The collapse of the moral centre of our society is profound: Harsh Mander

Few things are more persuasive than hope. It’s hard to miss hope’s slow-burning embers in Martin Luther King’s words, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”. Close to 50 years after the American civil rights leader’s assassination, Eric Holder, the first African-American Attorney General of the US, qualified King’s now-axiomatic statement. The arc bends towards justice, he said, “...but only because people pull it towards justice. It doesn’t happen on its own.”

Few chapters in Indian history are as dark as the Gujarat riots in 2002, which left over 1,000 dead and twice as many injured — with the majority of them Muslims. Subsequent studies have shown that the riots were a well-planned pogrom backed by the State.

For the survivors of the carnage, like Bilkis Bano, the arc of the moral universe has proved remarkably intractable. A pregnant Bano was gang-raped and her infant daughter and seven other family members were killed at Randhikpur village near Ahmedabad. On April 23 — after 17 years of legal battle — the Supreme Court ordered the Gujarat government to pay Bano ₹50 lakh as compensation for the horrors she endured.

Harsh Mander

The roots of this violence, its bestial ferocity — especially towards women and children — even as local and global institutions looked on as bystanders are captured in stark detail in activist and former civil servant Harsh Mander’s latest book Between Memory and Forgetting: Massacre and the Modi Years in Gujarat . A prolific writer, his last book Partitions of the Heart: Unmaking the Idea of India was published just four months ago. Yet, he believes that the arrival of Between Memory and Forgetting could not have been better timed — in the middle of a highly polarising and fractious election.

Between Memory and Forgetting: Massacre and the Modi Years in Gujarat;Harsh Mander; Yoda Press; Non-fiction; ₹450

Every second Indian in the country today was born after the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992 and the rise of Hindutva, the author tells BL ink during an interaction at his home in New Delhi. “So a lot of young people in the country don’t know what it was like to live in a country that was differently imagined — even if imperfectly realised.”

Mander terms the demolition of the 16th-century mosque in Ayodhya by Hindu nationalist organisations as a gestalt shift, the first moment of triumph of Hindutva politics, changing the way it was perceived in India. “If you go back to the days of the freedom struggle, the battle was not just against colonisation but also to define what India would become after Independence,” he says.

Among the ideas that took shape at the time was that of a separate nation for Muslims, where the underlying idea was of safety in sameness. “Sameness here was defined along the single axis of religious identity. But the idea of India was not a quest for sameness, but a respect for difference,” he says. A third strand of ideology, which conceptualised India as a majoritarian Hindu state, emerged. “With the assassination of MK Gandhi, it appeared that these alternate majoritarian ideas of India were put to rest. It was agreed that India would belong equally to everyone.”

But that was not the case. Around the late ’80s, far-right Hindu organisations such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Vishva Hindu Parishad were looking for a symbol that would force open the question that was seemingly settled with Gandhi’s death — namely, what were the terms under which minorities were allowed to live in a Hindu-majority nation? “Babri Masjid became that symbol — and it was a very powerful one at that,” Mander says. The dispute over the Babri Masjid centres on the claim by Hindus that it was built over a temple that marked the birthplace of Lord Ram.

In 1989, senior Bharatiya Janata Party politician LK Advani took out a rath yatra or cross-country mobilisation of support for the construction of a Ram temple in place of the Babri Masjid. At the time, Mander was a district collector in Madhya Pradesh. “I saw India changing as the rath moved through each village and town. People would line up with offerings of bricks for the Ram temple,” he recalls. “The demolition of the mosque was the first triumph of Hindu supremacism. And those who were cheering it on eventually became the people who now lead the country.”

During the Gujarat riots, the author, who was then on a sabbatical, took early retirement from the Indian Adminstrative Service shortly after witnessing first-hand the callous disregard of the state machinery towards citizens at the relief camps.

“I knew from experience that it’s a matter of hours — at most 24 — for any major conflagration to be put out, if state officials wanted to. I realised very quickly that what had happened was not a riot but a state-aided massacre,” he says, adding that such violence has become disturbingly commonplace in India of late.

But what is far more ominous, according to Mander, is the collective erosion of compassion in the country. “For every story of brutality in Gujarat, there were three stories I could find about kindness and courage. There was a broader resistance coming from people who were not from the Muslim community,” he says. But when he recently embarked on his Karwaan-e-Mohabbat, journeys to call on the survivors and victims of hate violence across 14 states, he realised the bitter truth about how much the country had since changed. “I was asking the families of people who were lynched — almost begging them to tell me — if someone offered help, if anyone tried to stop the lynching, but the answer is almost always ‘no’.”

“The collapse of the moral centre of our society is profound and we need to acknowledge the enormity of this moral crisis,” he concludes.

Mander is pulling at the arc of the moral universe, long as it is, but it requires more hands to make it bend towards justice. The book is a beginning.

Rihan Najib

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