‘I am a Muslim, a Hindu, and an Indian'

Is there a language to console a mother whose son has been bludgeoned to death?

‘This is my son, this is where my son was . . . . We will not wash this blood.’

Maragatham spoke in Tamil, a language that I don’t understand, and yet I understood her because she was speaking with her entire body. A group of us, representing a people’s campaign called Karwan e Mohabbat, had entered the small room in which her son, Shanmugham had been attacked by a mob of upper caste people with clubs, logs and axes. There was a flat screen TV on the wall. Its screen was smashed.

Maragatham, the grieving mother, entered after us. She was wailing and speaking simultaneously. She showed us her son’s blood on the mud floor of the room.

Most of us backed off from the spot she indicated, horrified that we had stepped on spilled blood. We moved closer to the walls. She then pointed to blood splattered on the wall, and again I moved away. Speaking loudly to make herself understood, she narrated how her son had been attacked from behind as he sat with a friend: he was killed at that very spot, his head split open.

Kachanatham village in Sivaganga district of Tamil Nadu is sixty kilometres away from the vibrant, bustling city of Madurai. Maragatham is a Dalit woman whose son, Shanmugham, was one of the three men who were hacked to death by a mob of upper-caste men and women from a neighbouring village. The attackers had gone from home to home, specifically hunting to kill three of the most-educated, highest-earning young men in the village in an attempt to teach the entire Dalit community ‘a lesson’. Besides the three who were killed, more than fifteen people were hospitalized with deep cuts, gashes and fractures. Some would be disabled for life.

As we began to move out of the room, Maragatham picked up a log of wood from a pile outside the room and showed us the bloodstains on it: ‘This is what they attacked my son with . . .’

I wanted to take the weapon from her hand. I wanted to transfer some calm from my hands to hers. Help her to move away from her abject rage towards a surrender to grief.

But is there a language to console a mother whose son has been bludgeoned to death? Besides her personal tragedy, there was also the historical and structural oppression to understand. A village of Dalits had been targeted by a mob of upper-caste families from neighbouring villages as punishment for having pulled themselves out from extreme penury by pursuing higher education and jobs. Shanmugham was a post-graduate, the second victim was a driver in the city and the third, a father of a soldier in the Indian Army—when the mob couldn’t find the son, who had returned home to get married, they killed his father and looted the home.

As I stepped out of the room that had been the scene of the crime, my eyes first searched for my own fifteen-year-old daughter, Sahar. I needed to see her and yet I hoped that she wasn’t too close to our group either. She was standing a little away, at a distance. The village of Kachanatham is so neat and colourful that I could have taken a photograph of her at that moment and it would have made a pretty picture reflecting none of the distress we were hearing and experiencing as we stood at this site of modern-day inter-caste violence.

Here we were in this moment—one mother, still in shock, beating her chest for a murdered son, and another looking to shield her daughter from the trauma of being confronted by the grief of others.

I’m not quite sure why I have been travelling with my daughter to sites of hate crimes where even I struggle to process the horror of the violence perpetrated. I had asked her if she wanted to travel with the Karwan e Mohabbat and she had said yes. She wanted to be a part of the life I was choosing. She wanted to stay close to me. As a parent, I want to both protect my children as well as expose them to the world as it exists around us.

I often wonder what choices I would have made if I hadn’t had children. Their presence in my life compels me to leave the home and become an activist. By travelling and working with Karwan e Mohabbat, I am responding to the rise of right-wing Hindutva in India and its impact on vulnerable communities and minorities. I must show my children that we are standing up against injustice, that we challenge the politics of hate. That we reach out to victims at a time when they have been abandoned by the state as well as society.

When did my understanding of family and country and my role in both become so intertwined with each other? I surprise myself, both with the depth of my own distress as well as my quiet commitment to transmute my helplessness into action.

****

In the autumn of 2017, Harsh Mander, a writer, teacher and human rights worker, announced the founding of Karwan e Mohabbat (Caravan of Love), a journey of atonement, solidarity and conscience to visit people who had been targets of hate attacks and to offer them the support they needed towards justice, livelihood and healing.

My husband and I had felt an instant connect when we first heard of this civil society initiative, which had launched with an online crowdfunding appeal. A few weeks later, I joined a group of people who had all responded to Mander’s call to travel across parts of India that are worst affected by lynchings. Among our group were writers, photographers, educationists, journalists, social workers, activists, scientists and a group of young men studying to be Catholic priests.

‘The purpose is two-fold,’ Mander had written in his crowdfunding appeal. ‘To respond to the everyday fear of Muslims, Dalits and Christians and the worrying silences of the majority’.

One of the first prominent cases of hate crime had been that of the lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq in his own home in Bisara village, Dadri, Uttar Pradesh. On 28 September 2015—over a year after the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janta Party had come to power in India—a mob had collected and attacked Akhlaq’s family in response to an announcement made in a temple claiming that they had slaughtered a calf to consume beef. Among other weapons, the attackers had used a sewing machine lying in the home to attack both the father and his son. Akhlaq died and his son was admitted in hospital with serious head injuries.

Dadri is less than ten kilometres away from my home on the outskirts of Delhi. Its news had triggered a visceral sense of dread for what had been unleashed in Indian society.

Over the next few months and years, multiple attacks were reported on Muslims and Dalits, many of them accompanied by gory videos of the lynchings. A teenage boy called Junaid Khan was beaten to death on a train when he was returning home after shopping for Eid in Delhi’s Chandni Chowk area. Pehlu Khan, a dairy farmer, was lynched in Alwar by self-styled ‘gau-rakshaks’—cow vigilantes—when accused of transporting cattle for slaughter, despite carrying papers to prove that he had bought milch cattle to rear in his own home. In Jharkhand, Mazlum Ansari and a fifteen-year-old Imteyaz Khan were returning home from a cattle fair when they were attacked and hung from a tree by men belonging to the Bajrang Dal, the youth wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sena (RSS), the right-wing, Hindu nationalist outfit that is regarded as the parent organization of the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP). The victims were poor cattle traders who made ends meet by buying young calves and selling them again after rearing them to adulthood. In Mangalore, Harish Poojari was stabbed fourteen times and his intestines pulled out, only because the attackers—again from the Bajrang Dal—mistook him for a Muslim when he was riding pillion on a motorcycle that was being driven by his Muslim friend who was wearing a skullcap.

A nationwide pattern had begun to emerge and it was very disturbing to witness. Fuelled by the anti-Muslim rhetoric and upper-caste Hindu male supremacist posturing of the leaders of the ruling BJP, more and more Indians were beginning to justify hate violence perpetrated on innocent citizens of minority communities. Social media and WhatsApp groups had become rife with fake news, Islamophobia, and a renewed pride in being Hindu, based on a crude re-imagination of history and mythology. The increasing intolerance towards, and disregard for, liberal, secular values and a scientific temper was palpable.

On the political stage of the country, the constitutional promise to protect and nurture the most vulnerable communities and people was being disregarded by those in power —the very people whose role it is to enforce the commitment.

‘How culpable are we when our brothers and sisters are burned and lynched and we stand by? We need to interrogate the reasons for our silences . . . we need our conscience to ache. We need it to be burdened intolerably,’ Mander would repeat, trying to frame the discourse to include the culpability of silent bystanders.

In our middle child’s diary I found a line that read like her own one-line bio—‘I am a Muslim, a Hindu, an Indian. And I love Harry Potter.’ She signed it with her name, Aliza.

The innocent directness of the statement moved me so much I had taken a photo of the page. I remember having a strong sense of being an Indian as I was growing up, but those decades had also been a time of singing patriotic songs in school, celebrating nationhood via Independence and Republic Day broadcasts on Doordarshan and being raised by a generation who had witnessed the freedom movement and been part of the brick-by-brick building of a new India.

The child of an inter-faith marriage, Aliza had observed life around her and picked for herself the identities that felt like home to her. After Akhlaq was lynched, I wrote a column in Mint Lounge that was titled, ‘Can Aliza’s India survive?’

For how long would the child be allowed to claim her multiple identities with safety and dignity?

****

Over the course of the next two years, the Karwan continued to travel across multiple states, making at least one journey every month and often making repeat visits to the homes of survivors to help them navigate legal processes and follow up on their psycho-social welfare. The team expanded to include lawyers, researchers and multi-media practitioners. We started creating a long-term media archive to preserve the details of the crimes and their impact on lives. We also began to make and disseminate films to document the hate crimes, to establish patterns and to record the testimonies of survivors as well as the responses of others affected.

We quickly realized that these were not just stories of tragedies. These were also accounts of great resilience and of truth telling. Of people who not only refused to be defeated but also offered hope and solace to those who came to mourn with them.

The journeys made many of us in the team confront our self-imposed limits and interrogate our commitment to go beyond our own comfort zone. Do I have the emotional stamina to stay with the tragedy and its consequences on the family who are struggling to come to terms with it?  Can I resist the distraction that the privilege of my class, caste and location bestows on me, even for short periods of time?

In my earlier career as a video journalist in broadcast news, I had repeatedly found myself covering massacres, riots, bomb blasts, accidents and other incidents of death and loss. In retrospect, I know that my camera equipment and the rigour of functioning as a professional would help to insulate my colleagues and me temporarily from the horror of what we were witnessing. After a decade of chasing the news, the dissonance created by the lack of permission to feel our feelings and our increasing disconnect with the people whose lives we were reporting left me feeling burnt-out. I felt that I was betraying both the people I was representing in my work as well as my own self. I needed to leave what I had loved so deeply to recover and restore my core.

A decade later, I was going back to similar scenes of crimes, listening to people narrate the minutest of details. This time there was no video camera in my hands, no shots to compose or deadline to chase and abundant permission to listen deeply and empathize. There were others in the team showing the way and helping make sense of the mindlessness of the crimes and the impunity of the perpetrators.

Yet, the frustration of being nothing more than a drop in the ocean continued to bog me down. I know that my main contribution, apart from physically holding and consoling survivors, is to write their stories. To expose the connections that show a systematic targeting of vulnerable communities and castes to push them back towards penury, helplessness and voicelessness. To reveal the collusion of the state and ruling classes and to hold them accountable.

I have cried a lot, but not typed enough. I have yet to write the stories that have hit me the hardest in my gut.

There is a way to sublimate my personal distress into strength and power; I know that. There is a way to out-walk the depression that clings to me like a weight around my ankles, slowing me down, holding me back. I don’t have enough words to describe horror, pain, outrage. But I must break through the wall of my own inarticulateness.

                                              ****

‘Empathy is first and foremost an act of imagination,’ Mander often reiterates. Compassion is an integral part of human nature but our privileged upbringing trains us not to care. We can unlearn the apathy that we have internalized.

Everywhere we travel, we almost always find ourselves addressing community gatherings. Every time I come face to face with the discomfort of breaking my own silence, I find that I don’t have to think too hard to frame sentences. The connections are already there, I just have to step out of my own way and let the words flow. The boundaries are artificial. There is power in reaching out.

‘My name is Natasha Badhwar and my husband’s name is Mirza Afzal Beg,’ I began, as I found myself facing a predominantly Muslim male audience in Kandhla, a small town, or what is called a ‘kasba’ in district Shamli, Uttar Pradesh. ‘My father is called Trilok and my father-in-law is Ashfaq. The story of this land is the story of my family.’

We were in a Muslim-majority area that had seen a robust participation in the Revolt of 1857 as well as the later freedom struggle against British colonization. Leaders from the community had shared with us earlier in the day that while caste rivalries between Jats and Dalits have always been sharp-edged in this area, communal violence was a new and manufactured phenomenon. Karwan members and volunteers had organized an Aman Sabha—a peace meeting to talk and to listen.

I shared the Partition stories from both sides of my family. How my husband’s grandparents in Ghazipur in east Uttar Pradesh had been cut off from their eldest son who had chosen to hold on to his government job in Chittagong when the country was divided in 1947. When he began to die of cancer in the 1970s, his mother could not get a visa to meet her own son, who had now settled in Karachi. A village in Uttar Pradesh mourned for one of their own that they could no longer reach out to.

I spoke about my own Hindu grandparents who had left behind their home in Lahore and crossed over with young children to start life anew. Despite my grandfather’s success in the transport business, he died prematurely. The stress and trauma had caught up with him. I mentioned the names of my own children—the great-granddaughters of these two families—who are a symbol of a land trying to heal from the wounds of its past. We are the adults who must turn the tide away from hate.

I don't always like to mention that my husband is a Muslim or that my children have a mixed identity. I feel defensive about the deduction that I am invested in this work because the threat perception is more real for my own family and those who I love. I want to raise my voice and say that it doesn’t matter. The atrocities, the injustice, the horror of what we are witnessing does not amplify or diminish according to the location in which we, the witnesses are situated.

As a woman, I have never cared to belong to any religion. I don’t accept the traditional hierarchies of the regressive, patriarchal structure of any religion as it is practiced.

Yet, I have begun to often publicly proclaim my Hindu identity when I speak to people in communities. I position myself in the majority community and speak to other Hindus from there. I am an upper-caste urban Hindu and that removes me from harm’s way. But is this the kind of Hindu you and I want to be? Is this the kind of Indian we want to be collectively?

                                              ***


Why is it so hard to write this essay? I change fonts on the page. I minimize the document on my computer screen in the daytime and resolve to write at night. I am too uncomfortable at night to type at my desk. I carry it with me when I am travelling on the Karwan e Mohabbat journeys, thinking I will write when the experience and emotions are raw and live. I return home with a growing shame and guilt that I am continuing to neglect writing this essay.

Is it too vast for me to process? Is there trauma to relive that I am avoiding? I know for certain there is some kind of imposter syndrome. Who are you to tell the story of others who have suffered unimaginable violence, an inner voice nags me. What are you going to do, bleed your own heart onto this page? How will that help anyone who has lost the only earning member of their family?

From across the country, the news of lynchings and hate crimes continues with scarcely a pause. A Goa-based musician on a field trip in a tribal area in Assam is lynched on suspicion of being an outsider with malicious intentions. In vain, he screams the names of his upper caste Hindu parents to try to convince his attackers that he is not a Muslim. In Manipur, Farooq Khan, recently returned from Bangalore with a fresh MBA degree is accused of stealing a two-wheeler, attacked by a mob in the presence of police personnel and his slow, painful death recorded on mobile phone cameras. Closer to Delhi, there are yet more video recordings of hate crimes reported in Hapur, Mewat, Saharanpur and Gurgaon.

There are few condemnations by those in power. In many instances, the administration files criminal cases against the murder victims and perpetrators roam free. Often they are feted by ministers and protected by their own communities. Families of victims find themselves isolated and abandoned, struggling to deal with their new reality. Most of them have no means to claim compensation from the state and are unable to negotiate with local police and courts.

I write a reported piece on the lynching of Rakbar Khan in Mewat for The Caravan, a narrative journalism magazine. Khan’s bereaved wife had been lying in bed, almost unresponsive, unable to sit up straight when Harsh Mander and I visited their home within a few days of the incident. Her daughters were the same age as mine. There is a photo of Khan—viral on social media—that shows the man alive when the police had reached the scene of the crime and taken him into custody. Yet, he died within hours. There is callousness and collusion on the part of those whose duty it was to rescue the victim.

I have a near meltdown as I spend a weekend negotiating with overworked desk editors about small details like photos and headlines. I am raging at my own powerlessness. ‘A man has died, his family is destroyed and we are obsessing over photo captions . . . ’ I cry to myself in a corner of my room. There are guests and children at home, plans being made to attend a wedding. Friends try to hold on to me till I recover.

What am I pretending to be? I know I am harassed most by own self-doubt and internalised judgement. There is survivor’s guilt. Discomfort with my own privilege. There is a nagging sense of never having done enough. I tire myself out and shut down to recoup my energy.

At some point I will have to deal with the wounds within me, so I am parking them here for now. Acknowledging on the page that they are there and they influence how I function. They demand healing.

As the journeys continue, I get more opportunities to know myself better. I also see a quieter, calmer side of me. One who speaks up in groups and is no longer paralysed by shame attacks. There is also the high of solidarity, of support, of the memories of forming connections with each other.

The more grief we confront, the more we expand our ability to experience happiness, fraternity and friendship with the people we meet.

****

At home, there was unexpected good news.

My brother and sister-in-law, parents of eleven-year-old twins, were expecting a new baby. At a phase in our lives when my peers and other siblings were wondering if we would be able to do justice to the childhoods of our adolescent offspring, the news of a new baby in our midst felt like a reset button had been pressed in our lives.

We could not afford to be weary and cynical. She deserved fresh energy from us. She would bring a fresh energy and a light-hearted happiness into the extended family.

As my sister-in-law’s pregnancy advanced, my firstborn daughter continued to accompany me quietly, on many of the Karwan journeys—to Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Assam and Orissa. At home, Aliza, now aged fourteen, learnt to manage her anxieties about the world and the risks she often worried her mother was taking. Our youngest child began to fold paper cranes to welcome the new baby. Origami was part of the curriculum in her Waldorf school and the home was dotted with delicate paper butterflies, frogs and cranes.

To mark the birth of new cousin, she folded the smallest paper crane imaginable. It was so small that I was afraid I would disfigure it were I to hold it between my fingertips. We placed it delicately on her palm and took photos. She had made a family of cranes—parents, adolescent twins, and a newborn baby.

This unexpected gift transformed our extended family and brought us back into a group huddle after years. This baby has arrived in a world in which Maragatham is mourning for her young son who was hacked to death.

The brain functions best when it is hopeful. Acting as if we have hope, gives us hope and eventually averts our own surrender to despair. The healthiest psychological response to alarming information is action. Slowly, persistently, collectively, we have to continue the work of healing and resistance. With hope, optimism, even naiveté, if need be.

This essay is a BOOK EXCERPT from the anthology:
A Thousand Cranes for India – Reclaiming Plurality Amid Hatred
Edited by Pallavi Aiyer