Thirty-six years after losing his parents, sister and a four-year-old daughter in one of India’s worst sectarian massacres, Abdul Suban says he is still trying to prove he’s a citizen of the Hindu-majority nation.

Suban is one of hundreds of thousands of Bengali-speaking Muslims categorised as “doubtful voters”, who will not find their names in a National Register of Citizens (NRC) the northeastern border state of Assam will release on Monday.

“If the government has decided to brand us foreigners what can we do?” said the 60-year-old. “NRC is trying to finish us off. Our people have died here, but we will not leave this place.”

Suban was seated with his wife at their house a few hundred metres from a vast paddy field where, in 1983, scores of people were chased down and killed by machete-armed mobs intent on hounding out Muslim immigrants. He survived by running as hard as he could and hiding behind a bush for days.

Work on the citizens’ register has accelerated under the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

With an eye on the 2019 national election, the BJP’s Hindu-first campaign has become more strident, critics say, playing to its core base with divisive programmes such as the citizenship test in Assam, already a tinderbox of ethnic and religious tensions.

Elsewhere in the country’s northern heartland, lynchings of Muslim cattle traders have risen under Modi in the country where many Hindus consider cows sacred, further deepening social divides.

The BJP has denied the lynchings have any connection with it being in power. Modi has at least twice publicly spoken out against cow vigilantes.

MASS GRAVE

Several other survivors of the “Nellie Massacre”, which killed around 2,000 people from more than a dozen villages, gave accounts of burying bodies in a mass grave now partly under water.

They said they hoped the release of the NCR list on Monday would not spark further violence. Security has been tightened across Assam.

The citizenship test is the culmination of years of often violent agitations by Assamese demanding the removal of outsiders they accuse of taking jobs and cornering resources in the state of 33 million, known for its tea estates and oil fields.

“The NRC is extremely important to make the Assamese people feel protected,” said Santanu Bharali, the legal adviser to the BJP chief minister of Assam.

“It’s a moral victory. The ethnic Assamese always maintained the presence of foreigners and this will prove that.”

But the opposition Congress party and rights activists say the government is misusing the register to target even legal Indian Muslim citizens who have traditionally voted for non-BJP parties. The BJP and NRC authorities have repeatedly denied the allegations.

“COMMUNAL POLITICS”

To be recognised as Indian citizens, all residents of Assam had to produce documents proving that they or their families lived in the country before March 24, 1971.

Suban said both he and his father were born in Assam, and showed Reuters a soiled yellow document that showed his father’s name in the list of voters in Assam for 1965, before the cut-off date. The local border police declined to discuss individual cases, but said not all documents furnished by suspected illegal immigrants were valid.

Hundreds of thousands of people fled to India from Bangladesh during its New Delhi-backed war of independence from Pakistan in the early 1970s. Most of them settled in Assam, which has a near-270 km (165-mile) border with Bangladesh.

The migrants included many Hindus, but Modi has issued orders stating that no Hindu or members of other minorities from Pakistan or Bangladesh would be considered an illegal immigrant even if they entered the country without valid documents before 2014.

“BJP’s only aim is to do communal politics, including through the NRC,” Congress lawmaker Ripun Bora said.

The BJP said the NRC was monitored by the country’s top court and there was no question of discriminating on the basis of religion.

Following an outcry from rights groups over possible harassment of Muslims in Assam, Interior Minister Rajnath Singh said that the NRC exercise was being carried out in an impartial and transparent manner.

Singh also reiterated that people finding their names missing from the list could raise objections and appeals, and said that they would not be thrown into detention centres.

Rivals say that as Modi’s government faces disillusionment for failing to deliver on jobs and prosperity, it will step up religious mobilisation across the country.

FEAR IN THE COUNTRYSIDE

The first draft of the NRC, released on Dec. 31, confirmed the citizenship of 19 million people, leading to jubilation for some and heartbreak among others.

The NRC office, however, told the Supreme Court this month that 150,000 people from the first list, a third of them married women, would be dropped from the next one, mainly because they provided false information or gave inadmissible documents.

Political activists in Assam say most of those are Bengali-speaking Muslims. NRC chief Prateek Hajela, whose office has processed 66 million documents and spent nearly $180 million in the whole NRC process, declined comment on the religion of people who would be removed from the register.

“We are doing an exercise that is unprecedented and if there are course corrections which are required to be done, we will need to do that,” said Hajela, who is guarded round-the-clock by a team of police.

Hajela said that most of Assam’s 126,000 so-called doubtful voters, and an estimated 150,000 of their descendants, would be excluded from the NRC in accordance with a court order.

One of them is Nellie farmer Suban’s son Nabi Hussain, 28, who said he has voted in two Indian elections but now fears arrests.

“We are scared,” said Hussain, his wife looking on from their mud-coated bamboo house, their nine-month-old daughter in her arms. “Terrible things happened to our family once, we don’t want a repeat.”

]]> 7538 https://www.faith-matters.org/hindu-and-sikh-villagers-rebuild-mosque-shut-since-1947/ Wed, 02 Mar 2016 11:29:45 +0000 https://religiousreader.org/?p=1619 Sikh and Hindu villagers in a Malla village in Ludhiana, India helped renovate and re-open a historic mosque. The mosque had closed in 1947 due to partial building collapse. But a communal rebuilding effort led to its inauguration on February 29. Both faiths assisted with fundraising and construction. Muslims are a tiny minority in a village where 90 per cent of residents are Sikh and 9 per cent Hindu. In the past, Muslims had to travel out of the village to pray at a mosque. The Majlis Ahrar Islam Hind Party of Ludhiana had contacted Maulana Habib Ur Rehman Sani Ludhianavi to assist. Ludhianvi told the Time of India that “Even as the village has just one Muslim family, the response had been overwhelming”. Villagers arranged a communal langar during the inauguration. Ludhianavi then published photos of the event on Facebook. The villagers in Ludhiana highlight how communities work together. Iqbal Hussain, a local Muslim in the village, expressed his gratitude and the bonds of affection for other faiths in his village.

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Some of India’s most prominent scientists have signed a petition and returned awards to draw attention to India’s growing intolerance.

The petition accuses the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of curtailing free speech and stoking Hindu nationalism.

Signatories include Ashoke Sen, who won the Fundamental Physics Prize, the world’s most lucrative academic award in 2012. Pushpa Bhargava who founded the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad. D Balasubramanian, former president of the Indian Academy of Science. And Dr Vineeta Bal of the National Institute of Immunology in New Delhi.

The statement reads: “It is the same climate of intolerance, and rejection of reason that has led to the lynching in Dadri of Mohammad Akhlaq Saifi and the assassinations of Prof Kalburgi, Dr Narendra Dabholkar and Shri Govind Pansare.”

Professor Malleshappa Kalburgi’s murder shocked India. Who would murder a “straight-talking, rationalist researcher of ancient Kannada literature”? As local media described him. One theory is that Hindu nationalists murdered him in response to his criticisms of idol worship.

The founder of the right-wing Hindu group Sri Rama Sene, Pramod Muthalik, rejected any links to Kalburgi’s murder. He also threatened to cut off the tongues of writers if they continue to “insult” Hindu gods.

In February, Communist and rationalist Govind Pansare died from gunshot wounds near his home in Kolhapur, in the state of Maharashtra. The main suspect in Pansare’s murder is Samir Gaikwad, a member of the Hindu nationalist group Sanatan Sanstha. In the past, members of Sanatan Sanstha took part in a bombing campaign in Thane and Vashi in Maharashtra and Madgaon in Goa.

In 2013, unknown individuals murdered rationalist campaigner Narendra Dabholkar. It took two years to identify any suspects.

More worrying, however, is the possibility that all three murders are linked.

Critics point to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s silence on the issue and interpret it as tacit approval – as he shares their ideology of Hindutva. A product of this ideology is anti-Muslim prejudice. It fuses cultural norms and the trauma of partition in north India and Bengal. The misuse of history allows these groups to reconfigure the frustrations of the Hindu middle classes. As Pankaj Mishra noted, Modi stokes this false sense of victimhood and chauvinism with the “old Hindu rage-and-shame over what he calls more than a thousand years of slavery under Muslim and British rule“.

Jyoti Punwani accused Modi of stoking anti-Muslim tensions during a recent assembly election rally. In his speech, Modi made various references to beef export figures and Bangladeshi ‘infiltration’.

Turning Islamophobia into a normalised, everyday prejudice is nothing new. Sumanta Banerjee highlighted this in 1991. For Banerjee, Hindu nationalists need this external enemy to justify their Hindu superiority and support base.

For the BJP, Hindutva has “awakened the Hindus to the new world order where nations represented the aspirations of people united in history, culture, philosophy, and heroes.

Hindutva successfully took the Indian idol of Israel and made Hindus realize that their India could be just as great and could do the same for them also“. The logic is also peppered with numerous anti-Islamic refrences.

Mohammad Akhlaq’s murder, on the belief that he and his Muslim family had consumed beef, in early October made global headlines.

Some Hindu nationalists came close to justifying Akhlaq’s murder. Sadhvi Prachi, a leader of the extremist Vishwa Hindu Parishad, told local press that “those who consume beef deserve such actions against them”. It took days for Modi to break his silence on the murder and call for religious tolerance.

Mahesh Sharma, India’s culture minister and a local MP, told the Guardian that Akhlaq’s murder was a ‘misunderstanding‘. Sharma is no stranger to controversy. Last month he told India Today that the Bible and Qur’an are not central to India’s soul. Yet there are 172,245,158 Muslims (14.23 per cent) and 27,819,588 Christians (2.3 per cent) in India. Nor has India been immume from Islamisation conspiracies.

The furore over beef (though banned from export) risks damaging the profitable buffalo meat trade. Hindu mobs have attacked suppliers of buffalo meat on suspicion of possessing cow carcasses in recent weeks.

Graffiti advocating the hanging of beef eaters recently appeared in a Mumbai suburb. Within the state of Maharashtra, where Mumbai resides, a ban on the slaughter and consumption of beef has existed since March. This caused tensions during the Islamic celebration of Eid-al-adha. To breach this ban in Maharashtra can result in a 5 year prison term or a fine of 10,000 rupees. A minority of states permit cow slaughter – including Kerala – which had its own recent beef scandal.

On a cultural note, organisers of a film festival faced government pressure to drop a documentary on the beef industry. The documentary, Caste on the Menu Card, was the only film the Information and Broadcasting Ministry did not clear.

Critics like Amartya Sen have accused the BJP of filling public and cultural institutions with party loyalists. Though the reasons are a little more complex. Other Hindu nationalists have lobbied to ban Muslims and other religious minorities from participating in festivals like Navratri.

More than 40 Indian writers have also returned their literary awards or written letters of protest in response to the “rising intolerance and growing assault on free speech”.

In a statement, the poet Surjit Patar said: “The practice of killing writers and thinkers in our multilingual, multicultural and multi-religious country is disheartening”.

The post Why Hindu nationalism threatens India’s free speech and secularism appeared first on Religious Reader.

The festival of Navratri (nine nights) celebrates the triumph of good over evil. Navaratri begins around harvest time in October, and, celebrations last for nine days.

Navarati sits within the wider festival of Durga Puja, which honours the mother goddess Durga. In one retelling of the triumph of good, a demon named Mahisha, who took the form of a buffalo, threatened the gods. To meet this threat, the gods pleaded with Durga to do what they could not – kill the demon Mahisha.

Bestowed with the weapons and strength of the gods, including Shiva’s trident, Vishnu’s disc, Yama’s iron rod, and Indra’s thunderbolt, Durga took on this mission. But it did not prove an easy victory. For the demon Mahisha’s blood created new demons to attack Durga. A prolonged battle ended with the demon’s decapitation.

Another popular story in northern India concerns the slaying of the ten-headed demon King Ravana. In a final and epic battle with Rama, who pursued Ravana in his chariot. Rama’s golden arrows, which transformed into serpents as they reached the demon King. The arrows had decapitated Ravana’s many heads but they regrew in an instant. This prolonged the conflict for many nights as Rama fired hundreds of arrows.

Matali, Rama’s charioteer, advised that he use the divine arrow to end this battle. The ‘dreaded arrow of Brahma’ was a gift presented to Rama by Agastya. Its divinity stems from its capacity to never miss its target. That divine arrow, powered by the gods, pierced the demon King’s heart and killed him. Ravana’s ten heads represent the ten days of the festival. And Hindus use the each day to remove bad characteristics – such as jealousy and lust.

Motherhood is an important festival theme. Stories allude to Shiva’s decision to allow Durga to visit her mother for nine days of the year. Families attempt to follow this tradition and return on the tenth day.

To propitiate the nine planets and harvest season, nine different kinds of food grain seeds are grown in small containers and then offered to the goddesses.

Some devotees fast and offer prayers relating to health and prosperity. Others seek introspection. In Tamil Nadu, celebrations extend to the goddesses Lakshmi and Saraswati.

Durgashtami, Mahanavami and Vijayadasami are the names of the final three days of Navarathri. In Kerala, those celebrating worship Saraswathi as the goddess of knowledge. The deity of Gayathri represents the fountain of fine arts and science.

Diverse celebrations take place across India.

Vijayadasami marks the end of the nine-day festival. Across India, effigies are burnt and idols are cast into rivers in the hope of rekindling of the soil’s fertility.

The spectre of a growing Hindu nationalism continues to haunt parts of India. It morphed into a paroxysm of anti-Muslim anger and violence last year. Police had arrested 140 people after violence between Muslims and Hindus broke out in the state of Gujarat.

That violence came in a climate where radical Hindus, spurred on by the success of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), lobbied to ban Muslims and other religious minorities from participating festivals like Navratri.

Before his electoral success, the United States had denied him entry in 2005. The State Department can deny foreign dignitaries visas on grounds of “severe violations of religious freedom”. Narendra Modi remains the only person ever denied entry to the United States under this provision.

Modi faced allegations that he failed to stop deadly riots by Hindus against the Muslim minority in the state of Gujarat in 2002. At least 1,000 people died as a result of the riots that lasted a matter of days.  Though the courts later found that Modi had no case to answer.

A reminder of the faultlines of exploited religious tensions appeared in Bishara, near Delhi last week. A mob murdered Mohammed Akhlaq, a 50-year-old labourer, on the belief that he and his Muslim family had consumed beef, an animal considered sacred in Hinduism.

The seductive narrative of religious nationalism can undermine religious cohesion, even in times of celebration.

The post What is the Hindu festival of Navratri? appeared first on Religious Reader.

The harvest festival of Onam is a moveable feast: it colours the landscape of Kerala in South West India in a rhythm of elaborate dances, music, sports and banquets.

A festival of secular tradition, where different faiths and castes celebrate. It falls on the Malayee month of Chingnam, which coincides with Shavan Masa of the Indian calender. This ten day celebration falls between August and September 15.

It honours the homecoming of the beloved King Mahabali, who makes a yearly return to Kerala. Legend dictates that the jealous king of the gods, Indra, hatched a plan to oust Mahabali. Indra begged Lord Vishnu for protection who then transformed into a Brahmin boy, or dwarf, named Vamana. The people of Kerala adorded the wisdom and generosity of King Mahabali; Vamana sought to exploit the latter. He approached King Mahabali and asked for as much land as his feet could cover in three steps.

Upon granting what appeared a simple and humble request; Vamana grew at an exponential rate; one footstep covered the sky and the stars. The second step covered the netherworld. Vamana then turned to King Mahabli, who came to realise that a third step would destroy the Earth. To prevent this calamity, Mahabli offered his head. Before disappearing, Vishnu granted the King’s request  to return to the Earth once a year.

Preparations for the festival begin with a cleaning and decorating of the house. Onam presents an opportunity for family members to wear new clothes. For women, the traditional outfit is the kesav saree (a white saree with golden border), for men, it is the mundu (a white dhoti with golden border).

Outside of houses, rests the pookalam (athapookalam), or flower mat. This is a symbol of welcoming King Mahabali.

Mahabali visits his kingdom on the second day of Onam, the most important day of the festival. Mounds of earth representing Mahabali and Vishnu rest in courtyards, decorated with flowers.

The Thrikkakara Temple, in Thrikkakara, two kilometers east of Idapally near Cochi in Kerala, remains one of the few Indian temples dedicated to Lord Vamana (the fifth incarnation of Lord Vishnu). Thrikkakara means ‘the holy place where Lord placed his foot’.

Other celebrations incorporate traditional Kathakali dances and parades with fireworks and elephants. The Vallamkali (boat race) sees around one hundred oarsman take to the water in spectacular boats. Others sing traditional songs, called Onappatt.

In Thrissur, artists paint their bodies in the likeness of tigers to perform the annual ‘Pulikali‘ or tiger dance. This folk art performance settles on the theme of tiger hunting to entertain during Onam. Others in Thrissur began celebrations with a tug-of-war.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, retired cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi, and some Bollywood celebrities wished individuals a happy Onam.

The post Happy Onam! But what is this festival about? appeared first on Religious Reader.

Oxford University digitised more than one hundred 19th Century Kalighat paintings depicting Hindu deities. The digitisation is part of a wider project at the university’s Bodleian library to make thousands of rare manuscripts and images accessible to the public.

Religious statesman, Rajan Zed, took to Twitter to heap praise on the university:

We commend #OxfordUniversity for digitizing 110 19th-century #KalighatPaintings of #Hindu deities & others & posting on new #OnlinePortal.

— Rajan Zed (@rajanzed) August 1, 2015

Sir Monier Monier-Williams acquired the Kalighat paintings for the Indian Institute Library following his third fund-raising trip to India in 1883.

You can trace the history of the Kalighat art to a Kali Temple on the bank of the Buri Ganga (a canal diverging from the Ganges River) in southern Kolkata (Calcutta).

This form of Bengali folk art, created between 1800 and 1930, was a product sold to tourists and pilgrims as souvenirs.

The sprawling metropolitan success of 18th-century Kolkata attracted a wealth of creative talents. Others moved to the city due to the economic grip of The East India Company in the region. Among them were the trained artists of Murshidabad and folk painters (patuas). A patua depicted mythologies, religious figures, popular proverbs, and contemporary events with vegetable and mineral dyes. These pictures were a patchwork of sequential images. Patua families travelled to rural villages to sing or recite these stories.

Artists and craftsman found a living by selling inexpensive products at holy sites.  Kalighat artists began to make smaller, single icon paintings, and Hindu deities proved popular. The cheap paper and quick brushstrokes soon turned the paintings into cheap commodities. This inexpensive product allowed more individuals to worship deities at home altars. In spite of the commodification, depictions reflected three characteristics (gunas): essence (satva), power and action (rajas), and chaotic power (tamas). Only a correct depiction meant a person could meditate in divinity. That sense of divinity relied upon the artist using correct colours. Saraswati, Goddess of learning is white, Lakshmi, the Goddess of Wealth is reddish gold. Whilst depictions of Kali, with her power to dissolve the cosmos, reflected dark tones.

Yet, the inescapable impacts of colonialism meant some artists depicted goddesses in Victorian crowns, their poses reflected English nobility, and violins replaced the traditional veenas (a stringed instrument associated with Saraswati). In Hinduism, Kali embodies the female active principle of the faith, or power (shakti). Artists inverted the approaches of potential suitors into lapdogs or charlatans. Depicting women as Saraswati, goddesses of the arts, though westernised, reflected a broader social change: in 1849, the first female school opened under the banner of the Bethune College (and replacing an earlier Hindu female school), to be followed by a college in 1879.

A desire for female education spread to other parts of India. The social reformer Durgaram Mehta (1809-1876), opened a school for girls in Surat in 1851. In Ahmedabad, a school for girls opened in 1849, under the banner of the Gujarat Vernacular Society, founded on Boxing Day, 1857 by Alexander Kinloch Forbes, a British administrator with the East India Company. The Gujarat Vernacular Society’s original aim of ‘civilising the natives’ evolved towards social change.  Forbes’ society administered a school for girls founded by Harkor Shethani, the widow of businessman and philanthropist Hutheesingh Kesarisingh, and established an all women’s library.

Others lampooned the hypocrisies of the upper-classes. To avoid libel, a cat painted with ritual stripes upon its forehead represented hypocritical holy men (sadhu).

But the artists made sure to reflect the religious diversity of Kolkata; a small number of painting depicted the celebration of Muharram, an important month in the Islamic calendar. A further example included a painting of “Duldul Horse” on which Husain, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, was killed in the battle of Karbala. The number of Christian missionaries in Kolkata, including the Baptist William Carey (1761-1834) meant the occasional Kalighat paintings depicted Christian mythologies or iconographies.

Towards the end of the 19th Century, Kalighat artists used their skills to highlight tales of scandal, including a high-profile murder in 1873.

Today the rich traditions of this art form exist in Bengal villages.

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