Things fall apart

Large parts of Mewat are unaffected by the winds of socio-economic changes, though Kherla village, with its TV sets and refrigerators, is an island of prosperity thanks to entrepreneurs like Din Mohammed who operates 350 trucks in Gujarat. Although the tall and bearded Daud Khan owns large tracts of land, he and others blame the politicians for their economic plight. He says that his people depend on Allah for everything. 8220;Gone are the days of Gandhi and Nehru. Present-day netas are different; they don8217;t keep their promises. Where, for example, is the river that was supposed to flow from the East Jumna Canal in Ballabhgarh to this area?8221;

The same story does the rounds in Malabh, seven kilometers from Nuh, where people refer to278 deaths in 1996 because of dengue fever. 8220;How and why this happened is anybody8217;s guess. Why this criminal neglect? Why deny us proper roads, schools and clean drinking water? Why deprive us of a small-scale industry? Is it because we are Muslims? If not, why doesn8217;t somebody alleviate our sufferings?8221; I had no answers. One simply felt helpless and disheartened listening to their tale of woes for the second time within a fortnight. I felt like saying to them, Ram kab aye ge maaloom nahin; kash Ravan hi koi aa jaata nobody knows when Ram would return; let8217;s have Ravan instead.

As I turned on the ignition key of my car to hit the road to Nuh, people pleaded with me to convey their grievances to the authorities. I tried telling them that my intervention would not move the bureaucracy or the politicians, and that nobody pays heed to a historian harping on the familiar story of misery, deprivation and civic neglect. Who cares, I reminded myself, whether my co-citizens in Malabh have drinking wateror not. Why provide roads, electricity, schools and health centres in the rural hinterland? Surely, the essence of swadeshism is that the poor must learn to take care of their needs.

I expected the Mewatis to be angry and agitated. Did they not express their resentment in the past, as in 1857, against their oppressors? Were they not inspired by the verse Mahabharat, authored by the Mewat poet Sadullah, and by the courageous deeds described in the ballads of the battle of Panch Pahar, or the raid on Dholagarh? Today, that spirit of revolt and defiance, the hallmark of Mewat8217;s turbulent history, has been replaced by a sense of defeat, despondency and resignation. Increasingly, the Meo Muslims turn to the Tablighi Jamaat for spiritual solace. Some who travel to distant lands to spread Allah8217;s gospel reminded me of the description of tabligh parties, travelling on foot, with blankets thrown on their shoulders and parched grain or bread tied in a corner of the mantle, their tongues engaged in repeating the nameof Allah. The activities of Madarsa-i Islamia, housed in an attractive mosque off the national highway, reflect a conscious effort to redefine Meo identity in strictly Islamic terms. Such institutions, though small and modest in their goals the four teachers receive a paltry sum of Rs 2,000, mirror the transformation in the consciousness of peasant/pastoral communities.

The Meos were truly different from mainstream8217; Islam; they represented the little8217; tradition, neither speaking nor understanding the language of orthodoxy. They lived in a world of their own, untouched by the religious decrees of theologians. Converted to Islam in different periods, they retained many Hindu beliefs. Mewat thus emerged, through the vicissitudes of history, as a model of composite living and inter-cultural fusion. Now, however, it has sadly turned into a graveyard of India8217;s syncretic traditions.

It would require a dissertation to explain why this has happened. Suffice it to say that, besides the trauma of Partition andthe displacement of some 800,000 Meos which remains a reference point in subaltern consciousness, the social and cultural landscape has been largely transformed by the Tablighi Jamaat. 8220;Saare Mussalman sudhar gaye All the Muslims have been reformed,8221; announced Mohammed Isa, head of the Tablighi branch in Malabh. The region emerged from darkness into light8217; in the new climate of faith and piety. Beards were grown freely, polytheistic marriage ceremonies were discarded and Hindu customs were abandoned. For these reasons, the Meo Muslims take pride in the Tablighi Jamaat as a reformist body committed to religious cleansing, moral uplift and spiritual regeneration.

Is there a connection between the religious not fundamentalist identity of the Meos and their underdevelopment? The withdrawal of the state from developmental projects has created space for various organisations to promote their specific agenda. At present, the unfolding events sensitised us to the contribution that communal politics,particularly during the Babri masjid-Ramjanama-bhoomi controversy, can make to people8217;s sense of vulnerability and opportunity in all spheres of life. As local studies reveal, local riots, as in Mewat in December 1992, and communal discrimination do not disappear of their own accord, but require systematic social and political efforts to combat them and the social groups that benefit from them. An organised secular and radical movement is required if the conditions for the average villager 8212; woman or man, Hindu, Muslim or Scheduled Caste 8212; are to materially improve in the foreseeable future.