This must be the place I waited years to leave…

Those readers who don’t reside in the city I live in, those who haven’t visited it and is reading my blog for the last two months…you must be thinking that I live in a scum of a city where strange third-worldish things happen…but I am quite content living here, with certain reservations. I thought that the gains are more than the losses…

Something happened last day in my city. I am not interested why it happened any more. It ceased to be my city for a day as bunches of clueless lumpens had a gala day out of banging whimpers. it had the semblance of a riot, but it was not, therefore it was nothing short of a tasteless gag keeping the city hostage for hours. No one died except an image of the city. No body was burned alive except cars. And those burning cars smelt in a eerie way of possible burning bodies…

Everyone is sure that there is a design behind it. Someone says it is the ruling party to distract people of all those recent discontents, someone said it is either of the two leading oppositional ones to prove the messy government to be messier. It is a foolish guessing game where all reasons seems feasible and ridiculous. Ridiculous is another name of the feasible in realpolitik these days. So speaking politics has been elevated to speaking out intricacies of nothings.

When possibilities of people dying was almost eliminated after Rizwanur and Nandigram, the media got an event to cling on. I saw the military personnel are also sporting digital cameras these days and they are shooting a lot.

I told a blogger-friend last night: “A bizarre and obnoxious thing…I was not even able to write something about it…Will be showcased by the police how they were perfectly behaving beings since they shot and killed no one. Providing a puzzle to the media which they will pursue forever forgetting more real wounds and blood! Would have written something but was incapable of summoning a muse of the comic and the grotesque and the burlesque; it has the element of a bitter farce and right now I am in a stupidly emotional and alarmed state. My language would have been ridiculous…”

I was afraid for hours, and now I am bored. Enough from me! Read better writers whom I quote below:

• Rioting in an auroral city and the twilight of words » Radical Hypocrite
  

  A city in riot. Perhaps I’m exaggerating.
  Rioting protesters, riot-police running with all their gadgetry and flag marches by the army happens in central Kolkata. And twilight descends on the city caught like a frightened hare in the snare.
  A city in riot, at least parts of it.
  Truths are being recalled, truths turning westward, and by the sight of the sun, slung like a rotund ball of blood on the sky, turning blood-red and sinking rapidly to nowhere.
  While we, in this mad city, are still coming to terms with a brilliant amorous auroral ’sunrise’ grown out of bloodshed in Nandigram, what a different surprise falls on us with vehemence. Tomorrow the newspapers will tell us something different, but right now, the TV channels are screaming with flames of an unknown colour.
  …
  There’s someone in the high glass tower right now, with certain blueness about his lips, staring through the looking glass and starting to be glad that a justification of purpose for all the previous wrongs has been provided. Will there, or can be any justification of what was done in Nandigram? Never.
  And is it simply dusk? Is it formless darkness?
  Is it confusion that rises out of the bowels of the city, confused of its own madness that chases all the sanity out of minds, freezes returning birds in mid-air with all that terror inspired by the word ‘riot’ and ushers in the familiar dread of communal violence that always creeps in like ghosts from an unburied past?
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  Let’s face it. Right now, right here. We have smoke, sawdusts and cinders before our eyes in Kolkata, and I’m ranting in the dark, gentle reader, for there are incredibly stupid people who prefer religious dogma above everything else, all opting for opium and analgesics against the deadening pain of remembering innocent people being killed.

  Calcutta is Burning » Living like a Flame
  

In 2000, when I went to live in Medinipur, I was struck by the difference on a day to day basis of the lives of the people there from what we consider ‘mainstream’ Bengal. This was familiar to me from the days when I used to live in North Bengal. The fact is, there are and always have been two Bengals. One is the aspirationally Hindu, uppercaste, narrow-minded metropolitan sentimental ‘cultured’ Bengal which has today usurped the name of ‘bhadralok’, and the other is the other. Bengal is probably one of the few places where the dominant culture of the metropolis is more narrow-minded than that of the margin. That dominant culture claims to celebrate the underdog, while making sure that the underdog stays firmly under and likes it.
The Medinipuris I met were strongly tribal-influenced, independent-minded, educated after their own fashion and acutely aware of the attitude of patronage and pity with which the bhadraloks saw them. My co-faculty members were mostly highly dismissive of them, though they were careful never to say so expressly because ‘these people are very volatile’. This other Bengal is the old Bengal, a Bengal that occasionally hijacks the youth of bhadralok culture and turns them into revolutionaries, the Bengal that existed before the elite of several different foreign lands came and named the place ‘a hell stuffed with sweets’. Bhadralok culture sentimentalises this other as the realm of the little man, the dispossessed in whose name practically anything can be done and got away with. But perhaps not any more.
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The army is now out on the streets, flag-marching. Curfew seems imminent. The last time I remember this happening was in December 1992. I was at the epicentre then, in Park Circus, watching friends and neighbours run in fear of their lives. The flames I see now are arriving via satellite on my TV screen. They are no less real. But these flames have been lit from a source much closer than Ayodhya, and I don’t see any prospect of their going out in a hurry.Stop press: Turns out that the prime cause of the disturbance was the All India Minorities Forum demanding that Taslima Nasreen’s visa be revoked. Well, I’ve already had my say on that issue here. All I can add is that the campaign for Rizwanur Rahman taught me that the common people of Calcutta are not, by and large, communal. Make of that what you will.

This is What We Get » Living like a Flame

Today I saw streets I’ve walked for years, deserted and strewn with the corpses of burning cars. I saw half naked men imitating Saurabh Ganguly’s shirt-semaphoring while lobbing teargas back at troopers. I saw RAF jawans beating people with knouts. I saw a child pop out of the shanties next to the Lohapool offramp to be confronted with a policeman holding an upraised rock. The child ducked and ran fearfully into the arms of a cameraman. I saw seven men advancing menacingly along the empty Lohapool while RAF jawans threatened them with automatic weapons. I saw the house where I lived for seven years standing next to a struggling mass of men trying to escape a teargas cloud. I saw Yasinbhai’s pan shop through the haze. I didn’t see Yasinbhai.Someone or something must pay for this.

Idris Ali: ‘Taslima is Not a Good Writer’ » Living like a Flame

Idris Ali, in case you’ve never heard of him, is the head of the All India Minorities Forum, the group that called the initial protest that spiralled out of control this morning. The primary purpose of the protest was to demand the revoking of Taslima Nasreen’s visa, effectively forcing her out of the country.
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Idris Ali appeared on a several-hour-long panel telecast by Star Ananda. Also present were a number of artists and intellectuals…Idris got the worst of it throughout. No surprises there, but the hidden bonus track of the evening came when he confidently stated that the Siddiqui pirs of Furfura Sharif in Hooghly were solidly supporting his agitation to get rid of Taslima. Some time later, the pirs of Furfura Sharif rang up the Star Ananda studio to say on live television that no, they were not supporting the violence the day had witnessed, they did not endorse Idris Ali’s stand, and they condemned the vandalism and arson carried out by Idris Ali’s followers. Idris Ali’s response? To accuse the pirs of Furfura Sharif of being instruments of the CPIM, of taking money from America, and of having no concern for the sentiments of Muslims. He then named a Siddiqui who he claimed was on his side; the pirs said the man was a junior pir and didn’t represent them all. Idris Ali was saved by a commercial break.
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Most of the people rioting on the streets today, I am willing to warrant, have never read a full length book, let alone anything by Nasreen. Quite a few of them possibly can’t read. All of them I saw on TV were men: I don’t know if any women took part; probably not. Most were painfully young; young enough to be in school or college. Yet here they were, getting their kit off, dancing like monkeys in the light of burning tires. Clearly they had nothing better to do.
Someone (or something again, though there isn’t really much difference) has betrayed these children. They are instruments of a hate that sent them out to destroy in the name of a literacy to which they can’t aspire. All they probably know about Taslima Nasreen is that she’s a woman of questionable morals who wrote a book that discusses dirty subjects in connection with religion, and that they should do their best to get her kicked out of the country. In the process, they get to traumatise the fat cats who ride around in cars, who are by definition evil because the young boys don’t have cars.
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It was clear from the way they were behaving that those boys saw themselves as heroes. They were fighting a glorious war to save their religion while looking good to the other guys in the process. Or they were simply fighting a glorious war: there’s no guarantee that all of them were Muslim. For those few hours, they were showing the world, giving back as good as they got, making a difference. No doubt for days afterwards they’ll tell stories about how they lobbed the teargas shell back at the police, or how they overturned that jeep and poured petrol on the wheels. They’ll feel like they made history.

The Sword and the Monk’ s Cowl » Kafila.org

Just as society in Kolkata was conquering a new content for itself in the wake of Nandigram and even the murder of Rizwanur Rahman, the state (and its shadows), to all intents and purposes have returned to its oldest form in West Bengal. Even as I write, the Army is out on the streets of Kolkata, imposing a curfew, and the past few hours have been spent witnessing (on television in my case) the ridiculous and pathetic spectre of what seems even at first glance to be an orchestrated outbreak of rioting on the streets. Clearly, there will be no more rallies against the CPI(M);s actions in Nandigram in the coming days in Kolkata.
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For weeks, since the mysterious death of Rizwanur Rahman, allegedly at the behest of a powerful trading family, allegedly with the connivance of the senior echelons of the Kolkata police, allegedly acting under the patronage of the ruling party – the CPI(M) and for days, since the ‘retaking’ of Nandigram by a militia of CPI(M) cadres – the streets of Kolkata have witnessed a flowering of fraternization between young people, students, peasants, activists disturbed by the happennings of Nandigram, intellectuals and cultural workers.In both responses, the response to Nandigram, and in the response to Rizwanur Rahman’s death, we have seen a great deal of involvement by people who happen to be Muslims, and this is in part because of the fact that Rizwanur was murdered because he happenned to be not well off, and Muslim, and because incidentally, a large number of people affected in Nandigram also happen to be Muslim.
What this was leading to was a degree of fraternization between Muslims and others, not on grounds of secterian identitiy or communal harmony, but on banal, and utterly secular issues that had to do with the blatant misuse of power and the realities of having to live with capitalism.
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Muslims in West Bengal have a lot to worry about, terrible social and economic indicators…unemployment, an apathetic government that holds them hostage to the shibboleth of ’secularism’ and the violence that has scarred and displaced so many poor Muslim peasants in Nandigram. Taslima Nasrin neither steals Muslim bread, nor appropriates Muslim peasants land, nor keeps Muslim kids away from school, nor organizes riots against them, nor condemns them to a situation of studied social apathy. She may or may not be a good writer, and is probably not even by her own self description a ‘good Muslim’ but by raising questions that have to do with exegesis and Quranic interpretation, she is only demonstrating the continuity of her project with the long tradition of reasoned and passionate philosophical enquiries about faith that have been part of Islamicate traditions. The partisans of the All India Minorities Forum, like their Hindu fundamentalist peers, may be performatively pious, but they certainly have no handle on the rich intellectual heritage and history of doubt within the cultures they claim as their own…

Kolkata violence: Irresponsible Jamiat playing with fire » An Indian Muslim’s Blog

If it was a protest over just Nandigam, I could understand. But the way Jamiat brought the issue of Taslima Nasrin and also the murder of Rizwanur Rahman, it is a dangerous signal. For Rizwanur Rahman, the entire Bengal has come together. And Muslims surely have other problems to worry about than Taslima.
I don’t know how many protestors have read her works. They are not readable anyhow. And even if she has written something that doesn’t go well with us, we have the option not to read it or ignore it. With every such protest Taslima’s stature as a writer will go up even if she doesn’t deserve that.
Violent street protests don’t serve anybody. But what perturbs me the most is the involvement of Jamiat-e-Ulama and the Muslim Forum. By communalising the issues and raising the same old ‘victim’ complex, it is not going to help Muslims of West Bengal rather anti-Muslim feelings may rise.
As I saw the stone pelting on streets and the iamges of burning car and mob clashing with police, imposition of curfew, I could imagine what must be going through the minds of many non-Muslims, ‘These Muslims, the troublemakers…they are at it again’. I am not sure about the All India Minority Forum whether it has any following amongst Muslims in West Bengal.
But Jamiat’s political ambitions are a cause of worry. Muslims must fight for their rights, but peacefully, as as part of the society by taking along others. Muslims should raise their voice against atrocities on themselves and also other sections of society who are facing injustice. The minority community can’t afford to be an insulated group.