How history has shaped the Indian mind

 

Rahul Bhatia’s book, ‘The Identity Project — The Unmaking Of a Democracy’ through narrative, anecdote, research and on-the-spot reporting explains why India is the way it is today

By Shevlin Sebastian

In the book’s introduction, author Rahul Bhatia talks about an aunt’s partner who told him to be careful about Muslims. ‘They don’t see themselves as Indians,’ the man said. “Jaat hi alag hai (they are made of something different).” His aunt butted in, “You don’t know. They’re savages. I’ve seen what they are capable of.” Two friends told Rahul about the howling of the ‘mozzies’ minarets near their home.

Disturbed, Bhatia decided to investigate what had happened. He did six years of research and met all kinds of people. The result is a memorable 449-page book, ‘The Identity Project — The unmaking of a democracy’.

The book begins with a protest by the faculty and teachers of the Jamia Millia Islamia University. It was against the Citizenship Amendment Act. Parliament passed this act on December 11, 2019.

The police entered the old library at the Ibn Sina block. Then they began wielding their plastic sticks. ‘Squeezed in the crowd [student] Minhajuddin made for the exit,’ wrote Bhatia. ‘As Minhajuddin went by, he felt a whip and a burning pain across his left eye that almost made him faint. Although he did not know it then, the attack rendered his eye useless. It may have been his beard, he said later, that got the police’s attention. He wore it long then.’

Bhatia describes the students’ reaction to the CAA at Mumbai and Ambedkar University in Delhi. Most students were fearful. ‘They knew the police were using new technologies to identify dissenters,’ said Bhatia. ‘They had seen unidentified drones flying over protests, taking pictures, picking out dissenters and saw police point cameras at crowds. Their data was being transmitted to an unknown location, for unknown purposes.’ No surprises then that someone had scribbled, ‘Hindutva Gestapo everywhere.’

Bhatia wrote about the Shaheen Bagh protests. And the 2020 Delhi riots. At the police station at Gokulpuri, a photographer, Meherban asked Bhatia to walk from the building to a few Muslim-owned body parts and tyre repair shops. It took 91 steps.

Meherban said Hindu gangs set the shops on fire in February 2020. ‘It had been a slow-burning, with men returning in waves to set fire to one more shop, one more vehicle, one more tyre,’ recalled Meherban. ‘Despite the calls, no police had traversed the ninety-one steps.’

And in a chapter called Testimony, a mob gathers in front of a lane, shouting ‘Jai Shri Ram’ slogans. They also shouted hateful slogans, like ‘Kill the mullahs’, ‘Make the circumscribed run away’ and ‘Burn down their houses’. Then they moved into the lane and attacked all the Muslim houses.

Nisar, who built a successful business in textiles over decades, lost everything in one night.

But there was apathy everywhere for their suffering. Grievously injured Muslims would arrive at the Lok Nayak government hospital. The woman at the admissions desk said, “Didn’t you think before firing bullets and throwing stones? Do you have no shame?”

And when the people accompanying the injured said, “Does that mean you were there? You’re sitting in a hospital and accusing him of doing those things. So you were there too?”

But the woman did not budge. And the patients had to be taken elsewhere.

Despite pressure and threats, Nisar decided to testify against those who had pillaged and burnt his home. He had to attend the case at a sessions court in the Karkardooma court complex in East Delhi. Bhatia attended it and wrote a brilliant on-the-spot report about what happens inside a court. You will burst out laughing and after that pull your hair in frustration too. Finally, you will spread your hands out in exasperation as you watch the judge at work. It seems like things are moving ahead, but that is an illusion. Owing to endless delays and postponements, it took two years for Nisar to testify for the first time in front of the judge. No wonder people say the process is torture.

In the next section, called A New Country, the author traces the rise of the Arya Samaj in the 1850s. Dayanand Saraswati, a philosopher and preacher (1824-83), was the founder. Dayanand railed against the bloated idol worship of Hinduism. He spoke against child marriage and widow remarriage. And it was Dayanand who propagated the protection of the cow through a slim book, ‘Gokarunanidhi — Ocean of Mercy for the Cow’. This concept caught fire. The meetings on cow protection were attended by 5000 people. Soon, cow protection societies sprung up.

There was strife between Hindus and Muslims about it. In May 1894, the Allahabad-based newspaper, the ‘Pioneer’, reported that, for generations, the rival sects (Hindus and Muslims) had lived in harmony. But now the strain was showing. Sometimes, there was violence instigated by the cow protection societies.

‘Large numbers of Hindus armed with sticks and knives attacked smaller groups of Muslims with guns,’ wrote Bhatia. In 1882, there was a full-fledged riot in Salem. Many Muslim homes were burnt, according to the ‘Pioneer’. The mob razed a mosque. Along with the Arya Samaj, the Hindu Maha Sabha came into being in 1915.

In later years, a prominent Mahasabha official was a cataract surgeon named Balakrishna Sheoram Moonje. He worshipped Italy’s leader Benito Mussolini. Moonje wanted to set up a military school, like the way Mussolini had done in Italy. In the paperwork for the school, which was set up in 1937, Moonje stated that if the school is dissolved, the assets should go to Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). A Marathi-speaking Brahmin, Dr. Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, had set up the RSS in 1925.

Bhatia traces the career of Hedgewar and comes up with interesting statistics. Between February 1926 and August 1927, there were 52 riots. Seventeen riots occurred because of processions and music played outside places of worship. Total dead: 200. Injured: 1700.

In the riots in Calcutta, from April to May 1920, 113 died, and the injured were 1070. ‘Moonje and other stalwarts of the movements to unite Hindus travelled to Calcutta shortly after the unrest had subsided,’ wrote Bhatia. ‘The injured had barely healed, and tempers barely cooled, when Moonje delivered an incendiary speech about the ongoing “civil war” between Hindus and Muslims.’

When Bhatia described the chaos and the bloody riots after the partition of India in 1947, he quoted Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru: ‘There is a limit to killing and brutality and that limit has been passed during these days in North India. A people who indulge in this kind of thing not only brutalise themselves but poison the environment…individual attacks continue in odd places by the kind of persons who are normally quiet and peaceful. Little children are butchered in the streets. The houses in many parts of Delhi are still full of corpses. These corpses are being discovered as people go inside and find dead bodies which have been lying there for many days.’

Later, Nehru stated that the RSS and Sikhs mostly fomented this organised violence.

Other subjects include the experiences of Partha Banerjee, who was a loyal RSS worker. However, he left the organisation in 1981. Banerjee wrote a book called ‘In the Belly of The Beast: The Hindu Supremacist RSS and the BJP in India, An Insider’s View’.

He told Bhatia that the RSS foot soldiers had ‘sub-par intelligence. Ninety to ninety-five percent of its members were practically brainless idiots. They dumb you down so that you are not allowed to think, question or challenge. You just blindly follow directives from leaders.’

Bhatia noted that in the RSS magazine, ‘Organiser’, a surgeon, wrote that if a woman had a contraceptive pill, she would grow a beard. ‘An opinion held in 1949 was likely to be held in the year 2023,’ wrote Bhatia.

Bhatia also wrote about the President of the Bharatiya Janata Party Lal Krishna Advani’s Rath Yatra in September 1990. The aim: to build a temple where the Babri Masjid stood. It was believed to be Lord Rama’s original birthplace. One of the rallying cries was: ‘Just one more push, break the Babri mosque’.

As the yatra proceeded from the Somnath Temple in Gujarat, deaths began occurring owing to inflamed rhetoric. On October 27, 52 were killed in Jaipur. On October 29, 88 died in Bijnor, Rampur, Lucknow, Howrah and Ranchi. By October 30, the death toll reached 67 in Colonelganj and Hyderabad.

And the story went on….

This book will shake you up. It is a must-read. The author writes it in a straightforward manner. So, it is easy to read. People will get an idea of how India is today, thanks to events that took place during the past 150 years. The need to know the past is imperative.

As Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana said, in his most famous and oft-repeated aphorism, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

(Published in kitaab.org)