Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Last Friday I travelled on the Delhi-Alwar highway to explore what meanings people attached to freedom, the golden-jubilee celebrations and the change wrought in their lives by fifty years of independence.
The experience was rewarding, though one discovered the hazards of talking to strangers in an unfamiliar place. Several people raised their eyebrows when I fired a question at them. Who was I? What brought me to the villages of Mewat the districts at the junction of Alwar and Bharatpur in Rajasthan with Gurgaon in Haryana? Perhaps a CID man deputed to conduct an enquiry?
Fellow-academics talk of rapid socio-economic change and the social revolution in the countryside. Come to Nuh to be proven wrong. This otherwise historical town, first mentioned in written history in the time of Prithviraj Rasa, survives uneasily on the fringes of urban life. Though the quality of life has improved, most people remain impoverished and marginalised. The place is a victim of civic neglect. With its broken roads, open drainage, inadequate water supply and long hours of 8220;load-shedding,8221; Nuh is an area of darkness in the otherwise prosperous state of Haryana.
Wherever we went, people were bitter and angry about the deterioration in civic amenities. The civil hospital, encircled by heaps of rubbish, exists only in name. Medicines are in short supply, most patients are invariably referred to a doctor in Gurgaon or Delhi. Children have virtually no access to a decent school or college. Nuh has just two 8220;recognised8221; matriculation-level schools and a private degree college. Government schooling is still prized, though most people said the state school offered an inferior education to that available from the few private schools. Muslims in general, and Muslim girls in particular, were under-represented at all levels of the schooling system.
Compare Nuh with Sohna, a few miles beyond the fast-developing town of Gurgaon. Known to Delhi wallahs for its sulphur springs, Sohna has many factories and industrial plants, including Datt Mediproducts, OK Play India, Continental Value, Titagarh Stells and Innovative Tech. Pac. It may be decades before such plants appear in Mewat or the fruits of progress reach this backward region. What do fifty years of independence mean to the poor, the sick and the uneducated in Mewat? Not much. Aap bare logon se poochhiye. Azadi to unko mili hai Ask the rich and the influential. They are the ones who have become independent. In most places, the standard answer was: 8220;Bas guzara kar rahe hain Just managing to survive8221;.In Nuh, the Punjabi refugees were decidedly hostile to the Gandhian and Nehruvian legacies. A refugee from Lyallpur said gleefully, 8220;Nehru ka chapter hi nahin hai Nehru is of no relevance to us8221;. His hero was Bose. What about Gandhiji? 8220;Oh, he is responsible for the present mess. He was too soft towards the Muslims and allowed them to live in India.8221; A frail-looking Meo Muslim protested. The Mahatma, he insisted, brought peace to the region and was chiefly responsible for the rehabilitation of the Meo Muslims. His intervention gladdened my heart.
These gentlemen, along with their companions in Nuh8217;s grain market, mirrored the religious cleavage that developed after the Babri Masjid demolition. Yet in an area with a long-standing history of social and cultural fusion and inter-community, the religious boundaries are still not so sharply demarcated. In the mandi, most shopkeepers transcend their boundaries and their identities become negotiable. While memories of a syncretic past have faded and been replaced with an exclusive historical consciousness, particularly after December 6, 1992, Hindus and Muslims share and voice common socio-economic grievances.
But there is no room for complacency. The status quo may not last for long. Religious zealots and political fundamentalists threaten to undermine the fragile communal equilibrium. Most people, as in Malabh village, were indifferent to the golden-jubilee celebrations in Delhi. They have some hazy ideas about Gandhi, Nehru and Maulana Azad, but scarcely know the meaning and content of freedom, nationalism or patriotism. Azadi from what?, asked Mohammad Isa, a former panchayat member. 8220;Please come to the wheat-growing village of Chandeni to discover our plight. There is not enough water to irrigate our fields,8221; added a school teacher. The struggle for existence, camouflaged behind smiling faces, goes on. With little to do outside the harvest season, most people in Malabh sit around their mud houses or a dilapidated haveli. There are some shops but no customers. Young boys and girls aimlessly roam the dusty lanes. Men sit listlessly around the dhaba, inhaling fumes from passing buses and trucks.They are energised five times a day by the call for prayer. Malabh has three grand mosques, symbols of Meo identity, but no full-fledged school. Here, as elsewhere, the state is in full retreat.
For the women, agency8217; and autonomy8217; have little relevance. Influenced by the Tablighi Jamaat, a conservative Muslim organisation, Muslim women cannot create their own space and challenge the dominant meanings through song, speech and action. They may not sing or watch TV. They are socially almost powerless. The issue is not empowerment but sheer survival.
As the President of the Republic reflected on the state of the nation in a television interview, women in Malabh were getting ready to cope with the inglorious uncertainties that would follow the crack of dawn.
