Undiscovered Country. The activist

I met Ashraf (name changed) a few months back in distressing circumstances. Like most other residents of Delhi, I knew that tens of thousands of people had fled their homes after the Muzaffarnagar riots. And like most other Delhi residents I had no idea what to do about it.

A friend, though, put me in touch with an NGO working with those who had fled their homes in fear. My wife and two of our friends — Vivek and Ruchika — decided we would drive down to see the camps.

It was there that we met Ashraf. He had done a survey of the camps around the area, doing a needs assessment, finding out where the people had come from, and under which conditions they had fled their homes. He also did an informal check of how many residents were in each camp, how many supplies had been received, and thus a rough breakup of how much had gone where — and how much had also disappeared between the donors and those in whose names a few unscrupulous men picked up the donations and pocketed them. This is work that he did on his own time, at his own cost, and while he guided us from camp to camp, explaining where one political party had managed to assert itself, and where another had done so, we asked him how he came to be involved in the work he was doing. He shrugged, at first, not really ready to open up to strangers.

But it is hard to walk through one miserable camp after another and remain strangers. His story came out in small bursts. He was a local boy, not really from an educated background. His father had been marginally literate and had seen no reason to waste his money on Ashraf’s education. Ashraf wanted to study, though, and he did small jobs that allowed him to get through school, earn a degree. It was more his drive than the degree that would have mattered. He had an office job, a salary, but something pushed him in other directions. It started with medical shops, illegal drugs and a small piece of empowerment called the Right to Information Act.

Ashraf’s small town had, a while back, started experiencing a small uptick of violence. Prohibited drugs were freely available, and young men had started sampling them. Initially it was merely a cause of hilarity and annoyance, and then it transformed into street-fights and stabbings. A few young men died. Nobody acted though. Everybody knew that a few medical stores were illegally selling drugs, but the police had been paid off, the local politician was curiously quiet, and who cared about a few good-for-nothing boys?

Ashraf cared. Maybe he saw himself in them — a young man with few opportunities, he too might have fallen into such habits, had he not had his determination. Ashraf filled out an RTI request, asking whether the drugstores had the proper licences for the medicines they were stocking, and how many prohibited drugs they were stocking. The education he had received was enough for him to painstakingly state the details of his enquiry, and having paid the ₹10 fee, he waited for his answer.

The answer came in the form of an official enquiry team. The drugstore owners, utterly complacent that they had bribed the right officials, found themselves shut down. Unwilling, or unable, to believe that this had all been engineered by a young man on his own, they blamed their downfall on scheming rivals. Ashraf did not enlighten them. He grinned as he told the story, and then we were at another camp. Three of the families there had lost relatives in the riots, water from the recent rains puddled around the makeshift camps set up on forestland. Faeces floated in the water, and children ran around. Disgusted, Ashraf made a short speech, saying the children should be in school. “Look at me,” he said, “I had nothing, not even a supportive father, but I worked, I prayed, I can stand on my own two feet.”

It is an image that stays with me. A month ago, I was at a conference on Countering Violent Extremism in South Asia and South East Asia. We discussed the issues in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh and the Philippines. The one big question for many of us was what explained Indian exceptionalism? How was it that in the midst of all this fury and violence, India was affected only very slightly in comparison to all the others? To me part of the answer lay in Ashraf, and the systems that allowed someone like him to stand tall, stand proud and, in the midst of tragedy and deprivation, assert that there were ways to challenge injustice in the world and triumph against it. Unfortunately, some of the question comes from that image as well. The thousands in the camps had fled because a broken system had not protected them from murder and rape, nor had shown any initiative to hold the guilty to account. How long can we rely on the drive and honesty of activists like Ashraf, expecting them always to rise out of broken systems, find their way on their own, inspire us, while the systems stay broken, and we do little to fix them?

( Omair Ahmad is an author. His last book was on Bhutan.)

Follow Omair Ahmad on Twitter>@OmairTAhmad

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