hatred,
suspicion and prejudice.

So Teesta argues that when one is working for the minority rights
one should also keep thinking of rebuilding those bridges, because
today the cities have been ghettoized. And ghettoisation is very
dangerous, because they are vulnerable to be easy targets, she says.

In this context Teesta refers to the recent statement made by Bal
Thackeray, in which he exhorted to the hindutva extremists to get in
the “mini Pakistans” (Muslim ghettos) and explode bombs there.

Teesta points out that if there is intermingling of people at the
residential levels and school level, for instance, then it will not
allow the prejudices and hatred to build up as easily as when they are
ghettoized.

Emerging Muslim middle class: a threat to commuanlists?

And that is one of the reasons why the communalists and the communal
violence push people back in the ghettos, because after the partition,
for the first time, Muslim middle class has emerged very strongly in
the last 20 -25 years. In every profession, be it legal profession or
medical, the class has made their presence felt.

Teesta further explains “and it wants its place under the sun, it
also wants its share of the cake, naturally. And it is this which is
the threat [for the communal forces].”

Because suddenly one sees Muslim not as a typical Maulana (as they
have always been represented in the popular and mainstream narratives,
although not even five percent of the Muslims are Maulanas).

But today people find a Muslim who is a woman, a lawyer , a doctor,
a software professional, an engineer, and who could be anybody like you
and me “but not the specimen out of your overheated imagination” and
that is what is the threat, because in today’s growing India every
section needs to have their share out of it.

After listening to Teesta Setalvad, one cannot help think that one
of the aims of the communalists behind the Gujarat riots of
February-March 2002 was to crush that threat posed by the emergence of
the strong Muslim middle class. And to a large extent they became
successful in their purpose.

Housing laws & segregation

Teesta refers to the housing laws which allow people to build
segregated colonies for different communities. And it is very
remarkable that even the Supreme Court of India is upholding these
rules. Two years back a Parsi from Ahmadabad won a case. He had argued
that the Parsi community did not want non-Parsis in their locality.

But Teesta points out that those laws have their roots in the
pre-independence British rule when every community’s right for housing
needed to be protected. “But under the Constitution they have inverse
and converse impact because they deny intermingling and thereby
discriminate one community against the other,” she says.

So Teesta Setalvad argues that we need to have a national debate,
and amend the housing laws because these violate the basic secular
nature and the spirit of the Constitution.

Minority rights and victimhood

She points out that the issue of the denial of the minority rights
cannot be seen in isolation. In the context of the erosion of the
secular identity and minority rights in the secular India unfortunately
for a variety reasons, it s not only Muslims whose right have eroded.
But also that of Dalit, the poor, and women.

“We should be clear about the fact that the Muslims are not the only
victim of this erosion, because victimhood beyond a point is also
destructive.”

“We need to fight for our rights. We need to convert our sense of
outrage into fighting for the right. But if we become victim of the
victimhood, then that can also be a very perverse logic…because that
may lead to the denial of the problems that might exist within us, for
instance on the discourse of terrorism, which is always a denial.”

Just as it is completely wrong to say that all the Muslims are
terrorists but at the same time the sensible section of the community
accepts that a small part of the youth of the community is getting
strayed.

She gives the example of the Jews, pointing out how the excessive
sense of victimhood can be horribly exploited and justified to
perpetrate the mass extermination and genocide of the innocent Muslims.

The same people who have been the victims of the worst possible
holocaust in which six million people had been massacred, have now
turned into aggressors. Teesta puts a very relevant question, “Can’t it
happen to the Muslims?” She herself answers: “It can happen to anyone
in the world, so we have to guard against that, we can not use our
victimhood to perpetrate genocide and mass extermination of innocent
people, which is what is exactly happening in Israel, so we cannot
afford to repeat that with Muslims.”

She repeats that “excessive victimhood without rationality can have
its side effects which are very damaging for the community and the
world community at large.”

Then she points that we in India are at a very historic moment,
because India, in spite of all its faults, has the opportunity to show
the way to the world. We in India have managed to negotiate and live
together for thousand of years. In spite of social, cultural, religious
and linguistic diversity and differences there are different levels at
which different communities negotiate and live together.

“So why cannot we make it our asset instead of a liability? And I think that’s the language we need to be speaking to people.”

Secularism, state and religion

On the matter of secularism, and the state and its relation with
religion, she says that in India we have to look at secularism from two
levels.

As far as the state is concerned, the state agencies, for instance,
police, government and court cannot compromise on secularism; there
should be complete separation of religion from these agencies.

But when it comes to the society, and the social practices, there
should be equal respects to al the faiths, because the state has to get
support of every one.

She categorically objects to the historical propaganda that, as Home
Minister, Sardar Patel gave money to the Somnath Temple. Teesta says
that it is a completely false idea, a concocted story. In fact Sardar
Patel refused to sanction money for the Temple.

Teesta refers to a letter written by Sardar Patel to the
contemporary Chief Minister of U.P. Gobind Ballabh Pant, saying that it
would be wrong on his part to talk about the Babri Masjid.

Mobilisation of Dalits in communal violence

Teesta also talked about the active mobilization of the Dalits in the riots and pogroms, for instance in Godhra riots itself.

More importantly it is a comparatively recent phenomenon, as earlier
there used to be a gulf between the high castes and the Dalits.

Teesta says that that in India caste has always played a major role.
The higher caste people have managed to mobilize the Dalits and other
low castes, as it is safe to be involved into the riots from a distance.

She gives the example that in the Gujarat riots the actual
perpetrators were the people from Patel community, but they managed to
mobilize the Dalits, and distributed booze among them, and made to do
all that. For instance in Panvela, the tragedy is that rioters were all
OBC boys.

The politics of the communalism and communal violence which is
always orchestrated by the upper caste is that the son of Bal Thackeray
would never go in the “mini Pakistans” to explode bombs. And L.K.
Advani would never participate personally into the riots. But these
people will exhort others to do that, she says.

NDA, UPA and again NDA

Teesta Setalvad points out that the seven years of the NDA
government was not enough and this country will see more years of
Fascism, because of the “betrayal of the secular parties, Congress at
the top.”

She also points out that the NDA government would be more brutal if
it comes to power and she does not see the country escaping one more
round of Fascism, because they have been in the power for seven years,
and within six months of the UPA government it is almost as if we
forgot that the NDA was ever there, and what it meant.

She also says that the Left parties which have been making such a
huge noise on the nuclear deal, did they make such noise on the Gujarat
case. On the political front, she says, she got support from nobody yet
she says, that she knows that had the NDA been in power it would have
been much more difficult.

She says that everybody knows that bureaucracy runs the country. She
questions that, how many police officers, judges and administrative
officers who are affiliated to the RSS have been flushed out by the
UPA? From top to the bottom the system has gone ideologically corrupt.
Even in the Prime Minister’s office there are many people from the RSS.

She says that she is afraid of the two possibilities; either the
entire Congress has turned communal, or at least the dominant part of
it. Or it has decided that now it can do without the minority votes.
Because this message is coming too often, Gujarat gave it brutally.

And if it happens they would be at the real loss because, they don’t
realize that once the minority votes ditches the Congress, it will not
come back with it for the next thirty years as it has happened in Uttar
Pradesh.

The Congress party does not trust Muslims. This is a fact that after
the indifferent behavior of the “secular” parties, some Muslims have
taken refuge in the BJP. When the secular parties will not shelter them
they do not have any option. It is not that Muslims like BJP, but how
else do they survive? She says that this is a very disturbing pattern
started three years back with Godhra where the independent Muslims are
governing Godhra with support from the BJP.

http://www.indianmuslims.info/news/2008/jun/25/teesta_communalism_minori...