Showing posts with label conversion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conversion. Show all posts
Sunday 13 December 2020
Wednesday 30 October 2019
Thursday 30 November 2017
Let Hadiya take charge of her life
Brinda Karat in The Hindu
The Supreme Court did not allow itself to be converted into a khap panchayat, although it came close to it on Tuesday as it heard the Hadiya case. The counsel for the National Investigation Agency (NIA) supported by the legal counsel of the Central government made out a case of indoctrination and brainwashing in a conspiracy of ‘love jehad’ which they claimed rendered Hadiya incapacitated and invalidated her consent. The NIA wanted the court to study the documents it claimed it had as evidence before they heard Hadiya. For one and a half hours, this young woman stood in open court hearing arguments about herself, against herself and her chosen partner. It was shameful, humiliating and set an unfortunate precedent. If the court was not clear that it wanted to hear her, why did they call her at all? She should never have been subjected to that kind of indignity. She is not a criminal but she was treated like one for that period of time.
The right to speak
The court remained undecided even in the face of the compelling argument by lawyers Kapil Sibal and Indira Jaising representing Hadiya’s husband Shafin Jahan that the most critical issue was that of the right of an adult woman to make her own choice. The court almost adjourned for the day when the Kerala State Women’s Commission lawyer, P. V. Dinesh, raised a voice of outrage that after all the accusations against Hadiya in the open court if the court did not hear her, it would be a grave miscarriage of justice. In khap panchayats, the woman accused of breaking the so-called honour code is never allowed to speak. Her sentence begins with her enforced silence and ends with whatever dreadful punishment is meted out to her by the khap. Fortunately the Supreme Court pulled itself back from the brink and agreed to give Hadiya an opportunity to speak.
There was no ambiguity about what she said. It was the courage of her conviction that stood out. She wanted to be treated as a human being. She wanted her faith to be respected. She wanted to study. She wanted to be with her husband. And most importantly, she wanted her freedom.
The court listened, but did it hear?
Both sides claim they are happy with the order. Hadiya and her husband feel vindicated because the court has ended her enforced custody by her father. She has got an opportunity to resume her studies. Lawyers representing the couple’s interests have explained that the first and main legal strategy was to ensure her liberty from custody which has been achieved. They say that the order places no restrictions on Hadiya meeting anyone she chooses to, including her husband. It is a state of interim relief.
Her father claims victory because the court did not accept Hadiya’s request to leave the court with her husband. Instead the court directed that she go straight to a hostel in Salem to continue her studies. He asserted this will ensure that she is not with her husband who he has termed a terrorist.
The next court hearing is in January and the way the court order is implemented will be clear by then.
The case reveals how deeply the current climate created by sectarian ideologies based on a narrow reading of religious identity has pushed back women’s rights to autonomy as equal citizens. From the government to the courts, to the strengthening of conservative and regressive thinking and practice, it’s all out there in Hadiya’s case.
One of the most disturbing fallouts is that the term ‘love jehad’ used by Hindutva zealots to target inter-faith marriages has been given legal recognition and respectability by the highest courts. An agency whose proclaimed mandate is to investigate offences related to terrorism has now expanded its mandate by order of the Supreme Court to unearth so-called conspiracies of Muslim men luring Hindu women into marriage and forcibly converting them with the aim of joining the Islamic State. The underlying assumption is that Hindu women who marry Muslims have no minds of their own. If they convert to Islam, that itself is proof enough of a conspiracy.
This was clearly reflected in the regressive order of the Kerala High Court in May this year which annulled Hadiya’s marriage. Among other most objectionable comments it held that a woman of 24 is “weak and vulnerable”, that as per Indian tradition, the custody of an unmarried daughter is with the parents, until she is properly married.” Equally shocking, it ordered that nobody could meet her except her parents in whose custody she was placed.
Not a good precedent
Courts in this country are expected to uphold the right of an adult woman to her choice of a partner. Women’s autonomy and equal citizenship rights flow from the constitutional framework, not from religious authority or tradition. The Kerala High Court judgement should be struck down by the apex court. We cannot afford to have such a judgment as legal precedent.
The case also bring into focus the right to practice and propagate the religion of one’s choice under the Constitution. In Hadiya’s case she has made it clear time and again that she converted because of her belief in Islam. It is not a forcible conversion. Moreover she converted at least a year before her marriage. So the issue of ‘love jehad’ in any case is irrelevant and the court cannot interfere with her right to convert.
As far as the NIA investigation is concerned, the Supreme Court has ordered that it should continue. The Kerala government gave an additional affidavit in October stating that “the investigation conducted so far by the Kerala police has not revealed any incident relating to commission of any scheduled offences to make a report to the Central government under Section 6 of the National Investigation Agency Act of 2008.” The State government said the police investigation was on when the Supreme Court directed the NIA to conduct an investigation into the case. It thus opposed the handing over of the case to the NIA. In the light of this clear stand of the Kerala government, it is inexplicable why its counsel in the Supreme Court should take a contrary stand in the hearing — this should be rectified at the earliest.
Vigilantism by another name
The NIA is on a fishing expedition having already interrogated 89 such couples in Kerala. Instead of inter-caste and inter-community marriages being celebrated as symbols of India’s open and liberal approach, they are being treated as suspect.
Now, every inter-faith couple will be vulnerable to attacks by gangs equivalent to the notorious gau rakshaks. This is not just applicable to cases where a Hindu woman marries a Muslim. There are bigots and fanatics in all communities. When a Muslim woman marries a Hindu, Muslim fundamentalist organisations like the Popular Front of India use violent means to prevent such marriages. Sworn enemies, such as those who belong to fundamentalist organisations in the name of this or that religion, have more in common with each other than they would care to admit.
Hopefully the Supreme Court will act in a way which strengthens women’s rights unencumbered by subjective interpretations of tradition and communal readings of what constitutes national interest.
The Supreme Court did not allow itself to be converted into a khap panchayat, although it came close to it on Tuesday as it heard the Hadiya case. The counsel for the National Investigation Agency (NIA) supported by the legal counsel of the Central government made out a case of indoctrination and brainwashing in a conspiracy of ‘love jehad’ which they claimed rendered Hadiya incapacitated and invalidated her consent. The NIA wanted the court to study the documents it claimed it had as evidence before they heard Hadiya. For one and a half hours, this young woman stood in open court hearing arguments about herself, against herself and her chosen partner. It was shameful, humiliating and set an unfortunate precedent. If the court was not clear that it wanted to hear her, why did they call her at all? She should never have been subjected to that kind of indignity. She is not a criminal but she was treated like one for that period of time.
The right to speak
The court remained undecided even in the face of the compelling argument by lawyers Kapil Sibal and Indira Jaising representing Hadiya’s husband Shafin Jahan that the most critical issue was that of the right of an adult woman to make her own choice. The court almost adjourned for the day when the Kerala State Women’s Commission lawyer, P. V. Dinesh, raised a voice of outrage that after all the accusations against Hadiya in the open court if the court did not hear her, it would be a grave miscarriage of justice. In khap panchayats, the woman accused of breaking the so-called honour code is never allowed to speak. Her sentence begins with her enforced silence and ends with whatever dreadful punishment is meted out to her by the khap. Fortunately the Supreme Court pulled itself back from the brink and agreed to give Hadiya an opportunity to speak.
There was no ambiguity about what she said. It was the courage of her conviction that stood out. She wanted to be treated as a human being. She wanted her faith to be respected. She wanted to study. She wanted to be with her husband. And most importantly, she wanted her freedom.
The court listened, but did it hear?
Both sides claim they are happy with the order. Hadiya and her husband feel vindicated because the court has ended her enforced custody by her father. She has got an opportunity to resume her studies. Lawyers representing the couple’s interests have explained that the first and main legal strategy was to ensure her liberty from custody which has been achieved. They say that the order places no restrictions on Hadiya meeting anyone she chooses to, including her husband. It is a state of interim relief.
Her father claims victory because the court did not accept Hadiya’s request to leave the court with her husband. Instead the court directed that she go straight to a hostel in Salem to continue her studies. He asserted this will ensure that she is not with her husband who he has termed a terrorist.
The next court hearing is in January and the way the court order is implemented will be clear by then.
The case reveals how deeply the current climate created by sectarian ideologies based on a narrow reading of religious identity has pushed back women’s rights to autonomy as equal citizens. From the government to the courts, to the strengthening of conservative and regressive thinking and practice, it’s all out there in Hadiya’s case.
One of the most disturbing fallouts is that the term ‘love jehad’ used by Hindutva zealots to target inter-faith marriages has been given legal recognition and respectability by the highest courts. An agency whose proclaimed mandate is to investigate offences related to terrorism has now expanded its mandate by order of the Supreme Court to unearth so-called conspiracies of Muslim men luring Hindu women into marriage and forcibly converting them with the aim of joining the Islamic State. The underlying assumption is that Hindu women who marry Muslims have no minds of their own. If they convert to Islam, that itself is proof enough of a conspiracy.
This was clearly reflected in the regressive order of the Kerala High Court in May this year which annulled Hadiya’s marriage. Among other most objectionable comments it held that a woman of 24 is “weak and vulnerable”, that as per Indian tradition, the custody of an unmarried daughter is with the parents, until she is properly married.” Equally shocking, it ordered that nobody could meet her except her parents in whose custody she was placed.
Not a good precedent
Courts in this country are expected to uphold the right of an adult woman to her choice of a partner. Women’s autonomy and equal citizenship rights flow from the constitutional framework, not from religious authority or tradition. The Kerala High Court judgement should be struck down by the apex court. We cannot afford to have such a judgment as legal precedent.
The case also bring into focus the right to practice and propagate the religion of one’s choice under the Constitution. In Hadiya’s case she has made it clear time and again that she converted because of her belief in Islam. It is not a forcible conversion. Moreover she converted at least a year before her marriage. So the issue of ‘love jehad’ in any case is irrelevant and the court cannot interfere with her right to convert.
As far as the NIA investigation is concerned, the Supreme Court has ordered that it should continue. The Kerala government gave an additional affidavit in October stating that “the investigation conducted so far by the Kerala police has not revealed any incident relating to commission of any scheduled offences to make a report to the Central government under Section 6 of the National Investigation Agency Act of 2008.” The State government said the police investigation was on when the Supreme Court directed the NIA to conduct an investigation into the case. It thus opposed the handing over of the case to the NIA. In the light of this clear stand of the Kerala government, it is inexplicable why its counsel in the Supreme Court should take a contrary stand in the hearing — this should be rectified at the earliest.
Vigilantism by another name
The NIA is on a fishing expedition having already interrogated 89 such couples in Kerala. Instead of inter-caste and inter-community marriages being celebrated as symbols of India’s open and liberal approach, they are being treated as suspect.
Now, every inter-faith couple will be vulnerable to attacks by gangs equivalent to the notorious gau rakshaks. This is not just applicable to cases where a Hindu woman marries a Muslim. There are bigots and fanatics in all communities. When a Muslim woman marries a Hindu, Muslim fundamentalist organisations like the Popular Front of India use violent means to prevent such marriages. Sworn enemies, such as those who belong to fundamentalist organisations in the name of this or that religion, have more in common with each other than they would care to admit.
Hopefully the Supreme Court will act in a way which strengthens women’s rights unencumbered by subjective interpretations of tradition and communal readings of what constitutes national interest.
Wednesday 1 November 2017
Thursday 1 December 2016
Thursday 29 January 2015
‘Love jihad’ in India and one man’s quest to prevent it
Vijaykant Chauhan believes that, all over India, gangs of Muslims are seducing Hindu women and forcing them to convert to Islam – and he’s made it his mission to stop them. Aman Sethi reports on India’s rising religious tensions
Aman Sethi in The Guardian
Every few days, Vijaykant Chauhan WhatsApps me a photograph of himself. The photographs are invariably scenes of crowds gathered on a north Indiastreet corner. Chauhan is right in front: a thickset, mustachioed man in his late 30s, in faux-army fatigues, a camouflage-print baseball cap and sunglasses. He stands with his fists tightly bunched, arms upraised. Occasionally the police make an appearance – their faces creased by patient smiles, their hands held close to their chests, palms facing outwards, in gestures of pacification.
These are photographs of protests, celebrations, rallies and, most often, “cultural programmes”: neighbourhood events usually organised under the patronage of the local political representative to promote good values in society. Onlookers peer out from the margins, their faces inscrutable amid all the posing and scuffling, shouting and jostling.
Last week, I received a photograph of Chauhan posed beside a scooter laden with slabs of raw meat.
“What’s up, Chauhan-ji?” I asked, when I called him up that afternoon. “Why is a crowd gathered around a hunk of meat?”
Anyone who attacks the four pillars of Hindustan deserves to be put to death
“We found that meat secreted under the scooter’s seat,” Chauhan said. “Proof that cow flesh is still freely traded in these parts.” Beef, Chauhan reminded me, was an affront to Hindus. “Our strength, Aman-ji, comes from four pillars: our cows, our temples, our ancient culture and our girls. Anyone who attacks any one of these pillars should be put to death.”
* * *
I chanced upon Chauhan while on assignment for my newspaper, the Business Standard, in Saharanpur, a trading town in western Uttar Pradesh. In the summer of 2014, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) and its controversial leader, Narendra Modi, had swept the general elections in a campaign that addressed the two presumed weaknesses of the ruling Indian National Congress – the faltering national economy, and the Congress’s alleged appeasement of minorities in the garb of secularism.
All summer long, Modi had dismissed accusations of orchestrating a communal riot that left more than a thousand dead in his home state of Gujarat in 2002. He said he was saddened by the loss of life, in the manner of a passenger involved in a traffic accident. “Someone else is driving a car and we’re sitting behind,” he said. “Even then if a puppy comes under the wheel, will it be painful or not? Of course it is.” He deflected attention away from the topic with rousing speeches about the need for jobs, progress and development. In the meantime, his lieutenants reached out to men like Chauhan to stage rallies, mobilise crowds and organise cultural events to consolidate the diverse Hindu spectrum against their Muslim neighbours.
If Uttar Pradesh were a country, it would be the fifth most populous in the world. China, India, the US, Indonesia and then Uttar Pradesh, on a par with Brazil and some way above Pakistan, Russia and Japan. More than 200 million people live here, a fifth of whom are Muslim. The rest are mostly Hindu, and divided broadly between three mutually antagonistic caste groups: the upper-caste Brahmins and Thakurs; the lower-caste Dalits; and the “other backward classes” such as the Yadavs. While castes were once divided by hereditary occupations such as priests, warriors, traders, animal herders and manual scavengers, years of lower-caste political mobilisation and emancipation have blurred these hierarchies.
For the last two decades, Uttar Pradesh’s regional parties have formed state governments by promising state patronage to unusual social coalitions. As a primarily upper-caste Hindu party, the BJP has historically struggled to build broad alliances in Uttar Pradesh, but in 2014 the party saw an opportunity. In 2013, another communal riot had caused an outbreak of violence throughout the region, and the ruling Samajwadi party had failed to contain it. Most accounts suggest the state administration played one community against the other – leaving the Hindus alienated and the Muslims fearful.
A photograph sent to the author by Vijaykant Chauhan on WhatsApp of one of the numerous rallies he holds to promote Hindu values. Photograph: Vijaykant Chauhan
A year later, with elections round the corner, Amit Shah – Modi’s most trusted lieutenant – toured the riot-affected areas in the company of local BJP leaders accused of inciting rioters. Shah himself stands accused of ordering extrajudicial killings in his time as home minister of Gujarat. “This is an election for honour and revenge,” he announced at one point of his whistle-stop campaign tour. “A man can live without food or sleep … but when he is insulted, he cannot live. We have to take revenge for this insult.”
The strategy paid off; the BJP won 71 of 80 seats in Uttar Pradesh and 282 of 543 seats across the country. While the politicians were transparently opportunistic in their utterances and their aims, I was interested in the motivations of their followers. Who were these men? What were the lives they returned to when the elections ended?
* * *
“Cut my own throat if I’m lying, but I swear to you: around us, right now, all around us, are Hindu women held captive by Muslim husbands,” Vijaykant Chauhan said on our first meeting. “Islamic terrorists are using the sacred land of Hindustan, the wealth of Hindustan and Hindustan’s daughters to breed children who are sent to madrasas, trained in Pakistan and turned into more terrorists who want to destroy India.”
We had been discussing the Uttar Pradesh state elections scheduled for 2017. The BJP leadership had found a new issue to rally their Hindu voters. They called it “love jihad”.
“I coined the phrase. Everyone called me crazy,” Chauhan told me. “Now they listen to me. I have it all on record. I estimate over 20,000 Hindu women are abducted by Muslims each year, but their parents are too frightened to tell anyone.”
Chauhan describes himself as a foot soldier in the battle to save Hinduism from its enemies. His job, broadly, is to “spread awareness” of the evil designs of Hinduism’s many enemies. He said he had no ties to any political party, but offered “issue-based support” to formations that supported his causes. He said love jihad, or the practice of Muslims seducing Hindu girls with the aim of converting them to Islam, was an existential threat to India. “They want to make us into a Muslim-majority nation.”
They are using our daughters to breed children who are sent to madrasas, trained in Pakistan and turned into terrorists
Three months after the general elections, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a rightwing organisation with affiliations to the BJP, put love jihad on the covers of Organiser and Panchjanya, its English- and Hindi-language magazines. Love Jihad: Reality or Rhetoric?, the Organiser cover wondered; the article decided on the side of reality. Panchjanya went with a caricature of a clean-shaven man wearing a keffiyeh and sunglasses with red hearts stuck on the lenses: Pyaar andha ya dhanda? (Is love blind, or a business?) “It’s a big business, there are cash rewards.” Chauhan fiddled with his smartphone to pull up a pamphlet his friends had been WhatsApping each other. The image, purportedly made by unknown Muslim love jihadis, called on all followers to take Hindu wives.
“You are ordered and requested to bring more and more non-Muslim girls to our great faith Islam,” it read. “Here is the cash reward list.”
I noted that the author had a particular taste for upper-caste Hindus: bagging a Gujarati Brahmin girl could win a lucky jihadi six lakh rupees (£6,480), while a Buddhist girl was worth a mere 1.5 lakhs (£1,600).
“We have not made it ourselves, if that is what you are implying,” Chauhan said, putting the phone away. “I’ll WhatsApp it to you and you can read it at your leisure.”
* * *
Vijaykant Chauhan was born to a family of Punjabi artisans who crossed over from Rawalpindi in Pakistan to settle in a refugee camp in Saharanpur. In Rawalpindi, his grandfather had made ghungroo, tiny metallic ankle bells worn by subcontinental dancers, and in Saharanpur, his father learned the craft and set up a small business.
In his telling, Chauhan’s father was an impoverished and occasionally violent man, and so young Vijaykant spent a lot of time with his grandparents, particularly his maternal grandmother. “My nani told me stories about the partition, and how entire neighbourhoods butchered each other. When the mob came for my nani, she squeezed herself under a pile of fresh corpses that lay in the local vegetable market. That is how she escaped.”
Vijaykant claims he was an extraordinary student – “I was perfect” – but was forced out of school in grade seven on an administrative technicality. “My parents tried to reason with the school, but what did they have? No connections, no money – and so my father put me to work at the shop.”
When the mob came for my nani, she squeezed herself under a pile of fresh corpses that lay in the local vegetable market
Vijaykant Chauhan
Vijaykant hated it. He escaped to religious functions organised by the RSS and joined the Bajrang Dal, a particularly violent RSS affiliate implicated in everything from attacking young unmarried couples for holding hands to organising riots and building bombs. The RSS and its many affiliates work on what a friend of mine once called the “life insurance model”: the RSS puts out a policy – it could be an agitation against cow slaughter, or the need for a new temple in the place of an old mosque – and leaves it to individual agents to take the initiative, spread the word and find followers who buy into the policy.
“I began my career as a particularly aggressive enforcer for the RSS,” Chauhan said. “When the Bajrang Dal demanded that the markets close in solidarity with their causes, I made sure all shops downed their shutters immediately.” On the side, he did odd jobs; he worked briefly as an electrician and he helped out at his father’s shop. Still, there was always a tiny voice that said, “I don’t have a school degree, my family has no resources, but God has made me for a special purpose.”
In 2004, that purpose was made manifest. Rashid Masood, an influential Muslim politician from Saharanpur, publicly declared that he would not say Vande Mataram, as saying a prayer to a deity like Bharat Mata was against his religion.
Chauhan was incensed. Bharat Mata, or Mother India, is the personification of the Indian nation as a female, sari-clad, Hindu deity. She made one of her earliest appearances in Anandamath, an 1882 novel in which a group of Hindu sages rise up against Muslim overlords loyal to the British empire.
FacebookTwitterPinterestexpand Vijaykant Chauhan shows off his tattoo which says ‘Vande matram’ or ‘Hail thee Mother’ . He has the same tattooed on his arms and back. Photograph: Ishan Tankha
Chauhan is obsessed with Bharat Mata – she is a frequent subject of his WhatsApp messages. Vande Mataram, or Hail Thee Mother, a poem from Anandamath, was a rallying cry for the independence movement and has the status of India’s national song, separate from the national anthem. Chauhan has Vande Mataram tattooed on his chest, arms and back.
The morning after Masood’s refusal, Chauhan launched Mission Vande Mataram – the aim of which was to get as many people to say the words “Vande Mataram” as often as possible.
The following year, Chauhan organised a cultural programme to commemorate his Vande Mataram movement. When the programme sponsors pulled out at the last minute, he sold his house to pay for the arrangements.
“The programme was a super-duper success. We did a play about Bhagat Singh’s sacrifices to the nation,” he said. “Thousands of people came up to me to thank me for reminding them of their sacred duties as patriots. I asked myself, why do I need a house? Why do I need a job? All I need is two rotis a day, which God shall provide. I decided to devote myself to the nation.”
These days, Chauhan lives in a large open cow shelter in Saharanpur. He sleeps on a string cot and spends his time looking after stray cattle and fighting love jihad.
* * *
One day I visited Chauhan to watch him at work. The shelter is a large airy space with a temple at one end and a feeding pen at the other. A shipping container, sawn in half, serves as his living space, where, Chauhan said, a veterinary surgeon sometimes examines sick cows.
People dropped by in ones and twos; some brought fodder for the cows, and others put some money in the collection box. Reverentially they fed the assorted cows – healthy, injured and infirm – while their children gaped at two caged white rabbits. A middle-aged man walked up to Chauhan towing along a young girl dressed in a pink shalwar kameez. He shouted, “Vande Mataram”; Chauhan replied in kind.
“She was standing around the market as if she was waiting for someone,” the man said, pointing to the nervous young girl. “She won’t tell me why she’s out in the market on a Sunday afternoon.”
FacebookTwitterPinterestexpand Vijaykant Chauhan poses for a visitor’s photograph at his shelter for abandoned cows. Photograph: Ishan Tankha
“Muslim boys keep buzzing up and down this street on their motorcycles, looking for precisely such girls,” Chauhan said. “Hello, hello, what’s your name, girl? Does your father know you have come out to the market?”
The girl looked down at her feet.
“See, Aman-ji, she’s clearly waiting for a Muslim. This town is full of girls who claim they are going to school, and then go off to service Muslim businessmen who give them money and drop them back in time to catch the school bus home.”
“But she hasn’t said a word since you brought her here. How do you know?”
“I have studied this in great detail. Notice she can’t look me in the eye. She’s been brainwashed.”
Love jihad made its first appearance in Uttar Pradesh in the 1920s. “In June 1924, in Meerut, handbills and meetings claimed that various Hindu women were being lured and their pure bodies being violated by lustful and sexually charged Muslim men,” writes historian Charu Gupta in an article titled Hindu Women, Muslim Men: Love Jihad and Conversions, describing a time of intense communal tensions in pre-independence India. Since then, the idea has periodically regained currency when purveyors such as Chauhan are granted a fleeting moment of relevance.
My conversations with Chauhan suggested that, for him, love jihad is a game of deception that had to be countered by the same coin. After all, why would a Hindu girl willingly fall in love with a Muslim? In the past, Chauhan has stormed district courts to prevent Hindu girls from marrying their Muslim fiances. In one instance, he claimed he was already married to the girl and produced false papers to stake his claim. “It is true the papers were false, but the scriptures allow the righteous to adopt falsehood to do good.”
Most Muslim love jihadis, Chauhan insisted, disguise themselves as Hindus. A pamphlet doing the rounds in Saharanpur offers an insight into their methods: when girls go to recharge the talk time on their mobile phones, some stores pass on their numbers to love jihadis who seduce them via text messages. If that doesn’t work, the jihadis pose as electricians, car mechanics and vegetable vendors to gain access to middle-class Hindu homes and seduce their daughters.
The young girl before us at the cow shelter didn’t seem brainwashed; she just looked very scared. “Let’s drop her home,” Chauhan said. “Come along.”
We piled into a battered Hyundai piloted by one of his friends. “Me? I’m a farmer; actually I’m a farmer turned businessman. Make that a farmer turned real estate agent,” said the driver when I asked him what he did for a living. “But most importantly, I am a Hindu. I am an admirer of Vijaykant-ji and support him whenever I can.”
The ride takes about 15 minutes. The girl sits silently in the back seat, occasionally giving directions. We turn into an alley and stop before a woman sleeping in the doorway of a brick hut. “This your daughter?” Chauhan asked, awakening the woman. “Do you know where she was? She was waiting for her Muslim boyfriend.”
“I have a fever,” the woman replied.
“I will return in the evening to speak with her father.”
The girl ran to her mother; we got into the car and drove off. As we made our way back to the city I asked Chauhan if he wanted to enter mainstream politics.
“It’s not possible,” he said. “You need money, you need connections. I don’t even have a house any more. But I live on the love and support of the people. I am happy.”
Does he wish his life had panned out differently?
“When I was younger, I thought: If I hadn’t been thrown out of school I could have become a police officer, or joined the army, or risen to a position where I could serve my people better. But now I feel that God has always had a plan for me; he wants me to fulfil a special purpose.”
* * *
“The problem with Chauhan is that he will go back in the evening and speak with the girl’s father. And who knows what he will say,” said Shandar Ghufran, pulling on a cigarette. Ghufran, a boyish 40-year-old schoolteacher and activist, has been monitoring the communal polarisation in western Uttar Pradesh for some time now. “This love jihad idea has ruptured what remains of Uttar Pradesh’s social fabric.”
The campaign has imbued all contact between the two communities with the possibility of tragic consequences. In the city of Meerut, for instance, the police had to be called in to confront a mob of rightwing Hindus when a 15-year-old Muslim boy had run away with his 14-year-old Hindu classmate.
FacebookTwitterPinterestexpand Vijaykant Chauhan shows photographs of his Hindu rallies to friends. Photograph: Ishan Tankha
The two children were found in Jaipur, en route to Mumbai to become Bollywood singers. The boy, the son of a carpenter, told his friend of his plan to make it big in Mumbai, and she decided to go along with him. By the time the police brought them home, two Muslim-owned shops had been vandalised and a Muslim home was attacked. In Bhopal, in Madhya Pradesh, a Hindu woman insisted that the state’s women’s commission order a medical examination of her Hindu husband to ensure the foreskin of his penis was intact, when she learned that he had a Muslim lover.
Such incidents, Ghufran said, will continue until the 2017 state elections. Each party will consolidate its base at the cost of the others, ratcheting up the tension in a region primed for conflict. “Things appear peaceful, but I fear that any single incident could trigger a riot,” he said. “There is, of course, a history to this.”
* * *
In August 2013, three young men – one Muslim and two Hindus – were killed in the course of an altercation in Kawal, a village on the outskirts of the town of Muzaffarnagar. Some say the Hindu boys killed the Muslim in an argument that began as a traffic accident, and others say the argument began over the harassment of a Hindu girl, but all agree that the incident came at a time of rising communal tension.
In the weeks that followed, both the BJP and the Samajwadi party, then Uttar Pradesh’s ruling party, did their best to keep tensions alive by sending their representatives to deliver inflammatory speeches before angry crowds. In the course of the riots that swept the western Uttar Pradesh countryside through the end of September, at least 62 people had died, several women were raped and over 50,000 mostly Muslim villagers were displaced from their homes. A year later, the riot relief camps still dot the villages around Muzaffarnagar.
This love jihad idea has ruptured what remains of Uttar Pradesh’s social fabric
Shandar Ghufran
“We left our village the moment we heard news that a riot had broken out. That was the mistake we made,” recounted Mohammed Aslam, as he sat hunched on a string cot beside a tent. “We should have waited for someone to get killed first.”
The government, Aslam said, does not consider his village to be riot-affected and hence he is ineligible for the riot compensation of 500,000 rupees (about £5,000) per family. So far, 768 families have been granted compensation, and the supreme court has ordered the state government to compensate another 203 people. Yet the administration is in a bind: it needs a framework to distribute the compensation, without which it could be accused of distributing state money in return for political support. In a state as poor as Uttar Pradesh, living in the putrid environs of a riot relief camp is not sufficient grounds for state-sanctioned relief.
Most of those who received support have sold their homes in their villages and have purchased lands in Muslim-majority settlements. The countryside is slowly reordering itself into Hindu- and Muslim-dominated pockets. Those with nothing are stranded where they stopped running.
Before the riots, Aslam said, he sold plastic crockery from the back of his bicycle. In the late 1980s, his father had gone to Saudi Arabia to work as a labourer and had returned with enough money to build a house, a portion of which was inherited by Aslam.
Four years ago, the household was hit by crisis: two of his daughters, aged seven and four, fell sick when they drank contaminated water from a village drain. Aslam sold his house to pay for their treatment, but both girls died within hours of each other. After that, the family was kept afloat by a monthly loan from a Hindu neighbour, paid back at 5% a month or 60% a year. When the riots rippled through western Uttar Pradesh, Aslam and his family fled to this camp, leaving behind a trail of possessions and IOUs. It’s been a year since Aslam worked, let alone considered paying his dues. “I’m too scared to go back home and I have no money to buy a house anywhere else,” said Aslam. “I really don’t know what to do.”
* * *
The retired schoolmaster sat with his head propped up on his palms, his elbows balanced on his knees, his radio by his side. “It’s a year today, isn’t it?” he said. “No one has returned.”
We sat on plastic chairs in his tiny yard at the edge of the Hindu quarter in Lissad, a village in Muzaffarnagar district, and looked out at the abandoned homes around us. At least 13 Muslims were killed here and several homes torched in the course of the 2013 riots.
“This was once a very busy neighbourhood,” he said. “That building over there, that was my son’s school. He is Hindu, but all his students were Muslims. It’s shut now. There are no Muslims in this village.”
“Why haven’t they returned?” I asked.
“I don’t know, things have changed, I suppose, times have changed,” he replied, as a young man in a tracksuit came to sit beside us. “I hear some people from the village went to call the Muslims back, but they refused to return.”
Did he miss them?
“What is there to miss?” asked the young man. “They kept to themselves, we kept to ourselves.”
“You lived together for many years before the riot,” I said. “What changed?”
The old man stayed silent – I sensed there was something he wanted to say, an explanation he wanted to offer. Perhaps he too was trying to understand why his village had suddenly turned on its neighbours, or how a schoolteacher and his students could be pulled into opposing camps.
“I don’t know,” he said, turning his back to me. “My heart doesn’t accept it.”
His young companion looked up. “Ask the Muslims what changed. We are still here.”
I left the old man to his radio and walked down into the abandoned settlement. The homes had been stripped clean, doors ripped off their frameworks, cupboards broken open. The roofs had caved in in many places, but the walls were mostly intact; some bore telltale signs of fire.
Down an alley of broken homes, I spotted a group of four young Hindu men. “Come sit, sit, sit,” said one, as he cleaned out a stalk of marijuana and mixed it with tobacco. “Do you work for a television channel?”
“A newspaper. And what do you do?”
“We?” he said. “We get high.”
So here’s the real issue, they said, between bouts of hysterical laughter. “Think about it, here we all are, sitting around. And them? They’ve got five lakhs compensation per house. Do any of these homes look like they are worth five lakhs?”
“Some families? They claimed their sons were living separately. Five sons, 25 lakhs.” “They could buy themselves a BMW with that money.” More laughter.
“They’ve given our names to the police, though,” said another, a well-built boy in a striped shirt. “I knew the Muslim boy who did it. I said why have you put my name on the list of rioters? I paid him 30,000 rupees to strike my name off the report. He said the cops took 20,000 to do it.”
“My name is still in the police files,” said a third young man whose thick spectacles magnified his slightly dilated pupils. “The cops asked for a lakh to strike my name. I don’t have a lakh, but it doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t matter for him, because he’s not applying for a government job, you know,” said a boy who looked about 19. “We all want government jobs. You can’t get a government job if you have a pending case. He hasn’t gone to college. But wait, you came first in school, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” The boy with the spectacles frowned. “Yes, you could say that.”
The afternoon sun dipped and a mild, early-evening melancholia set in. I sat with them for a while, listening as they ribbed each other, but the fun seemed to have slipped away with the sunshine and everyone seemed preoccupied by the thought of going home to face their parents.
* * *
For years, the Muslim film-maker nursed the possibility that he would – one day – marry his Hindu girlfriend. We met at a dinner organised by a friend in Muzaffarnagar. When I mentioned my work, he called me over for tea the next day. Our conversation had prompted a recollection of love and riots at another time and place. “I saw her on a train,” he recalled. “She was travelling from Dehradun to Ahmedabad, where she lived, while I was going to Mumbai to try to break into the film industry.”
She gave him her phone number, and asked for his. “But I didn’t have a number,” he said. “I was living out of a cheap hotel room in Mumbai’s red-light district.”
So he decided he would visit Ahmedabad every few weeks to see her. “I would take the overnight train and wait for her at the temple outside her office. She would sneak out at lunchtime, and then again after work.”
They’d talk until she left for home and he’d take the train back to Mumbai. But when her sister found out, she wasn’t pleased. Loving a Muslim, the sister said, was a path to schizophrenia. “Their mother had schizophrenia – so her sister’s remarks hit home. The logic was that marrying someone outside the Hindu fold would cause some sort of psychic schism.”
In February 2002, a train carrying Hindu pilgrims from Uttar Pradesh to Gujarat was set alight, killing 59 people. More than 1,000 people, most of whom were Muslim, were killed in the riots that ensued.
“She said it was too dangerous for me to come to Ahmedabad after the riots,” the film-maker said. He took off his spectacles and wiped his eyes. “We continued to meet, but it wasn’t the same.” Sometimes he is tempted to look back at the whole episode as a shared, youthful folly. “But it was love,” he said. “For what it was, for as long as it lasted, it was love.”
I once asked Vijaykant Chauhan if he thought it was possible for a Hindu and a Muslim, with complete knowledge of each other’s beliefs, to be in love. My fear, I told him, was that his campaign was fostering suspicion and fear rather than amity and understanding.
“We are not against love, Aman-ji. We are against deception and forcible conversion,” he said. He referred to Muslim Bollywood superstars with Hindu wives. “In most cases, the women are brainwashed and converted. Like Indira Gandhi.”
“Indira Gandhi?”
“Yes, she was married to Feroze Gandhi – but he was actually Feroze Khan, a Muslim. She was the first victim of love jihad.”
“But Feroze Gandhi was Parsi.”
“That’s what you think, Aman-ji, that’s just what you think. Everyone knows Feroze Gandhi Khan was a Muslim. It’s all over the internet.”
Aman Sethi in The Guardian
Every few days, Vijaykant Chauhan WhatsApps me a photograph of himself. The photographs are invariably scenes of crowds gathered on a north Indiastreet corner. Chauhan is right in front: a thickset, mustachioed man in his late 30s, in faux-army fatigues, a camouflage-print baseball cap and sunglasses. He stands with his fists tightly bunched, arms upraised. Occasionally the police make an appearance – their faces creased by patient smiles, their hands held close to their chests, palms facing outwards, in gestures of pacification.
These are photographs of protests, celebrations, rallies and, most often, “cultural programmes”: neighbourhood events usually organised under the patronage of the local political representative to promote good values in society. Onlookers peer out from the margins, their faces inscrutable amid all the posing and scuffling, shouting and jostling.
Last week, I received a photograph of Chauhan posed beside a scooter laden with slabs of raw meat.
“What’s up, Chauhan-ji?” I asked, when I called him up that afternoon. “Why is a crowd gathered around a hunk of meat?”
Anyone who attacks the four pillars of Hindustan deserves to be put to death
“We found that meat secreted under the scooter’s seat,” Chauhan said. “Proof that cow flesh is still freely traded in these parts.” Beef, Chauhan reminded me, was an affront to Hindus. “Our strength, Aman-ji, comes from four pillars: our cows, our temples, our ancient culture and our girls. Anyone who attacks any one of these pillars should be put to death.”
* * *
I chanced upon Chauhan while on assignment for my newspaper, the Business Standard, in Saharanpur, a trading town in western Uttar Pradesh. In the summer of 2014, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) and its controversial leader, Narendra Modi, had swept the general elections in a campaign that addressed the two presumed weaknesses of the ruling Indian National Congress – the faltering national economy, and the Congress’s alleged appeasement of minorities in the garb of secularism.
All summer long, Modi had dismissed accusations of orchestrating a communal riot that left more than a thousand dead in his home state of Gujarat in 2002. He said he was saddened by the loss of life, in the manner of a passenger involved in a traffic accident. “Someone else is driving a car and we’re sitting behind,” he said. “Even then if a puppy comes under the wheel, will it be painful or not? Of course it is.” He deflected attention away from the topic with rousing speeches about the need for jobs, progress and development. In the meantime, his lieutenants reached out to men like Chauhan to stage rallies, mobilise crowds and organise cultural events to consolidate the diverse Hindu spectrum against their Muslim neighbours.
If Uttar Pradesh were a country, it would be the fifth most populous in the world. China, India, the US, Indonesia and then Uttar Pradesh, on a par with Brazil and some way above Pakistan, Russia and Japan. More than 200 million people live here, a fifth of whom are Muslim. The rest are mostly Hindu, and divided broadly between three mutually antagonistic caste groups: the upper-caste Brahmins and Thakurs; the lower-caste Dalits; and the “other backward classes” such as the Yadavs. While castes were once divided by hereditary occupations such as priests, warriors, traders, animal herders and manual scavengers, years of lower-caste political mobilisation and emancipation have blurred these hierarchies.
For the last two decades, Uttar Pradesh’s regional parties have formed state governments by promising state patronage to unusual social coalitions. As a primarily upper-caste Hindu party, the BJP has historically struggled to build broad alliances in Uttar Pradesh, but in 2014 the party saw an opportunity. In 2013, another communal riot had caused an outbreak of violence throughout the region, and the ruling Samajwadi party had failed to contain it. Most accounts suggest the state administration played one community against the other – leaving the Hindus alienated and the Muslims fearful.
A photograph sent to the author by Vijaykant Chauhan on WhatsApp of one of the numerous rallies he holds to promote Hindu values. Photograph: Vijaykant ChauhanA year later, with elections round the corner, Amit Shah – Modi’s most trusted lieutenant – toured the riot-affected areas in the company of local BJP leaders accused of inciting rioters. Shah himself stands accused of ordering extrajudicial killings in his time as home minister of Gujarat. “This is an election for honour and revenge,” he announced at one point of his whistle-stop campaign tour. “A man can live without food or sleep … but when he is insulted, he cannot live. We have to take revenge for this insult.”
The strategy paid off; the BJP won 71 of 80 seats in Uttar Pradesh and 282 of 543 seats across the country. While the politicians were transparently opportunistic in their utterances and their aims, I was interested in the motivations of their followers. Who were these men? What were the lives they returned to when the elections ended?
* * *
“Cut my own throat if I’m lying, but I swear to you: around us, right now, all around us, are Hindu women held captive by Muslim husbands,” Vijaykant Chauhan said on our first meeting. “Islamic terrorists are using the sacred land of Hindustan, the wealth of Hindustan and Hindustan’s daughters to breed children who are sent to madrasas, trained in Pakistan and turned into more terrorists who want to destroy India.”
We had been discussing the Uttar Pradesh state elections scheduled for 2017. The BJP leadership had found a new issue to rally their Hindu voters. They called it “love jihad”.
“I coined the phrase. Everyone called me crazy,” Chauhan told me. “Now they listen to me. I have it all on record. I estimate over 20,000 Hindu women are abducted by Muslims each year, but their parents are too frightened to tell anyone.”
Chauhan describes himself as a foot soldier in the battle to save Hinduism from its enemies. His job, broadly, is to “spread awareness” of the evil designs of Hinduism’s many enemies. He said he had no ties to any political party, but offered “issue-based support” to formations that supported his causes. He said love jihad, or the practice of Muslims seducing Hindu girls with the aim of converting them to Islam, was an existential threat to India. “They want to make us into a Muslim-majority nation.”
They are using our daughters to breed children who are sent to madrasas, trained in Pakistan and turned into terrorists
Three months after the general elections, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a rightwing organisation with affiliations to the BJP, put love jihad on the covers of Organiser and Panchjanya, its English- and Hindi-language magazines. Love Jihad: Reality or Rhetoric?, the Organiser cover wondered; the article decided on the side of reality. Panchjanya went with a caricature of a clean-shaven man wearing a keffiyeh and sunglasses with red hearts stuck on the lenses: Pyaar andha ya dhanda? (Is love blind, or a business?) “It’s a big business, there are cash rewards.” Chauhan fiddled with his smartphone to pull up a pamphlet his friends had been WhatsApping each other. The image, purportedly made by unknown Muslim love jihadis, called on all followers to take Hindu wives.
“You are ordered and requested to bring more and more non-Muslim girls to our great faith Islam,” it read. “Here is the cash reward list.”
I noted that the author had a particular taste for upper-caste Hindus: bagging a Gujarati Brahmin girl could win a lucky jihadi six lakh rupees (£6,480), while a Buddhist girl was worth a mere 1.5 lakhs (£1,600).
“We have not made it ourselves, if that is what you are implying,” Chauhan said, putting the phone away. “I’ll WhatsApp it to you and you can read it at your leisure.”
* * *
Vijaykant Chauhan was born to a family of Punjabi artisans who crossed over from Rawalpindi in Pakistan to settle in a refugee camp in Saharanpur. In Rawalpindi, his grandfather had made ghungroo, tiny metallic ankle bells worn by subcontinental dancers, and in Saharanpur, his father learned the craft and set up a small business.
In his telling, Chauhan’s father was an impoverished and occasionally violent man, and so young Vijaykant spent a lot of time with his grandparents, particularly his maternal grandmother. “My nani told me stories about the partition, and how entire neighbourhoods butchered each other. When the mob came for my nani, she squeezed herself under a pile of fresh corpses that lay in the local vegetable market. That is how she escaped.”
Vijaykant claims he was an extraordinary student – “I was perfect” – but was forced out of school in grade seven on an administrative technicality. “My parents tried to reason with the school, but what did they have? No connections, no money – and so my father put me to work at the shop.”
When the mob came for my nani, she squeezed herself under a pile of fresh corpses that lay in the local vegetable market
Vijaykant Chauhan
Vijaykant hated it. He escaped to religious functions organised by the RSS and joined the Bajrang Dal, a particularly violent RSS affiliate implicated in everything from attacking young unmarried couples for holding hands to organising riots and building bombs. The RSS and its many affiliates work on what a friend of mine once called the “life insurance model”: the RSS puts out a policy – it could be an agitation against cow slaughter, or the need for a new temple in the place of an old mosque – and leaves it to individual agents to take the initiative, spread the word and find followers who buy into the policy.
“I began my career as a particularly aggressive enforcer for the RSS,” Chauhan said. “When the Bajrang Dal demanded that the markets close in solidarity with their causes, I made sure all shops downed their shutters immediately.” On the side, he did odd jobs; he worked briefly as an electrician and he helped out at his father’s shop. Still, there was always a tiny voice that said, “I don’t have a school degree, my family has no resources, but God has made me for a special purpose.”
In 2004, that purpose was made manifest. Rashid Masood, an influential Muslim politician from Saharanpur, publicly declared that he would not say Vande Mataram, as saying a prayer to a deity like Bharat Mata was against his religion.
Chauhan was incensed. Bharat Mata, or Mother India, is the personification of the Indian nation as a female, sari-clad, Hindu deity. She made one of her earliest appearances in Anandamath, an 1882 novel in which a group of Hindu sages rise up against Muslim overlords loyal to the British empire.
FacebookTwitterPinterestexpand Vijaykant Chauhan shows off his tattoo which says ‘Vande matram’ or ‘Hail thee Mother’ . He has the same tattooed on his arms and back. Photograph: Ishan Tankha
Chauhan is obsessed with Bharat Mata – she is a frequent subject of his WhatsApp messages. Vande Mataram, or Hail Thee Mother, a poem from Anandamath, was a rallying cry for the independence movement and has the status of India’s national song, separate from the national anthem. Chauhan has Vande Mataram tattooed on his chest, arms and back.
The morning after Masood’s refusal, Chauhan launched Mission Vande Mataram – the aim of which was to get as many people to say the words “Vande Mataram” as often as possible.
The following year, Chauhan organised a cultural programme to commemorate his Vande Mataram movement. When the programme sponsors pulled out at the last minute, he sold his house to pay for the arrangements.
“The programme was a super-duper success. We did a play about Bhagat Singh’s sacrifices to the nation,” he said. “Thousands of people came up to me to thank me for reminding them of their sacred duties as patriots. I asked myself, why do I need a house? Why do I need a job? All I need is two rotis a day, which God shall provide. I decided to devote myself to the nation.”
These days, Chauhan lives in a large open cow shelter in Saharanpur. He sleeps on a string cot and spends his time looking after stray cattle and fighting love jihad.
* * *
One day I visited Chauhan to watch him at work. The shelter is a large airy space with a temple at one end and a feeding pen at the other. A shipping container, sawn in half, serves as his living space, where, Chauhan said, a veterinary surgeon sometimes examines sick cows.
People dropped by in ones and twos; some brought fodder for the cows, and others put some money in the collection box. Reverentially they fed the assorted cows – healthy, injured and infirm – while their children gaped at two caged white rabbits. A middle-aged man walked up to Chauhan towing along a young girl dressed in a pink shalwar kameez. He shouted, “Vande Mataram”; Chauhan replied in kind.
“She was standing around the market as if she was waiting for someone,” the man said, pointing to the nervous young girl. “She won’t tell me why she’s out in the market on a Sunday afternoon.”
FacebookTwitterPinterestexpand Vijaykant Chauhan poses for a visitor’s photograph at his shelter for abandoned cows. Photograph: Ishan Tankha
“Muslim boys keep buzzing up and down this street on their motorcycles, looking for precisely such girls,” Chauhan said. “Hello, hello, what’s your name, girl? Does your father know you have come out to the market?”
The girl looked down at her feet.
“See, Aman-ji, she’s clearly waiting for a Muslim. This town is full of girls who claim they are going to school, and then go off to service Muslim businessmen who give them money and drop them back in time to catch the school bus home.”
“But she hasn’t said a word since you brought her here. How do you know?”
“I have studied this in great detail. Notice she can’t look me in the eye. She’s been brainwashed.”
Love jihad made its first appearance in Uttar Pradesh in the 1920s. “In June 1924, in Meerut, handbills and meetings claimed that various Hindu women were being lured and their pure bodies being violated by lustful and sexually charged Muslim men,” writes historian Charu Gupta in an article titled Hindu Women, Muslim Men: Love Jihad and Conversions, describing a time of intense communal tensions in pre-independence India. Since then, the idea has periodically regained currency when purveyors such as Chauhan are granted a fleeting moment of relevance.
My conversations with Chauhan suggested that, for him, love jihad is a game of deception that had to be countered by the same coin. After all, why would a Hindu girl willingly fall in love with a Muslim? In the past, Chauhan has stormed district courts to prevent Hindu girls from marrying their Muslim fiances. In one instance, he claimed he was already married to the girl and produced false papers to stake his claim. “It is true the papers were false, but the scriptures allow the righteous to adopt falsehood to do good.”
Most Muslim love jihadis, Chauhan insisted, disguise themselves as Hindus. A pamphlet doing the rounds in Saharanpur offers an insight into their methods: when girls go to recharge the talk time on their mobile phones, some stores pass on their numbers to love jihadis who seduce them via text messages. If that doesn’t work, the jihadis pose as electricians, car mechanics and vegetable vendors to gain access to middle-class Hindu homes and seduce their daughters.
The young girl before us at the cow shelter didn’t seem brainwashed; she just looked very scared. “Let’s drop her home,” Chauhan said. “Come along.”
We piled into a battered Hyundai piloted by one of his friends. “Me? I’m a farmer; actually I’m a farmer turned businessman. Make that a farmer turned real estate agent,” said the driver when I asked him what he did for a living. “But most importantly, I am a Hindu. I am an admirer of Vijaykant-ji and support him whenever I can.”
The ride takes about 15 minutes. The girl sits silently in the back seat, occasionally giving directions. We turn into an alley and stop before a woman sleeping in the doorway of a brick hut. “This your daughter?” Chauhan asked, awakening the woman. “Do you know where she was? She was waiting for her Muslim boyfriend.”
“I have a fever,” the woman replied.
“I will return in the evening to speak with her father.”
The girl ran to her mother; we got into the car and drove off. As we made our way back to the city I asked Chauhan if he wanted to enter mainstream politics.
“It’s not possible,” he said. “You need money, you need connections. I don’t even have a house any more. But I live on the love and support of the people. I am happy.”
Does he wish his life had panned out differently?
“When I was younger, I thought: If I hadn’t been thrown out of school I could have become a police officer, or joined the army, or risen to a position where I could serve my people better. But now I feel that God has always had a plan for me; he wants me to fulfil a special purpose.”
* * *
“The problem with Chauhan is that he will go back in the evening and speak with the girl’s father. And who knows what he will say,” said Shandar Ghufran, pulling on a cigarette. Ghufran, a boyish 40-year-old schoolteacher and activist, has been monitoring the communal polarisation in western Uttar Pradesh for some time now. “This love jihad idea has ruptured what remains of Uttar Pradesh’s social fabric.”
The campaign has imbued all contact between the two communities with the possibility of tragic consequences. In the city of Meerut, for instance, the police had to be called in to confront a mob of rightwing Hindus when a 15-year-old Muslim boy had run away with his 14-year-old Hindu classmate.
FacebookTwitterPinterestexpand Vijaykant Chauhan shows photographs of his Hindu rallies to friends. Photograph: Ishan Tankha
The two children were found in Jaipur, en route to Mumbai to become Bollywood singers. The boy, the son of a carpenter, told his friend of his plan to make it big in Mumbai, and she decided to go along with him. By the time the police brought them home, two Muslim-owned shops had been vandalised and a Muslim home was attacked. In Bhopal, in Madhya Pradesh, a Hindu woman insisted that the state’s women’s commission order a medical examination of her Hindu husband to ensure the foreskin of his penis was intact, when she learned that he had a Muslim lover.
Such incidents, Ghufran said, will continue until the 2017 state elections. Each party will consolidate its base at the cost of the others, ratcheting up the tension in a region primed for conflict. “Things appear peaceful, but I fear that any single incident could trigger a riot,” he said. “There is, of course, a history to this.”
* * *
In August 2013, three young men – one Muslim and two Hindus – were killed in the course of an altercation in Kawal, a village on the outskirts of the town of Muzaffarnagar. Some say the Hindu boys killed the Muslim in an argument that began as a traffic accident, and others say the argument began over the harassment of a Hindu girl, but all agree that the incident came at a time of rising communal tension.
In the weeks that followed, both the BJP and the Samajwadi party, then Uttar Pradesh’s ruling party, did their best to keep tensions alive by sending their representatives to deliver inflammatory speeches before angry crowds. In the course of the riots that swept the western Uttar Pradesh countryside through the end of September, at least 62 people had died, several women were raped and over 50,000 mostly Muslim villagers were displaced from their homes. A year later, the riot relief camps still dot the villages around Muzaffarnagar.
This love jihad idea has ruptured what remains of Uttar Pradesh’s social fabric
Shandar Ghufran
“We left our village the moment we heard news that a riot had broken out. That was the mistake we made,” recounted Mohammed Aslam, as he sat hunched on a string cot beside a tent. “We should have waited for someone to get killed first.”
The government, Aslam said, does not consider his village to be riot-affected and hence he is ineligible for the riot compensation of 500,000 rupees (about £5,000) per family. So far, 768 families have been granted compensation, and the supreme court has ordered the state government to compensate another 203 people. Yet the administration is in a bind: it needs a framework to distribute the compensation, without which it could be accused of distributing state money in return for political support. In a state as poor as Uttar Pradesh, living in the putrid environs of a riot relief camp is not sufficient grounds for state-sanctioned relief.
Most of those who received support have sold their homes in their villages and have purchased lands in Muslim-majority settlements. The countryside is slowly reordering itself into Hindu- and Muslim-dominated pockets. Those with nothing are stranded where they stopped running.
Before the riots, Aslam said, he sold plastic crockery from the back of his bicycle. In the late 1980s, his father had gone to Saudi Arabia to work as a labourer and had returned with enough money to build a house, a portion of which was inherited by Aslam.
Four years ago, the household was hit by crisis: two of his daughters, aged seven and four, fell sick when they drank contaminated water from a village drain. Aslam sold his house to pay for their treatment, but both girls died within hours of each other. After that, the family was kept afloat by a monthly loan from a Hindu neighbour, paid back at 5% a month or 60% a year. When the riots rippled through western Uttar Pradesh, Aslam and his family fled to this camp, leaving behind a trail of possessions and IOUs. It’s been a year since Aslam worked, let alone considered paying his dues. “I’m too scared to go back home and I have no money to buy a house anywhere else,” said Aslam. “I really don’t know what to do.”
* * *
The retired schoolmaster sat with his head propped up on his palms, his elbows balanced on his knees, his radio by his side. “It’s a year today, isn’t it?” he said. “No one has returned.”
We sat on plastic chairs in his tiny yard at the edge of the Hindu quarter in Lissad, a village in Muzaffarnagar district, and looked out at the abandoned homes around us. At least 13 Muslims were killed here and several homes torched in the course of the 2013 riots.
“This was once a very busy neighbourhood,” he said. “That building over there, that was my son’s school. He is Hindu, but all his students were Muslims. It’s shut now. There are no Muslims in this village.”
“Why haven’t they returned?” I asked.
“I don’t know, things have changed, I suppose, times have changed,” he replied, as a young man in a tracksuit came to sit beside us. “I hear some people from the village went to call the Muslims back, but they refused to return.”
Did he miss them?
“What is there to miss?” asked the young man. “They kept to themselves, we kept to ourselves.”
“You lived together for many years before the riot,” I said. “What changed?”
The old man stayed silent – I sensed there was something he wanted to say, an explanation he wanted to offer. Perhaps he too was trying to understand why his village had suddenly turned on its neighbours, or how a schoolteacher and his students could be pulled into opposing camps.
“I don’t know,” he said, turning his back to me. “My heart doesn’t accept it.”
His young companion looked up. “Ask the Muslims what changed. We are still here.”
I left the old man to his radio and walked down into the abandoned settlement. The homes had been stripped clean, doors ripped off their frameworks, cupboards broken open. The roofs had caved in in many places, but the walls were mostly intact; some bore telltale signs of fire.
Down an alley of broken homes, I spotted a group of four young Hindu men. “Come sit, sit, sit,” said one, as he cleaned out a stalk of marijuana and mixed it with tobacco. “Do you work for a television channel?”
“A newspaper. And what do you do?”
“We?” he said. “We get high.”
So here’s the real issue, they said, between bouts of hysterical laughter. “Think about it, here we all are, sitting around. And them? They’ve got five lakhs compensation per house. Do any of these homes look like they are worth five lakhs?”
“Some families? They claimed their sons were living separately. Five sons, 25 lakhs.” “They could buy themselves a BMW with that money.” More laughter.
“They’ve given our names to the police, though,” said another, a well-built boy in a striped shirt. “I knew the Muslim boy who did it. I said why have you put my name on the list of rioters? I paid him 30,000 rupees to strike my name off the report. He said the cops took 20,000 to do it.”
“My name is still in the police files,” said a third young man whose thick spectacles magnified his slightly dilated pupils. “The cops asked for a lakh to strike my name. I don’t have a lakh, but it doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t matter for him, because he’s not applying for a government job, you know,” said a boy who looked about 19. “We all want government jobs. You can’t get a government job if you have a pending case. He hasn’t gone to college. But wait, you came first in school, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” The boy with the spectacles frowned. “Yes, you could say that.”
The afternoon sun dipped and a mild, early-evening melancholia set in. I sat with them for a while, listening as they ribbed each other, but the fun seemed to have slipped away with the sunshine and everyone seemed preoccupied by the thought of going home to face their parents.
* * *
For years, the Muslim film-maker nursed the possibility that he would – one day – marry his Hindu girlfriend. We met at a dinner organised by a friend in Muzaffarnagar. When I mentioned my work, he called me over for tea the next day. Our conversation had prompted a recollection of love and riots at another time and place. “I saw her on a train,” he recalled. “She was travelling from Dehradun to Ahmedabad, where she lived, while I was going to Mumbai to try to break into the film industry.”
She gave him her phone number, and asked for his. “But I didn’t have a number,” he said. “I was living out of a cheap hotel room in Mumbai’s red-light district.”
So he decided he would visit Ahmedabad every few weeks to see her. “I would take the overnight train and wait for her at the temple outside her office. She would sneak out at lunchtime, and then again after work.”
They’d talk until she left for home and he’d take the train back to Mumbai. But when her sister found out, she wasn’t pleased. Loving a Muslim, the sister said, was a path to schizophrenia. “Their mother had schizophrenia – so her sister’s remarks hit home. The logic was that marrying someone outside the Hindu fold would cause some sort of psychic schism.”
In February 2002, a train carrying Hindu pilgrims from Uttar Pradesh to Gujarat was set alight, killing 59 people. More than 1,000 people, most of whom were Muslim, were killed in the riots that ensued.
“She said it was too dangerous for me to come to Ahmedabad after the riots,” the film-maker said. He took off his spectacles and wiped his eyes. “We continued to meet, but it wasn’t the same.” Sometimes he is tempted to look back at the whole episode as a shared, youthful folly. “But it was love,” he said. “For what it was, for as long as it lasted, it was love.”
I once asked Vijaykant Chauhan if he thought it was possible for a Hindu and a Muslim, with complete knowledge of each other’s beliefs, to be in love. My fear, I told him, was that his campaign was fostering suspicion and fear rather than amity and understanding.
“We are not against love, Aman-ji. We are against deception and forcible conversion,” he said. He referred to Muslim Bollywood superstars with Hindu wives. “In most cases, the women are brainwashed and converted. Like Indira Gandhi.”
“Indira Gandhi?”
“Yes, she was married to Feroze Gandhi – but he was actually Feroze Khan, a Muslim. She was the first victim of love jihad.”
“But Feroze Gandhi was Parsi.”
“That’s what you think, Aman-ji, that’s just what you think. Everyone knows Feroze Gandhi Khan was a Muslim. It’s all over the internet.”
Wednesday 31 December 2014
Conversion: With targets & incentives, new breed of evangelical groups are like start-ups
T V Mohandas Pai in The Economic Times
The Rajya Sabha has been paralysed by the Opposition on the “Ghar Vapasi” programe of a few organisations from the right. However, if you follow the debate, it is clear that this is a political battle by the left and the left of centre parties to embarrass and discredit the right of centre party in power. Maybe even with the intent to show up the government as incapable of bringing in reforms and development. The so-called conversion debate was an excuse to paralyse the Rajya Sabha, and a great opportunity was missed to debate the issue of large-scale surreptitious conversions across India (which is the real problem).
There is no doubt that large scale conversions have been taking place across India, accelerating over the last 5 years led by evangelical groups from the West. The North East has been converted with Arunachal and Tripura being now targeted. Tribal belts across Odisha, Jharkhand, Gujarat and MP have seen large-scale conversions for several years now.
The new phenomenon over the last 5 years has been the huge increase in evangelical conversions in Chennai and Tamil Nadu, clearly visible via the vehement advertising on particular channels on TV. Andhra Pradesh, particularly the interiors, Hyderabad and the coastal regions, has been specifically targeted due to the red carpet laid by a now deceased Chief Minister whose son-in-law is a Pastor with his own outfit. The visible impact across this region to any observer shows clearly that a huge amount of money has come in and that there is targeted conversion going on. Some evangelical groups have claimed that 9-12% of undivided AP has been converted, and have sought special benefits from the State (which has been reported in the media).
There is a very sophisticated operation in place by the evangelical groups, with a clear target for souls, marketing campaigns, mass prayer and fraudulent healing meetings. Evidence is available in plenty on videos on YouTube, social media, press reports, and on the ground. Pastors have been openly tweeting about souls converted, and saving people from idol worshippers. Some pastors have tweeted with glee about converts reaching 60 million, declaring a target of 100 million, and have also requested for financial support for this openly. Violence in some areas due to this has vitiated the atmosphere. The traditional institutions of both denominations are losing out to the new age evangelicals with their sophisticated marketing, money and legion of supporters from the West. One can almost classify these groups as hyper-growth startups – with a cost per acquisition, a roadmap for acquiring followers, a fund-raising machine, and a gamified approach (with rewards and incentives) to “conquering” new markets.
Our Constitution guarantees the freedom of religion, which includes the right of the individual to choose her religion. This is not in question, and is a very important concept for a nation like ours. But this right is terribly constrained by religions, which severely punish apostasy. Our laws prohibit conversion due to inducement, allurement, undue influence, coercion, or use of supernatural threats. Every debate on TV misses this point -people argue on grounds of constitutional rights and abuse right wings groups who protest such conversion forgetting that these new age evangelicals are clearly breaking the law! They go to the desperate, and prey on their insecurities by offering education for their children, medical services for the sick, and abuse existing religious practices and traditions.
People also point to the approximate 2.3% share of this minority in the last 3 censuses to deny such conversions. Of course, the 2011 census figures on religion has strangely not been released and we need this data. However, the reason why inthe conversion numbers do not show up in the census is that conversions are happening in communities entitled to reservation benefits. It appears that they are clearly told not to reveal their conversion in the census or officially to prevent loss of benefits. Most conversions happen amongst the tribals and rural and urban poor, who are soft targets to inducements.
I have a personal experience of evangelical groups trying to convert members of my family. Two house maids who converted said that the school where their children went raised fees and due to their inability to pay, they were told they would waive it if they converted (which they were forced to do). Of course, the school was rabid in their evangelism with these children. I use a taxi company for travel over the last ten years. I have noticed over 30% of drivers have converted over the last 5 years.
When asked, inevitably they spoke about evangelicals groups that gave them free education for children and paid their medical bills, provided they converted.
It is obvious that large-scale conversion by illegal means is happening in many places and the impact is clearly visible to anybody who would choose to see openly. Some apologists ask – where are the complaints about inducement or coercion? The law needs enforcement by the police independent of complaints, as is happening when rightist groups proudly announce conversions. These rightist groups lack sophistication, but they have squarely focused attention on this large-scale conversion activity. Law enforcers need to act before this becomes a bigger flashpoint.
Reconversion to Hinduism - Challenges of Ghar Wapsi
Jug Suraiya in the Times of India
The ‘ghar wapsi’ campaign needs to rebuild the ‘ghar’ they want people to return to.
The RSS, the Hindu Mahasabha and other elements of the Sangh Parivar who want to turn India into a Hindu rashtra through mass conversions called ‘ghar wapsi’ have their work cut out for them, because they face a couple of serious obstacles in achieving their objective. And these obstacles are not their ideological opponents like Congress and Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party. Nor is it the trifling matter of the Constitution, which clearly defines India as a secular republic.
No, the real problem with the so-called ‘ghar wapsi’ campaign is that many of those whom the Parivar is urging to come wapsi-ing back to their ghar didn’t belong to the ghar in the first place, which makes it difficult, semantically at least, for them to come back to it. For a lot of people being targeted for ‘reconversion’ by the Parivar belongs to tribal communities, which by and large were animists and did not belong to the Hindu fold. Indeed, as the story of Eklavya in the Mahabharata shows, tribals were given short shrift by mainstream Hinduism with its caste hierarchy: Eklavya, a tribal, is made to cut off his thumb and give it to Dronacharya as guru-dakshina because Dronacharya fears that his ‘low-born’ pupil will outdo the ‘high-born’ Arjuna in archery.
Tribals apart, many of those being ‘reconverted’ are dalits who, if anything, have been even more badly treated than tribals by casteist Hinduism, which looked down on them as being ‘untouchables’, literally and metaphorically. It was this enforced ‘untouchability’ which impelled many dalits to embrace religions like Buddhism. How can those who were considered outcasts – or ‘outcastes’- be brought back to a Hinduism which excluded them to begin with?
But perhaps the biggest problem faced by the ‘reconversionists’ is that, unlike Islam and Christianity, Hinduism has never been a proselytising religion. Before the Arya Samaj leader Swami Shraddhanand launched a programme of mass conversions in the 1920s, Hinduism never had a tradition of conversions, much less ‘reconversions’.
So before the Hindu brotherhood of the Sangh Parivar goes about converting, or ‘reconverting’, people to Hinduism it might have to do a bit of converting of Hinduism itself so as to bring proselytising within its purview. In order to bring in recruits to swell its ranks, Hinduism might have to convert, or reinvent, itself.
But should it do so, it might run a risk. To paraphrase Groucho Marx, recruits to Hinduism could well say that they did not want to join a religion which would have them as converted members.
Sunday 19 January 2014
Monday 18 July 2011
How to wipe out Islamic terror
Subramanian Swamy | Saturday, July 16, 2011in the DNA
The terrorist blast in Mumbai on July 13, 2011, requires decisive soul-searching by the Hindus of India. Hindus cannot accept to be killed in this halal fashion, continuously bleeding every day till the nation finally collapses. Terrorism I define here as the illegal use of force to overawe the civilian population to make it do or not do an act against its will and well-being.
Islamic terrorism is India’s number one problem of national security. About this there will be no doubt after 2012. By that year, I expect a Taliban takeover in Pakistan and the Americans to flee Afghanistan. Then, Islam will confront Hinduism to “complete unfinished business”. Already the successor to Osama bin Laden as al-Qaeda leader has declared that India is the priority target for that terrorist organisation and not the USA.
Fanatic Muslims consider Hindu-dominated India “an unfinished chapter of Islamic conquests”. All other countries conquered by Islam 100% converted to Islam within two decades of the Islamic invasion. Undivided India in 1947 was 75% Hindu even after 800 years of brutal Islamic rule. That is jarring for the fanatics.
In one sense, I do not blame the Muslim fanatics for targeting Hindus. I blame Hindus who have taken their individuality permitted in Sanatan Dharma to the extreme. Millions of Hindus can assemble without state patronage for the Kumbh Mela, completely self-organised, but they all leave for home oblivious of the targeting of Hindus in Kashmir, Mau, Melvisharam and Malappuram and do not lift their little finger to help organise Hindus. If half the Hindus voted together, rising above caste and language, a genuine Hindu party would have a two-thirds majority in Parliament and the assemblies.
The first lesson to be learnt from the recent history of Islamic terrorism against India and for tackling terrorism in India is that the Hindu is the target and that Muslims of India are being programmed by a slow reactive process to become radical and thus slide into suicide against Hindus. It is to undermine the Hindu psyche and create the fear of civil war that terror attacks are organised.
Hindus must collectively respond as Hindus against the terrorist and not feel individually isolated or, worse, be complacent because he or she is not personally affected. If one Hindu dies merely because he or she was a Hindu, then a bit of every Hindu also dies. This is an essential mental attitude, a necessary part of a virat (committed) Hindu.
We need a collective mindset as Hindus to stand against the Islamic terrorist. The Muslims of India can join us if they genuinely feel for the Hindu. That they do I will not believe unless they acknowledge with pride that though they may be Muslims, their ancestors were Hindus. If any Muslim acknowledges his or her Hindu legacy, then we Hindus can accept him or her as a part of the Brihad Hindu Samaj (greater Hindu society) which is Hindustan. India that is Bharat that is Hindustan is a nation of Hindus and others whose ancestors were Hindus. Others, who refuse to acknowledge this, or those foreigners who become Indian citizens by registration, can remain in India but should not have voting rights (which means they cannot be elected representatives).
Any policy to combat terrorism must begin with requiring each and every Hindu becoming a virat Hindu. For this, one must have a Hindu mindset that recognises that there is vyaktigat charitra (personal character) and rashtriya charitra (national character). For example, Manmohan Singh has high personal character, but by being a rubber stamp of a semi-literate Sonia Gandhi and waffling on all national issues, he has proved that he has no rashtriya charitra.
The second lesson for combating terrorism is that we must never capitulate or concede any demand, as we did in 1989 (freeing five terrorists in exchange for Mufti Mohammed Sayeed’s daughter Rubaiya) and in 1999, freeing three terrorists after the hijack of Indian Airlines flight IC-814.
The third lesson is that whatever and however small the terrorist incident, the nation must retaliate massively. For example, when the Ayodhya temple was sought to be attacked, we should have retaliated by re-building the Ram temple at the site.
According to bleeding heart liberals, terrorists are born or bred because of illiteracy, poverty, oppression, and discrimination. They argue that instead of eliminating them, the root cause of these four disabilities in society should be removed. This is rubbish. Osama bin laden was a billionaire. In the failed Times Square episode, failed terrorist Shahzad was from a highly placed family in Pakistan and had an MBA from a reputed US university.
It is also a ridiculous idea that terrorists cannot be deterred because they are irrational and willing to die. Terrorist masterminds have political goals and a method in their madness. An effective strategy to deter terrorism is to defeat those political goals and to rubbish them by counter-terrorist action.Thus, I advocate the following strategy to negate the political goals of Islamic terrorism in India.
Goal 1: Overawe India on Kashmir.
Strategy: Remove Article 370 and resettle ex-servicemen in the valley. Create Panun Kashmir for the Hindu Pandit community. Look for or create an opportunity to take over PoK. If Pakistan continues to back terrorists, assist the Baluchis and Sindhis to get their independence.
Goal 2: Blast temples, kill Hindu devotees.
Strategy: Remove the masjid in Kashi Vishwanath temple and the 300 masjids at other temple sites.
Goal 3: Turn India into Darul Islam.
Strategy: Implement the uniform civil code, make learning of Sanskrit and singing of Vande Mataram mandatory, and declare India a Hindu Rashtra in which non-Hindus can vote only if they proudly acknowledge that their ancestors were Hindus. Rename India Hindustan as a nation of Hindus and those whose ancestors were Hindus.
Goal 4: Change India’s demography by illegal immigration, conversion, and refusal to adopt family planning.
Strategy: Enact a national law prohibiting conversion from Hinduism to any other religion. Re-conversion will not be banned. Declare that caste is not based on birth but on code or discipline. Welcome non-Hindus to re-convert to the caste of their choice provided they adhere to the code of discipline. Annex land from Bangladesh in proportion to the illegal migrants from that country staying in India. At present, the northern third from Sylhet to Khulna can be annexed to re-settle illegal migrants.
Goal 5: Denigrate Hinduism through vulgar writings and preaching in mosques, madrassas, and churches to create loss of self-respect amongst Hindus and make them fit for capitulation.
Strategy: Propagate the development of a Hindu mindset.
India can solve its terrorist problem within five years by such a deterrent strategy, but for that we have to learn the four lessons outlined above, and have a Hindu mindset to take bold, risky, and hard decisions to defend the nation. If the Jews could be transformed from lambs walking meekly to the gas chambers to fiery lions in just 10 years, it should not be difficult for Hindus in much better circumstances (after all we are 83% of India), to do so in five years.
Guru Gobind Singh showed us how just five fearless persons under spiritual guidance can transform a society. Even if half the Hindu voters are persuaded to collectively vote as Hindus, and for a party sincerely committed to a Hindu agenda, then we can forge an instrument for change. And that is the bottom line in the strategy to deter terrorism in a democratic Hindustan at this moment of truth.
The writer is president of the Janata Party, a former Union minister, and a professor of economics.
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