Most of the 12 rat-hole miners who rescued 41 trapped workers from the tunnel in Uttarakhand’s Uttarkashi are Muslims and Dalits. Vaqueel Hassan is the head of Rockwell Enterprises whose employees are the 12 experts in rat-hole mining. He said, “In our team, there are both Hindus and Muslims, and people from both religions worked hard to save these 41 lives. None of them could have done this alone, and this is the message I want to give to everyone. We should all live in harmony and not spread the poison of hate.”
However, this silver lining looks dazzlingly beautiful amid the toxic cloud of hate. Hate is being spread in social media even through pop songs! Kunal Purohit in his book titled H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars gave some examples of its lyrics and said, “Emerging from four years of travels in seven states, H-Pop shows how Hindutva music, poetry and literature have popularised and normalised this ideology – radicalising ordinary Indians, and driving the tentacles of communalism ever deeper into society.”
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On the other hand, the half-yearly report of Hindutva Watch, a US-based research project, documented 255 incidents of hate speech gatherings targeting Muslims that took place in our country in the first half of 2023. As per the report, one third of these gatherings explicitly called for violence against Muslims.
The result is alarming to say the least. A school teacher who is supposed to be a role model for her students, asked students to hit their seven-year-old Muslim classmate at a school in Uttar Pradesh in August this year. An RPF constable who is supposed to protect rail passengers, killed his supervising officer and three Muslim passengers on a train running from Jaipur to Mumbai in the same month. A Jawan who is supposed to protect our secular country, was arrested in Kerala for allegedly faking an assault by a banned Islamist outfit for publicity and to get a transfer in September this year. In the same month, a fruit vendor’s mentally ill son was beaten to death in the national capital for not being able to give satisfactory answer to the question if he had stolen prasad from a temple.
Still, hate crimes against Dalits are even more than that of against Muslims. The latest National Crime Records Bureau report shows that last year 57,428 crimes against Dalits were reported in the country, up from 50,744 in 2021 and 50,202 in 2020.
Amid such horrific crimes against Dalits and Muslims, the Silkyara Bend-Barkot tunnel rescue act literally made India see the light at the end of the tunnel. After machines failed, the 12 rat-hole miners saved 41 low-wage contract workers by opening up the unyielding mountain debris by their courage, skill, patience, endurance and perseverance.
But the rat-hole miners wanted nothing in return as one of them said, “Labourers have saved fellow labourers. May be someday we will be trapped somewhere during work and these rescued workers will save us.”
They did not want to know the religion of trapped workers. The 12 rat-hole miners from Munna Qureshi to Monu Kumar, from Jatin to Nasir Khan, from Feroze Qureshi to Debender Kumar, from Saurabh to Wakeel Hassan, from Irshad Ansari to Ankur and from Naseem Malik to Rashid Ansari gelled as a close-knit family to make the seemingly impossible become possible.
The rat-hole miners worked at a stretch for nearly 24 hours squatting inside a narrow steel pipe of 800mm diameter on their toes, crouching as low as possible with their knees folded to clear the debris to rescue the trapped workers.
When the 41 trapped workers first saw the rescue team of 12 rat-hole miners, they did not look at their clothes to identify their religious identity. They just lifted them on their shoulders. It was a picture of secular, inclusive soul of India. This is my India.
