A Foreigner Returning from a Trip to the Third Reich When Asked Who Really Ruled There, Answered: ‘Fear’
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A foreigner returning from a trip to the Third Reich when asked who really ruled there, answered: ‘Fear’. 1 S T Q SEAGULL THeatRE QUARTERLY 2 3 4 5 5 6 6 7 7 8 8 9 9 But apart from that: what confidence! Even the dead were made up and given a cosy smile . for not even those who had got away were allowed to be without hope. 10 10 11 11 12 12 13 13 14 13 15 15 13 They told me which enemy to shoot at So I took their gun and aimed And when I had shot, saw my brother Was the enemy they had named. So now my brother is dying By my own hand he fell Yet I know that if he’s defeated I shall be lost as well. 16 16 17 17 18 18 19 19 20 21 21 22 22 23 23 My son you must listen to your mother when she tells you It’ll be worse than the plague, the life you’ve got in store But don’t think I brought you into the world so painfully To lie down under it and meekly ask for more. 24 24 25 25 26 26 And so my son, stay close to your own people So your power, like the dust, will spread to every place. You, my son, and I, and all our people Must stand together till there are no longer two unequal Classes to divide the entire human race. 27 27 28 28 29 29 30 30 31 31 This, then, is all. It’s not enough, I know. At least I’m still alive, as you may see. I’m like the man who took a brick to show How beautiful his house used once to be. 32 32 1/ Gujarat 2002 SAH I R RAZA 34/ Why this issue: editorial SU D HANVA DESH P AN D E 42/ A backgroundJANA M 48/ Communalism after Gujarat AI JAZ AH M A D 64/ Globalization and culture MAL I N I BHATTA C HARYA 80/ Communalism and globalization PRAB I R PURKAYASTHA 90/ Genocide in Gujarat BR I N D A KARAT 98/ ‘Where do we go from here?’ TRidip SUHRU D 104/ ‘We cannot tell what will happen tomorrow’ INTERV I EW W I TH AC HUTH 112/ ‘A very difficult battle’ INTERV I EW W I TH RAJ I N D ER SA I WAL 118/ ‘Nothing could be saved’ INTERV I EW W I TH MAN M OHAN 126/ ‘Brotherhood is not enough’ INTERV I EW W I TH ASH I SH CHATTERJEE 136/ ‘Art alone will not do’ INTERV I EW W I TH HAB I B TANV I R 146/ ‘We still don’t know the enemy’ INTERV I EW W I TH G. P. DESH P AN D E 156/ Resolution 158/ What the Left can do 162/ ‘It needed questioning . .‘ INTERV I EW W I TH SU M AN MUKHERJEE 174/ Reading Mephisto AYAN GAN G O P A D HYAY 182/ The Tiger: an extract SISIR KU M AR DAS 196/ Waste and void NAVEEN KI SHORE contents Published by Naveen Kishore for Seagull Foundation for the Arts 26 Circus Avenue Calcutta 700 017 Printed at Rockwel Offset 55B Mirza Ghalib Street Calcutta 700 016 33 32 a canni bal ti me This year our bodies will be bitter, alien flavours are seeping up through them, so they capitulate— is this possible? from water tainted by strontium, from murderous sunlight, from virulent alkalis and words we have hitherto selected (my dearest) our daily nourishment, our organs have been functioning, our hearts, lungs and brains have strained the filth off ceaselessly and, like tapwater forced Guest Editor through various purification-devices, SudhanvaDeshpande crystalline poems have poured on to my paper, Editor we were able to love one another, Anjum Katyal our lips had not been poisoned, Editorial Consultant Samik Bandyopadhyay and while our cells kept changing all the time Assistants the eye, the hand, the forehead and the groin Sudeshna Banerjee remained the same, Sunandini Banerjee Sarmistha Dutta Gupta no child of ours would wear Sameera Iyengar the features of a gesticulating puppet Design on television, Sunandini Banerjee it would wear the face we’d dreamt of, Cover design our parts resisted stubbornly, using a photograph by Sahir Raza no matter that we’d gaped at calves and pigs, Gujarat 2002 no matter that we’d seen monsters, photographs of the Gujarat God kept on stubbornly moulding carnage by Sahir Raza (kind courtesy SAHMAT); Brecht’s his own image in us, poems from Bertolt Brecht, no matter that we’d drunk vinegar, Poems 1913—1956 (Eyre Methuen, London, no matter that we’d swallowed emetics, 1976). in truth, it was all in vain, We are grateful to Arjun but the body slowly deteriorates, Ghosh for his help with and the soul also deteriorates, transcription and translation, to all JANAM poems decay too, activists and to Naveen for poisons penetrate Kishore for the use of his photographs. the elastic skin of our cells, ‘A Cannibal Time’, Bela the taut membrane of our words, the inside Marko, The Colonnade of will come to resemble the outside, Teeth: Modern Hungarian if there is hatred there, let hatred be, Poetry, ed. George Gömöri and George this is the true defeat, Szirtes (Bloodaxe Books, your mouth will taste bitter when you kiss me 1996). my mouth will be bitter when I kiss you, my poem will taste bad, this cannibal time does not gobble me up, but it will not let me go, and so we shall wander around here forever and ever not fit to be eaten. 34 32 Why this issue ? sudhanva deshpande 35 35 On 27 February 2002, bogies of the Sabarmati Express were set ablaze near the railway station at Godhra in Gujarat, claiming 58 lives. On the following day began the longest continuous bout of mass violence in recent history. This violence, which has officially claimed more than a thousand lives—unofficial figures are at least three times that number—lasted more than 75 days. Its implications will be with us for much, much longer. The carnage got called by the routine name that all such violence is given: communal riot. In actual fact, it was nothing of the sort. Gujarat was a one-sided attack, a carnage. It was, to put it bluntly, genocide: ‘the deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group’. Nothing Muslim was spared. In a row of ten shops, uncannily, the only Muslim- owned shop would be looted and gutted. In a row of parked vehicles, only the Muslim- owned vehicle would be burnt. The precision was stunning. Mobs came armed with lists of addresses and names. Printed lists. Lists taken from the municipal records. Lists published earlier in local newspapers. Lists of Muslim properties, businesses, houses. This was not a riot. This was a pogrom, a systematic carnage, genocide. It was our own, local, home-brewed Bosnia. Gujarat was in the making for a long, long time. It was not a ‘spontaneous reaction’ to the atrocity of Godhra. No incident of communal bloodletting is ever spontaneous, of course. Killing is hard business. Nobody does it ‘spontaneously’. The forces of the fascist Hindu right have been systematically spreading their poison for many years. Lists don’t get extracted from municipal records just like that, in a moment of madness and fury. When policemen, far from stopping killer mobs, actually give covering fire to them, this is not a case of the proverbial ‘official apathy’. When bulldozers owned by the state are used to raze to the ground shops and houses, it is not ‘official apathy’. When destroyed structures are tarred over and a road constructed to remove even a trace of what existed, it is not ‘official apathy’. It is active collusion. There are today more than 1,20,000 people living a degraded, subhuman life in relief camps in Gujarat, refugees in their own land. They have been hounded into this state because they are, allegedly, less ‘Indian’ than Hindus. A word, then, on this business of being ‘Indian’. Through the countless images of death, destruction, barbarism, pathos, that I have seen over the last two months and more, two pictures stand out. One appeared on the front page of The Hindu, sometime in early March. This was of a young 36 36 man, clean-shaven, tears in his eyes, begging for his life, hands folded. The other appeared on the cover of two newsmagazines, Frontline and Outlook. This was of another young man, bearded, sporting a cheap, imitation T-shirt and saffron bandana, arms raised in a gesture simultaneously triumphant and challenging, eyes blazing, brandishing weapons that sought their next victim. Look at the costumes, look at the gestures. The hunter is a lumpen stormtrooper, in whose costume of bandana and T-shirt, fascism and globalization come chillingly together. The hunted begs for sanity with folded hands. It would be ironical, had it not been so tragic, that the one who claims ‘Indianness’ is the bearer of apparel as well as ideology that is totally foreign, while the one being hounded for his alleged lack of loyalty to India employs so effortlessly, so naturally, the quintessentially Indian gesture of folded hands. A story, perhaps apocryphal, goes that when it was pointed out that many Gujarati men, both Hindu and Muslim, were shaving off their beards to avoid the gruesome fate of being burnt alive, Narendra Modi said: ‘That is very strange.