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Journalism of Courage
Ahead of the Himachal Pradesh Assembly elections in 2017, the happiness and peace of Khushnagri, a picturesque village in the Churah area of Chamba district, were shattered.
The alleged rape of a student at the local government school took on political colour and shops and small eateries were vandalised and set ablaze, allegedly selectively, in the ensuing communal violence in Khushnagri and the nearby town of Tissa-Bhanjraru. The village had never witnessed such disharmony before.
In the run-up to the elections, the BJP’s then chief ministerial face Prem Kumar Dhumal campaigned in Tissa and invoked the then US President Donald Trump in his speech and claimed that he won because he said he would work for his country “just like Modi is working to take India forward”.
Though Churah re-elected Hans Raj as its MLA and the BJP returned to power in the hill state, Dhumal lost and was eventually sidelined in the party. For the residents of Khushnagri and Tissa, life went on as before as they struggled amid a lack of development, the memories of the dark days of 2017 as if almost forgotten.
A government dispensary atop a hill in Khushnagri rarely has medicines or staff. With no pucca road leading up to it, reaching the dispensary is itself an arduous task for an ill person. Local villagers are waiting for over a year for their wages to be released under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). The government college in Tissa has a building but no teachers for commerce and science. Children still walk through a kutcha path to reach the government school and the local government hospital in Tissa has machines but no staff to perform ultrasounds or X-rays.
At the Tissa-Bhanjraru market, a new bus stand has come up at the spot where the small shops and eateries were burnt and vandalised in 2017. The shopkeepers who lost their shops, which they had taken on rent, had to relocate. Among them were some Muslims who ran “pure vegetarian dhabas and eateries”, according to some locals.
BJP flags and posters of Narendra Modi clad in local attire dot the Tissa where the main chowk now has a statute of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee that Hans Raj got installed in 2020. Holding on to the peace and communal harmony that has prevailed for the past five years, no one in the town mentions the riots any more. But there is palpable anger against Raj and the BJP for failing to solve local issues despite the constituency twice electing them to the Assembly. Looking to win his third straight election from Churah, the MLA is facing the Congress’s Yashwant Singh Khanna, a government schoolteacher who left his job to contest the polls.
“We clearly told the local MLA with folded hands that we cannot vote for him this time,” says Mohammad Rashid, whose “Vaishno Bhojanalaya” was set ablaze during the riots. “Five years and no one came to us, even for the sake of humanity if not monetary compensation. Our shops were burnt for no fault of ours. The monetary compensation never came. It was not easy to start everything from scratch.”
Rashid, who now runs a cloth shop, goes on to say, “Even if we forget our loss, what about the basics? There is no X-ray or ultrasound facility at the local hospital and no staff in the college. Patients are referred to Tanda or Chamba.”
Mohammad Mustafa, whose “786 Shuddh Vaishno Dhaba” was destroyed in the riots, now runs a small tea shop at a new location. “There was no option but to relocate. We never got any compensation for our loss,” he says.
Ranjit Singh, who has a shop near Atal Chowk, says, “People here realised soon that local BJP and Congress leaders added fuel to fire during the 2017 incident for their benefit. No one counselled us but we opted for peace ourselves. But the issue now is not riots, but development. Despite electing BJP MLA twice, local issues haven’t been solved.”
Shopkeeper Mohammad Gulabdeen in Khushnagri says that despite the BJP’s promises, pucca houses did not reach the poor who needed them. Gulabdeen’s grocery shop is in front of the government dispensary in Khushnagri. “Can someone enquire why we do not get medicines here? Whenever someone has fever or an injury, the nurse says medicines haven’t come. It is a task to reach the dispensary for a person who is ill.”
Razia, a villager, adds, “We have not received MNREGA wages for over a year now. How will we run homes?”
A person near Atal Chowk, who identified himself as Saddam Hussain, says, “Hindu-Muslim was never an issue here, it was only created to gain votes in 2017. Both local Congress and BJP leaders had led mobs to instigate violence and the sufferers were small shopkeepers … The people of Punjab were quick to believe the AAP. Here, it will still take some more time for a third party to rule. Till then, Himachal has always voted for a change.”
