Month: November 2012

In death, people have ceased to be objective about late Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray. Namita Bhandare writes.

The life-size effigies strung up on lamp-posts were terrifying – at least to a child. In the late sixties/early seventies, they symbolised the South Indians who the Shiv Sena was determined to drive out of Bombay, as the city was then called. It was a sight designed to intimidate.

Forty-odd years later, intimidation remains the party’s chief weapon. Over the years, the ‘enemy’ has changed, from South Indians to Muslims to Biharis, but the tactics remain the same.

With the ashes of their party supremo, Bal Thackeray yet to be immersed in the Godavari, it was business as usual: strike against those who oppose the party, even if that opposition comes from a 21-year-old girl. Shaheen Dhada’s Facebook post questioning why the city had shut down to mark the death of a politician prompted Bhushan Sankhe, the Palghar head of the Shiv Sena, to file a complaint on the absurd charge of ‘hurting religious sentiment’. The police, responding with rare alacrity, arrested Dhada as well as a friend who had ‘liked’ her post.

The arrest was the one sour, though not out-of-place, moment in an otherwise grand send-off to a man who had dominated the city’s politics for over four decades. Few could explain the presence of 20 lakh people, including film stars and industrialists with obsequious tributes, who turned up to bid farewell at Shivaji Park. Few could explain the contradiction of how a man whose politics was founded on fear could have summoned such crowds in death.

You had to grow up in Mumbai to understand the success of Thackeray’s politics. I grew up in posh South Bombay where the only Maharashtrians I came in contact with were, I regret to say, those who worked at home. My locality was dominated by Gujarati Jains and you couldn’t even buy an egg at my local bania shop. The only Marathi I spoke were the ditties learned in compulsory lessons at school. Worse, I was not alone. Thousands of South Bombay ‘outsiders’ grew up with absolutely no understanding of the ethos, language or culture of the state they had made their home. It took my marriage to a Marathi manoos to discover a city that I didn’t know existed.

Thackeray understood and exploited this sense of exclusion: If Maharashtrians were unemployed it was because ‘outsiders’ were taking their jobs. The fact that Gujarati and Parsi entrepreneurship and philanthropy had also contributed to the building of Mumbai seemed to elude him. His appeal, if you can call it that, was emotional not logical. His rhetoric was abuse, not reason. Muslims were ‘landyas’, women journalists were ‘high-class call-girls’.

He was outrageous and it was this playing to the gallery, coupled with strong-arm politics that made him seemingly irresistible. Nobody actually asked him what it was that he had done for the Maharashtrian cause besides effecting cosmetic re-namings and an insistence on Marathi signage in shops.

In death as in life. On TV channels, commentators spoke as if India’s foremost statesman had passed away. Some spoke of the ‘phenomenon’, others of the ‘passing of an era’. There seemed to be no embarrassment of the contradiction that those who can’t forgive Narendra Modi for 2002 have forgotten and forgiven both the Shiv Sena in 1992-93 and the Congress in 1984.

In India, we do not customarily speak ill of the dead, which perhaps is why there was no mention of the Srikrishna Commission report of the Mumbai riots of 1992-93 that had concluded that the Shiv Sena and its boss had taken the ‘lead in organising attacks on Muslims and their properties’.

There was no mention of Thackeray’s ‘arrest’ in 2000 only to have a magistrate rule that the case was time-barred and he could go home free. There was no mention of the fact that Thackeray had been disfranchised by the Supreme Court for six years for promoting enmity during an election campaign. Perhaps these were inconvenient truths that went against the sheer spectacle of 20 lakh people gathered in Shivaji Park.

Somewhere Bal Thackeray has had the last laugh.

Namita Bhandare is a Delhi-based writer. The views expressed by the author are personal

Twitter: @namitabhandare

The sudden ban on the entry of women by the trustees at Haji Ali could set a very dangerous precedent. If women are excluded today, it could be non-Muslims tomorrow. Namita Bhandare writes.

In all the years that I lived in Mumbai, I must have passed by the mosque on the sea over a hundred times. For me, Haji Ali is imprinted in my imagination as an indelible part of the syncretic, inclusive culture of a city I love. But I never actually went inside.

So why does the news of a ban on the entry of women into the sanctum sanctorum of the dargah dismay me? How does it concern me? There are dargahs where women traditionally do not enter the actual mazaar (grave) of the saint. In Delhi’s Nizamuddin, women can pray at the shrine, but cannot enter it. The entry of women is also curtailed at the shrine of Qutubuddin Bakhteyaar Kaaki, the patron saint of Delhi, points out film-maker Sohail Hashmi. But the shrine of Pir Haji Ali Bukhari built in 1431 has traditionally allowed men and women equal access. It is only over the past year that someone put up a steel barricade that now prevents women from entering the actual shrine.

Noorjehan Safia Niaz, a devotee who has been visiting Haji Ali since she was a child, says that in March 2011 she was able to go right inside. But when she visited again in July this year, she encountered the barricade.

Niaz, the founder of the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan, an organisation that works to develop Muslim women leaders, is now pushing to get the ban reversed. But so far, she’s not had much luck. Meetings with Maharashtra state minorities minister Mohammad Arif Naseem Khan and state minorities commission chairman Munaf Hakeem yielded no hope. “They refused to accept responsibility. They said it concerns the Shariah and they will not intervene,” says Niaz.

The invocation of the Shariah to impose a ban on the entry of women is an ‘invented tradition’, says historian and writer S Irfan Habib. “This is what Wahhabi Islam does. It imposes one main version of Islam when in fact there are diverse traditions.”

The Constitution guarantees equality to all citizens — men, women, high born, low born, Hindu, Muslim. When religious edicts clash with the law then which should get primacy? Moreover, religious orthodoxy is not the monopoly of any one religion. Hindu temples like Sabarimala disallow women between the ages of 10 and 50. Other temples prohibit the entry of non-Hindus. And if the Kerala government can rule that the nearly 15,000 private temples in the state must pay minimum wages because that is the law, then can the trustees of another religious shrine take refuge in their personal law?

If there is a silver lining to be found then it is in the nearly universal condemnation on social media over the ban. Cutting across political and ideological lines, some felt the step was regressive and discriminatory. The All India Democratic Women’s Association has expressed its ‘outrage’. There are serious concerns about a creeping sense of intolerance and the subversion of a tradition of inclusion.

Even the Congress — its record goes back all the way to Shah Bano to its support of a Deobandi demand earlier this year that Salman Rushdie be disallowed from visiting India — seems to have taken a stand. Senior leader Digvijaya Singh called the ban a ‘regressive step’ and added that ‘Talibani thought’ cannot be allowed in India.

The sudden ban on the entry of women by the trustees at Haji Ali could set a very dangerous precedent. If women are excluded today, it could be non-Muslims tomorrow. A ban at one dargah could lead to a ban at other dargahs where women and non-Muslims have traditionally been welcomed. Where do prohibitions end? At what point does one small ban become a giant slide into intolerance? The Haji Ali trust’s ban must concern every Indian who is invested in the direction we wish to take as a nation. Bans, even in the guise of religious prohibition, mitigate our traditional tolerance, inclusion and diversity. They strike against the very idea of India.

Namita Bhandare is a Delhi-based writer