Brutality, power and the use of
religionM V Ramana
The Daily Times
Thursday, October 24, 2002
Last week Virender Singh, Dayachand, Kailash,
Raju Gupta and Tota Ram were lynched — beaten to death — in the
Indian State of Haryana for the “crime” of skinning a cow. All five
were Dalits, which means the oppressed and is the name given to
themselves by the untouchables. Though the events have initiated
widespread outrage and condemnation, right wing Hindu
fundamentalists have excused the killings due to the purported
injury to Hindu sentiments.
Representative of this was
Giriraj Kishore, the leader of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) — the
most antediluvian of the family of Hindu right wing organisations
known as the Sangh Parivar — who stated that Hindu scriptures accord
an important place to the cow, holding it as sacred. Clearly in his
mind, the lives of the five Dalits were not as sacred. The local
office-bearers of the VHP and the Shiv Sena submitted a memorandum
to the police forbidding them from taking action against the
guilty.
That the lynching happened outside a police station
and in the presence of police officials and a senior member of the
civil administration indicates that these authorities were also
effectively in connivance. What is more, the police registered cases
against the victims under the Cow Slaughter (Prevention) Act. Worse
was to follow: two days after the gruesome lynching, the local
administration ordered a post mortem — of the cow, to find out
whether it was dead or alive when it was skinned!
Before
reflecting on the events, it is important to dismiss some
misconceptions. While cows are given a prominent place in Hindu
writings, apart from the occasional day when cows are washed and
decorated, for the most part the lot of cows in India is quite
pathetic. The sight of them wandering around in a half-starved state
looking for food in garbage dumps is common.
The second
misconception is that beef is not produced or eaten in India.
According to government statistics, among animal meats, beef is the
meat India produces the most (1.44 million tonnes in 2000); the
second is buffalo meat (1.42 million tonnes) and only third, is
mutton and lamb (0.7 million tonnes). Nor is this a new trend. In a
recent book “Holy Cow: Beef in Indian Dietary Traditions”, historian
D. N. Jha has quoted extensively from Hindu religious texts and
scriptures to argue that beef eating was widely prevalent in Vedic
India. The response of the Hindutva brigade was to call for the
banning of the book — historical facts are not things that religious
fundamentalists pay any heed to, especially when it does not suit
their needs.
An event like this cannot also be reduced to one
cause. The case reflects for example, the persistence of the caste
system and untouchability, as well as the lack of accountability by
police and other government officials. But perhaps the most
important force on display here is the rise of the Hindu right wing,
and its tacit supporters, who have not hesitated to use violence to
mould society according to their wishes. The fact that Dalits have
borne the brunt of this violence also reveals the fact that such
violence, and indeed the growth of Hindutva, has come about partly
as a reaction to the increasing social and political assertion of
marginalised groups.
These underlying factors suggest that
this is unlikely to be an isolated incident. As the leading Indian
newspaper The Hindu (which despite its name is no supporter of the
right wing politics of the Hindutva variety) pointed out in its
editorial: “the barbarism witnessed... could be enacted in several
other parts of the country given the prejudices inherent in the
thought process of some sections, even now, against any form of
egalitarianism and assertion of this right by the
oppressed.”
In a striking testimony to the common nature of
social conditions in India and Pakistan, the late Pakistani
journalist Najma Babar put forward a similar argument in 1984. (I
must mention that I would have never come across this but for the
wonderful little collection of Babar’s newspaper columns, The
Dispossessed that documents the erosion of women’s rights during the
reign of General Ziaul Haq.) Writing about an incident where some
people from a landlord family beat up a poor carpenter and forced
the women in his family to dance naked in the streets in Nawabpur
near Multan, Babar forcefully argued that “unless the feudal system
is done away with, such atrocious evils not disappear.... The fight
for human rights and dignity for women... has to be a fight for the
total abolition of feudalism.”
If the case in India was
about brutality towards one disempowered section, namely the Dalits,
in the Pakistani case the brutality was directed at women. The 1984
case was but one instance. More recently we have witnessed brutal
honour killings in Pakistan most prominently in the murder of Samia
Sarwar in 1999 for wanting to divorce her husband. Acting somewhat
like the VHP in India, the ulema in Peshawar then reportedly issued
statements saying that the man who murdered Samia Sarwar should
instead have killed her lawyers Asma Jahangir and Hina Jilani
because they are leading Pakistan’s young women towards waywardness
and working against Islam. Samia Sarwar’s was not an exception — the
same year the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) reported
that 888 women were murdered in Punjab alone.
What is common
to all these cases is the invocation of religion to justify the
power of the elite few to determine how the vast majority should
think or act. The power could be that of (some) men to determine the
conduct of women, or the right of the privileged sections of society
to determine who shall marry or not marry, who shall have sex and
who shall wear what kinds of clothing. Such expressions of power and
the use of the religious idiom to entrench these power relations
should be firmly opposed; modern societies should allow religion no
place in public affairs.
