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WE ARE NOT
COMMUNAL...PERHAPS
Shabnam Nadiya
I
A Hindu man I know got married recently. Speaking of the occasion, one of the
guests (a lecturer at a university) expressed his dissatisfaction at the
arrangements. The food was not as expected, and apparently the guests were not
properly taken care of. Then the man said, "Maybe because they were
Hindu, you know, they weren't too well disposed to us Muslims!" His words
suddenly struck me forcibly. It could very simply be that the family members
were bad hosts, but because this was a Hindu family, it had gathered some
communal shades.
We were waiting in front of Ecstasy, the store for men's clothing, just before
"Durga Pooja" when there was a power failure. There were some young
boys hanging out there, indulging in harmless fun - sharing a cigarette or a
joke, checking out girls. Then someone said jokingly, "All the Malus are
spending like crazy for Pooja, let's go kick some Malu ass".
A girl I had attended Holy Cross College with, remarked blithely when some of
us invited a varsity classmate to sit at the same table with us at TSC,
"Why are you asking him to join us, don't you know he's Hindu, they're
dirty you know, they smell bad."
II
The university lecturer remains close friends with the Hindu groom, the boys
outside Ecstasy did nothing more than join in laughter at their friend's
suggestion; a year later my college classmate declared that the Hindu boy was
her closest male friend. These people I speak of are not bad people; they do
not hate people because of their color or their creed, they do not resort to
violence to resolve issues. If you speak to them about the minority problem in
Bangladesh, about the increasingly violent face of religion that has emerged
in recent times, they will express their horror and their anger at atrocities
that occur in the name of religion - any religion. Yet somewhere deep inside
lies a kernel of something dark, something that is communalism, as surely as
the massive terror of Gujarat and the 'isolated' incidents of "Banshkhali"
and across Bangladesh are communal.
Communalism does not just mean going out into the streets, burning, and
looting "their" houses, raping "their" women or slitting
"their" throats. Communalism is the little things we do and say; the
stereotyping of people. Communalism is watching a little girl with a dirty
dress and snot running down her nose and thinking that Hindus are dirty and
don't take care of their children.
When violence related to the demolition of the Babri mosque was raging
across India, I was a teenager, growing up in the enlightened and sheltered
environment of a university campus. I remember a boy a couple of years younger
than myself living nearby, his father also a teacher like mine. He was the
quiet type, the classic four-eyed geek in appearance. He was also Hindu. One
evening, when some of my friends were passing by his apartment, they decided
to throw stones at his window. And they also shouted names at the apartment-
"Malaun!" they called out; and "Muslim Killers", "Babri
Bashers". It was harmless fun, I heard again and again later, no
different from the time when we all used to tease the nerdy types at school.
The harmless fun left three or four windows broken in the apartment. The next
morning there were complaints from the neighbors at this kind of unruly
behavior. There were also several late night anonymous phone calls, whispering
obscenities at the boy's mother. The boy's father never actually made a
complaint.
Is that communalism? Yes or no? Perhaps, in the light of Gujarat or the lesser
happenings in Bangladesh you will say "Of course not" in an
affronted voice. But when one day I will wake up and find that the Hindu
family next door is gone, suddenly left town with most of their belongings,
their land sold away quietly with even their closest Muslim friends without a
clue, I will remember the sound of windows breaking. Whenever I will hear
anyone announce with pride that the terrible events surrounding the Babri
Masjid, or the Gujarat riots were not reflected in Bangladesh, or that things
like the Banshkhali tragedy are horrific but isolated incidents, I can't help
but think of the Hindu boy living near our house. No, he was not beaten up,
his sister was not raped, and they were not uprooted from their house. Of
course these things did not happen to him, for ours is a tolerant community
and we think of them as one of our own. But in this world there exists more
than one kind of violence. The harmless fun indulged in by some high-spirited
teenagers gave that Hindu family one message very clearly - they were not part
of us. The boys didn't mean any harm. Some of them were even childhood friends
of the Hindu boy growing up side by side. They hung out together, talked about
girls, shared their first puff on a cigarette. They didn't really have
animosity in their hearts when they threw those stones. But they did throw the
stones-- at the one apartment among thirty others that housed a Hindu family
during a time when religious tensions were high across the sub-continent.
But still we are not communal people. Incidents do happen occasionally here
and there, but these are isolated incidents, and can happen in the best of
nations, among the best of people. There are always a couple of bad apples in
any given barrel. The kind and scale of the horror of Gujarat is almost
unthinkable here. Almost unthinkable. Almost.
III
I fear less the seeable violence- that is the violence and hatred that bares
its fangs and takes away your house, your home, your family; the violence that
says that you are Hindus/ Muslims/ Christians and you do not belong here among
us. I prefer that violence. That is something you can put your finger on,
point at and say "Look, look at what they have done to us!" But in
Bangladesh it is the violence of the mind, violence that is implicit that we
need to fear, the violence that slowly eats away who you are; the violence
that is a voice calling out "Malaun" in the darkness, the violence
that laughingly throws stones at your windows, the violence that is a strange
voice on the phone at the dead of night.
Those of us who come out and say "Kick those malauns back to where they
came from", are the easy ones. These you can look at, and easily identify
as evil people, hate mongers, people who would like to sow discord in the
fabric of our human coexistence.
But then there are the others, the people like you and me. Liberals who think
that they are fair minded and tolerant, yet who retain a kernel of mistrust
regarding the existence of "them"; these are the ones we truly need
to fear.
Bangladeshis proudly pronounce that this is not a communal nation. I myself
when talking of racism and communalism have boasted that yes, compared to our
neighboring nations we are much more tolerant and non-communal. But the trap
of self-complacency is a dangerous and ever widening pit. It is so easy to
fall into it forever.
One thing about discrimination - measuring our own evil against the evil of
other nations does not absolve us of our own guilt. Expiation does not lie
within the words: there are people who are worse than we are. The fact that
the man next door cracked his wife's ribs does not mean that my crime of a
single slap on her cheek is less of a sin. The fact that communal riots happen
in India or Pakistan but not in Bangladesh does not indicate that we are
better human beings. Or that the poison of religious and/or racial hatred has
not seeped into our minds.
IV
So the question comes up again-- are we communal or aren't we? Perhaps the
answer lies somewhere in between. Truth has a disconcerting habit of being
neither black nor white. But what we need to do today is look deep within
ourselves. The question to ask is not simply whether we are or aren't communal
people; the question is, are we content with what we are? If we are happy with
who and what we are, then it does not matter whether we are communal or
whether we practice unfair discrimination. For if we ourselves feel no
discontent, then there is no power in the world that can make us amenable to
change - any change. If, however, we feel that whatever the reasons, we, the
majority, have failed to provide minorities of this country with an
environment where they are able to stand up straight and strong, to speak with
courage and dignity about the human condition as experienced by them, then it
is time for us to rethink the identity we have created for ourselves.
A few isolated experiences of one individual are what this essay started off
with. I have a number of non-Muslim friends, but have never actually thought
of the fact that they were minority people, never considered what meaning that
fact held for them, how it shaped their selves and their lives. I was content
just knowing that they were around, they were my friends. I have only recently
realized that the experiences narrated in the beginning of this piece were
"experiences" at all. Perhaps in the grand scheme of things they are
unimportant. However, with the rise of violence directed against a certain
kind of people, it has become necessary to reexamine all our comfortable
assumptions regarding a number of things - not in the least, assumptions
regarding our selves.
There are times in the lives of individuals as well as in the lives of
nations, when ignorance itself is a sin. If we choose not to see, not to know
who and what we are, then it is easy for the oft cited "elements with
vested interests" to escalate a sense of "otherness". It
appears that all the potent ingredients needed to reach that final stage are
being aroused and assembled in Bangladesh. However, it is for us to decide
whether the truth is too grey to be seen; it is for us to decide whether the
escalation towards a larger violence should continue unchecked. The angry,
young poet, Rudra Muhammad Shahidullah once asked, "Stop, question
yourself, which road will you take?" It is time, we ask that question of
ourselves.
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