Till a week ago, bodies were being counted. Some flushed out of drains, others straight off the streets of North East Delhi. Stab wounds in some, gunshots in other. Some survived but only just and left to die. Some stopped on the way to a hospital for the police to check if they were really wounded. But these are just bodies. The attempt to destroy ‘Hind’, our land and our salutation ‘Jai hind’ has not been recorded. This is nothing short of attempting to eliminate the idea of “Hind”. This cannot go unrecorded.
In the carnage and the bloodshed, mainly in the name of cleansing, towards the not so subtle aim of having a rashtra of the majority community, it is ironical that the land they claim to possess and make it their own, cannot have a religious basis.
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The DNA of this nation just cannot be religious and a full- fledged attempt to make it one is a travesty of the ideals of how this land was created and derives its origin from.
The etymology with ‘Hindustan’, comes from the Persian ‘Hind’ and this meant the subcontinent. Hind means India. Hind means Indians, each and every Indian. A Muslim, Jain, Buddhist, Christian and a Hindu are all Hind.
There is also Rigvedic reference to our present land Sapta Sindhava (the land of the seven rivers) which later was phonetically called hapta hindu. The seeds of commonality and inclusion were sown and blossomed into a bouquet called ‘Hind’. In another major reference used during the reign of King Xerxes of Persia, the term Hind was also applied to the lands to the east of Indus.
The Arabic term Hind, was also used by the Arabs to refer to the Indianised region, from roughly Baluchistan to Indonesia, but the references to Hind later narrowed down to the Indian sub-continent.
Now why are these references needed in the context of hate and naked venom, leading to bloodshed across religions in India? The ones proposing to make this into a nation of one religion are plain delusional because neither history nor etymology supports them. It can at best float in the realm of fiction and concoction. The trouble is the amount of bloodletting the rulers of this country are allowing under their watch, to make this fiction seem real. Does it matter whether it is Hindu blood or Muslim blood (though the balance of victimisation clearly tilts to those who are on the wrong side of this power equation, as the Delhi riots have shown)? It’s the blood of Hind which never believed in bloodshed, which is flowing.
The abode of ahimsa (non-violence) has become the playground of himsa. The land of Hind does not teach us violence, or bloodshed or to cause hurt or harm (that’s what the Sanskrit word ‘hims’ means)
It’s the same India which worshiped nature, trees, even stones or rivers, or the sun and the moon, as the Almighty. The same nation which was Hind for people of all faiths is spewing hate. Yes there were Gods, hundreds of Gods and they included Hindu gods as well as Jesus, Allah or even Buddha and Guru Nanak, but worship or reverence was never confused with national identity. The identity was one- of Hind, based on the geographical position of where one lived, to the east of the Indus. And then the nation was peopled by those of all faiths with
common ideals.
Which is why, it was always Jai Hind, call of the nation, not the call of one faith.
When did that Hind change? How can that change?
But that’s doesn’t stop some from trying. A narrative obviously pushed by those who support the regime, is that a Tahir or a Shahrukh were the main protagonists of the Delhi riots. Both of them could well be absolutely guilty as charged, but only after the due process of law. But how did these absolute conclusions emerge? And why have conclusions on just two handpicked cases when there are over 450 FIRs lodged and in some cases not lodged, as the controllers of law give the long rope to favoured ones? The call is not to spare a Tahir or a Sharukh. The call is not to spare anyone because the law says so and the law is etched in our Constitution, not in the instant justice system of a religious bigot. That is the essence of what Justice Muralidhar of the Delhi High Court said, by the way. But these messages hurt some. And messengers are neatly replaced.
Why are there no conclusions drawn when you look at the absolute carnage in localities where people of one faith lived? Look at the destructions of shops, factories, and establishments and the bodies chopped and butchered left in drains. Why are there selective judgments? Each of the fifty-odd murders have murderers and their agent provocateurs. Where are those arrests? Can’t the police see them or know about them? Today, we have so many murderers roaming free.
This isn’t whataboutery, this is a call for judging every citizen of his country – on equal terms in the light of evidences gathered and analysed for the purpose of honesty and justice. These words seem to have been dumped in the same drains as some of the bodies.
There are stories from virtually every by-lane in North-East Delhi. Here is a snapshot of scenes witnessed or pictures taken after deaths occurred, compiled from twitter feeds and tracked closely. For a change, lets us not count the dead in terms of which God they prayed to or didn’t. The cruel reality though is everyone from the police and some doctors and politicians saw each body as a religious statistic.
In the land of ahimsa, in the land of Hind, there is no place for this.
Picture: Mother of Hashim, 17, wailing near her dead son, not yet twenty. She lost both her sons. Her daughter mourns the loss of her two brothers. Hashim and Mohammad Amir. Both were killed by a mob near their homes, bodies dumped in a drain.
Picture: Prem Singh, a rickshaw puller went out to buy milk for his family. He went missing. His body was identified by his family in the mortuary. His mother looks at her son, for one last time. He leaves behind a wife, three children, and an elderly mother.
Picture: Akbari, 85, was burnt to death in her own house. She was too old to climb to the terrace and flee when a mob torched her house.
Picture: Rohit Solanki was shot in his neck. He was refused aid at three hospitals. He died. It took another three days to get his dead body. His two friends, Shahbaz and Vivek console each other for the loss of their friend.
Picture: The grief stricken family members after seeing the body of IB officer Ankit Sharma, who was found dead in a drain near his home in northeast Delhi’s riot-hit Chand Bagh area. He was marked and attacked.
Picture: Mohammad Irfan, a tailor who lived in Ghonda, was lynched just 100m from his house. Quresha, Irfan’s broken mother pleads to the hospital staff to not conduct a post mortem on her son’s body.
Picture: Last rites of Head Constable Ratan Lal, were performed in his home town in Rajasthan. Ratan Lal was shot dead in the Delhi Violence.
This is not the Hind, or Hindustan that is the core of our existence. And we ask, does any government or ruling party have the right to tamper with the DNA of our land and society? No number of votes and seats allows or justifies this.
In today’s India, the common enemy – Pakistan, is the basis of defining an Indian identity. In the same India, hate has replaced compassion, love, affection.
As historian and author Ram Chandra Guha writes “Our founders built our nation on the basis of shared ideals of diversity, democracy, economic self-reliance and equality before law. It’s fascinating that the Indian nation did not even hate the British.”
When the Britishers left, those who remained with India, and did not go to Pakistan, didn’t do so because of India’s belief in the values of Hind for all. Constituent Assembly debates and Supreme Court judgments galore, have made inclusion and equality, with no religious bias the bedrock of our constitution. The Keshavananda Bharati vs State of Kerala judgment, in the Supreme Court, which is the foundation of our judicial system, has held that while the Parliament has “wide” powers, it did not have the power to destroy or emasculate the basic elements or fundamental features of the constitution.
The judgment helped strike down the ill-conceived 39th amendment. In 1975, Mrs Gandhi’s election was set aside by Justice Jagmohanlal Sinha of the Allahabad High Court, for corrupt practices. Immediately after, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi introduced the 39th Amendment of the Constitution, which sought to take away the power of any Court in India to adjudicate on the election of the President, Vice President and Prime Minister. This amendment, in a historical, defining judgment, was struck down by the Supreme Court as it violated the “basic structure of the constitution”.
Mrs Gandhi then moved the 42nd amendment to prevent Courts from ruling on any constitutional amendment. This second attack on the structure of the constitution was nullified by the post-Emergency Moraji Desai government, by further amendments nullifying the 42nd amendment. The Keshavananda Bharati judgment protects any such misadventures by governments with an agenda at variance with the “basic structure of our constitution”, which is defined and more so in the Indira Gandhi case where the 39th amendment was set aside .
In the context of what is happening in India, two ‘unamendable’ points in the “Basic structure of our constitution are:
– secularism and freedom of conscience and religion
– ‘government of laws and not of men’ i.e. the rule of law
Let us go back to where we began. This is what our ancient civilisation always was. It was for all and it followed codes of conduct. Our constitution only protects what our ancient civilisation did in Hind.
So what is unconstitutional is anti-national. And the only nation we can ever have was what Hind was – a land for all religions and faiths bowing to the supremacy and majesty of the law.
If we begin to see the massacre of Delhi from this prism, there will be no confusion in judging who the real anti-nationals are.
Meanwhile, India and Indians will have the strength to always have a ‘Hind rashtra’, a nation for all and our Parliament cannot pass any law to change this basic truth. Jai Hind!
