April 23, 2007

Rise of the Hindu Taliban?

AMULYA GANGULI, INDO ASIAN NEWS SERVICE, APRIL 22, 2007

New Delhi April 22: Even as the veiled women fundamentalists of a religious seminary in Islamabad are threatening video shop owners and setting a deadline for the introduction of Shariah laws in Pakistan, their Hindu counterparts in India have also become active, underlining a retrogressive tendency towards the Talibanization of the entire subcontinent.

What has angered the Hindu groups are some of the recent marriages between Hindu girls and Muslim boys. The extent of the concern among these outfits can be gauged from the fact that their chief patron, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), even brought out a compact disc depicting the supposedly baneful effects of such cross-community weddings.

Although the BJP had to withdraw the CD when the Election Commission accused it of spreading communal hatred to garner votes during the Uttar Pradesh elections, at least one saffron commentator referred to the underlying concerns expressed in the CD even as he acknowledged its crudity.

One of marriages that drew the ire of the Hindutva groups followed the elopement of a Sindhi girl of Bhopal with a Muslim boy. It led to the 'kidnapping' of the boy's brother by the police, evidently to put pressure on the groom. But when the Mumbai High Court intervened, the 'abducted' person was released.

The police were also ordered by the court to provide protection to the bride and the groom. But by then a Hindu "Kanya Suraksha Samity" (Committee to Protect the Daughters of Hindus) had been formed with the BJP's blessings.

Since Bhopal is in the BJP-ruled Madhya Pradesh, incidents like the abduction of the groom's brother, which was officially denied by the police till the man's presence in custody was filmed on a mobile phone, and the formation of the vigilante committee could take place seemingly with the tacit consent of the authorities.

But what these incidents indicate is that secular India is becoming susceptible to the kind of regressive attitudes which are associated with countries like Saudi Arabia, where there is not only a General Presidency for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, but also a so-called religious police or Muttawwa, which roams the streets looking for and punishing violations of strict Islamic laws on the segregation of the sexes. Afghanistan under the Taliban, too, had a Ministry for Fostering Virtue and Preventing Vice.

If the saffron brotherhood has set up similar organisations in India to watch over unmarried Hindu girls, the reason is the same extremist mindset based on a warped interpretation of the mutual exclusivity of religious communities, driven by an intense animosity towards the other sects.

Since this attitude has the Sangh Parivar's covert support, evident from the Vishwa Hindu Parishad's wish that the 'evil' of Muslim conspiracies shown in the banned CD should be widely disseminated, instances of attacks on Hindu-Muslim couples are likely to increase.

When the views of one such couple from Surat in Gujarat were aired over Rupert Murdoch's Star News television channel in Mumbai, the studio was attacked by a group, which called itself the Hindu Rashtriya Sena. By then, the boy and the girl had left the building and gone to the police on the advice of the television authorities since the girl was a minor.

The new outfit has obviously modelled itself on the better known Shiv Sena, which has earned a name for itself because of its acts of hooliganism such as digging up the cricket pitches meant for India-Pakistan games or targeting couples on the occasion of Valentine's day for acting in contravention of the Sena's definition of Indian culture.

The attack on the Star News office was followed by the burning of the effigies of film stars Richard Gere and Shilpa Shetty after the Hollywood hero kissed the recent winner of the Big Brother reality show in Britain at an AIDS awareness function.

Again, the intolerance displayed by the Hindu groups (a lawyer has filed a petition in a Jaipur court against the two 'offenders' for hurting Hindu cultural sentiments) recalled the anger vented against a woman minister in Pakistan for embracing a male companion after a paragliding show in Europe.

There is little doubt that the BJP's relentless anti-Muslim, and also anti-Christian, campaign has bred an atmosphere of intolerance in India, which frequently erupts into violence directed against individuals with the police looking on as spectators, mainly in the BJP-ruled states.

While in the case of Christians, the focus of the Hindu extremists is usually on preventing suspected conversions, which led to the murderous assault on the missionary Graham Staines and his two sons in Orissa a few years ago, the propaganda against Muslims concentrates on their alleged links with terrorism, their preference for cow slaughter, and their suspected high rates of population growth, which threatens, according to the saffron outfits, to reduce Hindus to a minority in their 'only' country.

All these allegations, coupled with the charge that the Muslims are not sufficiently patriotic since they refuse to sing the Indian national song "Vande Mataram" (Hail to the Mother), as it includes references to Hindu idols, are continuously voiced by the BJP and other saffron groups, provoking a sense of animus against the minorities.

Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst

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April 21, 2007

Civil Code, De Facto: Hindu-Muslim marriages give saffronites in MP an excuse for 'righteous' upheaval

SABA NAQVI BHAUMIK, OUTLOOK INDIA, APRIL 30, 2007

Bhopal's Hour Of Marital Crisis

* The city came close to a riot last fortnight over a Muslim boy marrying a Sindhi-Hindu girl.
* The Bajrang Dal has formed a Hindu Kanya Suraksha Committee.
* The Sindhi panchayat wanted their girls to stop using mobiles or riding two-wheelers and to abandon the city's fashion of covering their heads and faces Islamic style.
* The state CID keeps tabs on all Hindu-Muslim marriages.
* According to one list distributed by the Bajrang Dal, 341 such marriages have taken place between 1997-2004.
* Families of Muslim boys who run away with Hindu girls are harassed by the police.
* The Muslim community has responded to the latest uproar with a dignified silence.

Are Hindu-Muslim marriages made in heaven too? Perhaps, but if you happen to be in Bhopal, capital city of Madhya Pradesh, that saccharine-sweet cliche is swiftly turned sour by a vicious form of saffron vigilantism. Hindutva's brigadiers unleash mayhem on the streets each time such a marriage takes place, the state cid keeps a list of such couples, and the parivar's propaganda machine spews uninterrupted venom about predatory Muslim men luring innocent Hindu maidens.

Over the last one month, the state home department has recorded six inter-religious marriages in Madhya Pradesh, three each in Indore and Bhopal. But while the Indore marriages provoked no stir, Bhopal came close to a riot on April 14 over the issue. Of the three Bhopal couples, one Neetu and Rehan quietly returned to their respective homes after they were tracked down. Since they claimed they had got married already, their families are now believed to be thrashing out the details. One couple is yet to be traced.

It is, however, the elopement of Priyanka Wadhwani, a girl from a wealthy Sindhi family, and Umar, also from a leading Muslim family in Bhopal, that triggered the biggest storm in the city. Incensed, the Sindhi community convened a panchayat. Much deliberation later, the elders concluded that it was mobile phones and two-wheelers that were leading their daughters astray and perhaps a curb was required on these. A "distinctly Islamic" influence was also discerned in the practice of Bhopal girls covering their heads while riding. "They say they do it to protect themselves from heat and dust," said Madhu Chandwani, general secretary of the Sindhi panchayat. "But it's clearly a fashion picked up from some Muslim girls. We Sindhis left Pakistan to protect our daughters, and here in India they are moving around with their heads covered."

The girls, however, did not take kindly to the panchayat's diktat and took out a procession. Sindhis in Indore too expressed reservations. Confronted with all the opposition, the panchayat backtracked and said these were just views and not a firman on the community.

As for Priyanka and Umar, they are in hiding in Mumbai and are said to have contacted activist Teesta Setalvad. Umar's family thinks it would be foolish for them to return as Umar could be attacked or even thrown into jail in bjp-ruled Madhya Pradesh. Never mind if the court has ordered that the couple be given protection.

Priyanka and Umar's troubles have been compounded by the fact that Priyanka's family has close links with the parivar. Outlook met her uncle Lajpat Rai Wadhwani in the company of known parivar activist Bhagwandas Sabnani, who is also said to be a close aide of Uma Bharati. Uncle Wadhwani was categorical that "Priyanka is dead for us". More vocal was Sabnani who was not only instrumental in organising the panchayat but was also behind the creation of the Hindu Kanya Suraksha Samiti, another parivar front organisation that will largely be run by the Bajrang Dal.

Love doesn't enter into the picture for Sabnani; it's all part of a larger conspiracy to convert Hindus to Islam. He outlines the diabolical design Muslim boys perpetrate: wear tilaks to disguise themselves as Hindus and hang around girls colleges; threaten and force the girl to run away with them and then abandon them since they can marry many times.

Bhopal girls cover their heads against the dust, but for Sindhis it’s Islamic

That both Umar and Rehan have converted to Hinduism is not enough to wash their sins. "It's meaningless," says Sabnani. "Done under pressure." With the families of both boys under attack in Bhopal, the Hindu conversion could indeed have been a tactical move. For Sabnani, there is no doubt: "In no time, they will reconvert." The most sensible thing for the couple to have done was to marry under the Special Marriages Act, but it's a long bureaucratic process that requires a month's notice during which anyone can object to the proposed marriage.

Incidentally, of Umar's eight brothers, the eldest too is married to a Hindu, Aparajita Sharma, daughter of a police DG and an IAS officer herself. Reports in the media said the second daughter-in-law too was a Hindu but she is in fact Muslim, and goes by the name of Zeba. The rest of the brothers are unmarried. When Umar disappeared with Priyanka, it was Zeba's husband and Umar's brother who was picked up by the police and questioned repeatedly for five days.

All their connections and wealth can't stop Umar's family from feeling nervous, enough for them to refuse being photographed or be directly quoted. They say people who tried to help them were asked to lay off by the highest authorities in the state. The police would land up at their house at odd hours and without warrants. Umar's conversion is hardly an issue for them. As a family member says, "He is a 22-year-old child. We are worried only about his security and health." Currently the family has round-the-clock police protection.

Hardly surprising, as many think that the state government would have allowed a riot had the regime in Delhi been friendly. But as Sajid Ali, a senior lawyer and Congressman, says, "We recently complained to the minority commission in Delhi how there have been 112 incidents of communal tension since the BJP came to power." Ultimately, the BJP dispensation decided to back off and told its Bajrang Dal/VHP cadres not to agitate further. Even the devout doubted the intentions of the agitators. The general secretary of the All India Sindhi Sadhu Samaj, Mahant Baba Ramdas Udaseen, told Outlook: "Social outrage is not surprising in such cases. But these days such issues are also highlighted for the political agenda of dividing communities."

And no one did it better than the parivar outfits in Bhopal. They made political capital out of the state's practice of tabulating such marriages, something it has no business doing. The Bajrang Dal went to town distributing an 'official' list of 341 Hindu-Muslim marriages in Bhopal between 1997 and 2004. Hardly an alarming figure but enough to reinforce parivar lore of venal Muslim characters pursuing innocent Hindu damsels. Some years ago, VHP leader Acharya Giriraj Kishore had gone on record to tell this correspondent: "There is a physical reason Muslims can seduce Hindu girls. They give them more sharirik anand (physical pleasure) because they have a surgery, Hindus don't." In Kishore's view, circumcision is the Muslim's secret weapon. In the face of such seductive logic, can reason have a chance?

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