By Md. Ali, TwoCircles.net
No one term can describe her activism. Her area of work is vast and very risky also. Initially a full time journalist attached with newspapers including The Indian Express, she took the road of activism after being appalled by the horrors of the Bombay riots. She is Teesta Setalvad, a relentless campaigner for the rights and privileges of minorities- Dalits, Muslims and women.
In an exclusive interview with TwoCircles.net, she spoke on matters as diverse as communalism, gender rights, pseudo- secularism of political parties in India, minorities’ rights.
Listen to the interview:
Muslim women & the community
But the only common thing present in all these areas is her praiseworthy and courageous work which she has done in the last fifteen years or so.
She mentions some of the cases in Uttar Pradesh on which she is working, particularly the Shravasti mass rape case where the Muslim women of the village were attacked and raped on 10th July 2007. The case is pending in Allahabad High Court.
She points out that the issue of minority rights in a democracy is very important that is why they are constitutionally guaranteed, but “as important as that are the rights of the minority within the minority,” referring to Muslim women. Women are doubly marginalized not only in the socio-political power equations, but also in the areas very essential for the progress of any community, education for instance.
She says the Muslim community will have to realize that half of its part is women and these women are tremendous potential for that community. You see the merit lists of all state board examination: Muslim girls are doing well; they are doing well in every field. They want to go ahead, and ready to compete with everyone.
So Teesta points out the urgent need for the community elders, the religious leaders, and the family to seriously encourage the participation of women in the affairs of the community. Because, she points out, no community in the world history has ever been able to progress without its women standing on its side.
Ghettoisation
She says her organisation has experimented with this idea in Gujarat. In a city like Himmat Nagar, it has formed a joint force in which Muslim, Dalit and Hindu women have worked together side by side.
Teesta Setalvad says that this intermingling is also very important today because it helps rebuild the traditional linkages between the communities, because these linkages and cultural bridges between different faiths negate the communalist sentiments.
Communalism has broken the old associations and cultural linkages between different communities which have been replaced by hatred, suspicion and prejudice.
So Teesta argues that when one is working for the minority rights one should also keep thinking of rebuilding those bridges, because today the cities have been ghettoized. And ghettoisation is very dangerous, because they are vulnerable to be easy targets, she says.
In this context Teesta refers to the recent statement made by Bal Thackeray, in which he exhorted to the hindutva extremists to get in the “mini Pakistans” (Muslim ghettos) and explode bombs there.
Teesta points out that if there is intermingling of people at the residential levels and school level, for instance, then it will not allow the prejudices and hatred to build up as easily as when they are ghettoized.
Emerging Muslim middle class: a threat to commuanlists?
And that is one of the reasons why the communalists and the communal violence push people back in the ghettos, because after the partition, for the first time, Muslim middle class has emerged very strongly in the last 20 -25 years. In every profession, be it legal profession or medical, the class has made their presence felt.
Teesta further explains “and it wants its place under the sun, it also wants its share of the cake, naturally. And it is this which is the threat [for the communal forces].”
Because suddenly one sees Muslim not as a typical Maulana (as they have always been represented in the popular and mainstream narratives, although not even five percent of the Muslims are Maulanas).
But today people find a Muslim who is a woman, a lawyer , a doctor, a software professional, an engineer, and who could be anybody like you and me “but not the specimen out of your overheated imagination” and that is what is the threat, because in today’s growing India every section needs to have their share out of it.
After listening to Teesta Setalvad, one cannot help think that one of the aims of the communalists behind the Gujarat riots of February-March 2002 was to crush that threat posed by the emergence of the strong Muslim middle class. And to a large extent they became successful in their purpose.
Housing laws & segregation
Teesta refers to the housing laws which allow people to build segregated colonies for different communities. And it is very remarkable that even the Supreme Court of India is upholding these rules. Two years back a Parsi from Ahmadabad won a case. He had argued that the Parsi community did not want non-Parsis in their locality.
But Teesta points out that those laws have their roots in the pre-independence British rule when every community’s right for housing needed to be protected. “But under the Constitution they have inverse and converse impact because they deny intermingling and thereby discriminate one community against the other,” she says.
So Teesta Setalvad argues that we need to have a national debate, and amend the housing laws because these violate the basic secular nature and the spirit of the Constitution.
Minority rights and victimhood
She points out that the issue of the denial of the minority rights cannot be seen in isolation. In the context of the erosion of the secular identity and minority rights in the secular India unfortunately for a variety reasons, it s not only Muslims whose right have eroded. But also that of Dalit, the poor, and women.
“We should be clear about the fact that the Muslims are not the only victim of this erosion, because victimhood beyond a point is also destructive.”
“We need to fight for our rights. We need to convert our sense of outrage into fighting for the right. But if we become victim of the victimhood, then that can also be a very perverse logic…because that may lead to the denial of the problems that might exist within us, for instance on the discourse of terrorism, which is always a denial.”
Just as it is completely wrong to say that all the Muslims are terrorists but at the same time the sensible section of the community accepts that a small part of the youth of the community is getting strayed.
She gives the example of the Jews, pointing out how the excessive sense of victimhood can be horribly exploited and justified to perpetrate the mass extermination and genocide of the innocent Muslims.
The same people who have been the victims of the worst possible holocaust in which six million people had been massacred, have now turned into aggressors. Teesta puts a very relevant question, “Can’t it happen to the Muslims?” She herself answers: “It can happen to anyone in the world, so we have to guard against that, we can not use our victimhood to perpetrate genocide and mass extermination of innocent people, which is what is exactly happening in Israel, so we cannot afford to repeat that with Muslims.”
She repeats that “excessive victimhood without rationality can have its side effects which are very damaging for the community and the world community at large.”
Then she points that we in India are at a very historic moment, because India, in spite of all its faults, has the opportunity to show the way to the world. We in India have managed to negotiate and live together for thousand of years. In spite of social, cultural, religious and linguistic diversity and differences there are different levels at which different communities negotiate and live together.
“So why cannot we make it our asset instead of a liability? And I think that’s the language we need to be speaking to people.”
Secularism, state and religion
On the matter of secularism, and the state and its relation with religion, she says that in India we have to look at secularism from two levels.
As far as the state is concerned, the state agencies, for instance, police, government and court cannot compromise on secularism; there should be complete separation of religion from these agencies.
But when it comes to the society, and the social practices, there should be equal respects to al the faiths, because the state has to get support of every one.
She categorically objects to the historical propaganda that, as Home Minister, Sardar Patel gave money to the Somnath Temple. Teesta says that it is a completely false idea, a concocted story. In fact Sardar Patel refused to sanction money for the Temple.
Teesta refers to a letter written by Sardar Patel to the contemporary Chief Minister of U.P. Gobind Ballabh Pant, saying that it would be wrong on his part to talk about the Babri Masjid.
Mobilisation of Dalits in communal violence
Teesta also talked about the active mobilization of the Dalits in the riots and pogroms, for instance in Godhra riots itself.
More importantly it is a comparatively recent phenomenon, as earlier there used to be a gulf between the high castes and the Dalits.
Teesta says that that in India caste has always played a major role. The higher caste people have managed to mobilize the Dalits and other low castes, as it is safe to be involved into the riots from a distance.
She gives the example that in the Gujarat riots the actual perpetrators were the people from Patel community, but they managed to mobilize the Dalits, and distributed booze among them, and made to do all that. For instance in Panvela, the tragedy is that rioters were all OBC boys.
The politics of the communalism and communal violence which is always orchestrated by the upper caste is that the son of Bal Thackeray would never go in the “mini Pakistans” to explode bombs. And L.K. Advani would never participate personally into the riots. But these people will exhort others to do that, she says.
NDA, UPA and again NDA
Teesta Setalvad points out that the seven years of the NDA government was not enough and this country will see more years of Fascism, because of the “betrayal of the secular parties, Congress at the top.”
She also points out that the NDA government would be more brutal if it comes to power and she does not see the country escaping one more round of Fascism, because they have been in the power for seven years, and within six months of the UPA government it is almost as if we forgot that the NDA was ever there, and what it meant.
She also says that the Left parties which have been making such a huge noise on the nuclear deal, did they make such noise on the Gujarat case. On the political front, she says, she got support from nobody yet she says, that she knows that had the NDA been in power it would have been much more difficult.
She says that everybody knows that bureaucracy runs the country. She questions that, how many police officers, judges and administrative officers who are affiliated to the RSS have been flushed out by the UPA? From top to the bottom the system has gone ideologically corrupt. Even in the Prime Minister’s office there are many people from the RSS.
She says that she is afraid of the two possibilities; either the entire Congress has turned communal, or at least the dominant part of it. Or it has decided that now it can do without the minority votes. Because this message is coming too often, Gujarat gave it brutally.
And if it happens they would be at the real loss because, they don’t realize that once the minority votes ditches the Congress, it will not come back with it for the next thirty years as it has happened in Uttar Pradesh.
The Congress party does not trust Muslims. This is a fact that after the indifferent behavior of the “secular” parties, some Muslims have taken refuge in the BJP. When the secular parties will not shelter them they do not have any option. It is not that Muslims like BJP, but how else do they survive? She says that this is a very disturbing pattern started three years back with Godhra where the independent Muslims are governing Godhra with support from the BJP.