Hate crimes and healing

Reconciliation

Karwan E Mohabbat’s Journey of Solidarity Through a Wounded India

Harsh Mandar, Natasha Badhwar and John Dayal (eds)

Westland Books

171 pages; Rs 399

This book is as hard to read as it is to put down. Co-edited by Harsh Mandar, Natasha Badhwar and John Dayal, it chronicles the journey of Karwan E Mohabbat — a journey undertaken by a diverse group of citizens across the country, to express love, solidarity and condolences to families of victims of mob violence. Again and again, the essays in the book return to a single question — can a nation so fractured by hate crimes, encounter killings and communal deaths ever be made whole again by love? Can broken fences be mended? Can love act, not only as a balm but as an instrument of change?

To many, these questions might seem simplistic, naïve even. But they have come at a time when the increasingly violent polarisation of Indian society has made many fear for the future of civil society in India. Reconciliation is, thus, a timely reminder that love and empathy can actually effect transformations, just as they did for Gandhi decades ago.

From Assam to Gujarat; Haryana to Karnataka, the ‘Karwaneers’, as Mr Mandar refers to members of the caravan of love, met families grappling with heartbreak and despair, wondering why their loved ones were taken. The most moving account in the book is about the death of 16-year-old Sibghatullah Rashidi of Asansol in a communal riot. His father, a maulana of the local mosque, exhorted his congregation not to respond to his son’s death with violence. After ensuring that peace would prevail, the heartbroken father performed funeral rites on his son’s mutilated body. In doing so, the father rejected what Mr Mandar refers to as the “Doctrine of Vicarious Guilt” — that individuals must bear the burden of sins, real, imagined and across history, of their entire community. This, he writes, is the reason so many lynchings and instances of mob violence occur.

The essays in the book reveal that for many Karwaneers, mostly city born and bred, these journeys were searing, new experiences. Ms Badhwar, for example, writes of the horror she experienced while watching the video of a man giving precise instructions on how to kill a Muslim without getting booked for his murder. Every essay in the book is, thus, a personal journey into the intolerant cesspits of India. And each writer examines mob and communal violence from a different standpoint — as a practising Christian, as someone in an interfaith marriage and another, as a human rights activist. John Dayal, a founder Karwaneer, writes evocatively of the disquiet he experiences when he realises that Muslims are marginalised to such an extent that their plight had been rendered invisible. In one of the most honest passages in the book, he wonders, very much aware that he too belongs to a religious minority, why more Christian organisations have not come forward to protest the human rights violations of Muslim and Dalit lynching victims.

Reconciliation reveals certain sad commonalities among instances of mob violence across the country and over time. One, lynchings and mass killings — be they the atrocities committed on Dalits in Shamli district in Uttar Pradesh under the Yogi Adityanath-led BJP government or the mass killings of Sikhs after Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 under the Congress leadership — have taken place under all political parties. Two, no minority is safe from mob violence. Dalits, women, Muslims and tribals are all being further marginalised by the fear of violent reprisals that hangs in a constant pall over their heads. As author/activist Navsharan Singh writes, “wherever the Karwan went, we witnessed a complete breakdown of law and the isolation of Muslim communities in the wake of state hostility and the apathy of non-Muslim communities”. Elsewhere in the book, Mr Mandar notes that even more dangerously, this apathetic silence is now being replaced by selective outrage. So while Hindu suffering often elicits anger and empathy, Muslim suffering is being seen as inevitable, even deserved.

Third is the role of the police. In many cases enumerated in the book, the police have been either directly involved or implicated by their inaction.

Fourth and perhaps most reprehensible is the thunderous silence about these killings from people like us, from wealthy corporations and the government. As a young Karwaneer points out, all of us who have stood by silently are also guilty of abetting the hateful climate we find ourselves in today. To many, this silence quite justifiably has a ring of tacit approval.

The importance of this book is that it will prompt many readers to ask some basic questions from the world around them. Why would anyone feel enough hatred towards a stranger to mutilate and murder him? Which religion would condone the filming of that murder or sharing that video on social media? Which civilised culture allows the killing of people simply on the suspicion of beef-eating? How long can minorities in India continue to live, in what Martin Luther King called “constantly at tiptoe stance”?

There are no sane answers to these questions, nor does Reconciliation offer any. Only one thing is for certain though -- these are questions we all must ask every day, and this makes Reconciliation one of the most important books to be published this year.