The Rising

Has the Shaheed Mangal Pandey Smarak Samiti, that has suddenly piped up from Nagwa village in the Uttar Pradesh backwaters, seen Ketan Mehta...

Has the Shaheed Mangal Pandey Smarak Samiti, that has suddenly piped up from Nagwa village in the Uttar Pradesh backwaters, seen Ketan Mehta8217;s film? The samiti threatens a nationwide agitation against Mangal Pandey 8212; The Rising for allegedly defaming the martyr. If the angry members of the samiti had sat in a darkened hall, they just might have been seduced into seeing it as one attempt, and not a very lustrous one, to tell the story of a man whose sketchiness in historical accounts allows us the delicious freedom to imagine many stories about him. On the other hand, perhaps seeing the film wouldn8217;t have mattered to the Samiti at all. Because the clamour it seeks to work up now is not about Mangal Pandey and the film on him. It8217;s about the competitive political jostling for the Brahmin Vote in hopelessly fragmented UP. More than that, it8217;s about a rising intolerance.

An invisible thread may run through the protests against Mangal Pandey, the latest fatwa from Deoband that seeks to bar or inhibit Muslim women from contesting elections, the new law in Dharam Singh8217;s Bangalore that seeks to control 8216;8216;Public Entertainment8217;8217; and put all citizens to bed by 11:30 pm 8212; to pick just a few random events from across the country in the past few days. A similar illiberalism raises its head, now in government and then in sections of civil society. Admittedly, there is a more hopeful way of looking at these same events. The Darul Uloom fatwa, for instance, that came on the eve of the first round of panchayat polls across UP, could be seen as a feverish attempt to roll back the growing political participation of Muslim women at the local level. It may be no coincidence, too, that the edict was issued on the day the Supreme Court issued notices to the Union government, state governments, and Muslim bodies 8212; including the Darul Uloom 8212; on a PIL that questions the legality and validity of shariat courts and their fatwas.

In the long term, it may well be that modern India will overtake these attempts to shorten its strides. But in the short term, modern Indians, where ever they are, must miss no opportunity to fight back the illiberalism.