Sah Nirmaan Rally – Press Release
The Hindustan Times
Thursday, September 12, 2002
Why not a ‘lajja [Shame] yatra’?
Chitra Padmanabhan
Streets always have stories to tell, be it the patter of playful feet, the soft hush of a baby’s pram, the camaraderie of friendship or secluded corners of soft nothings – even the sharp jabs of conflict.
But a balance of life is maintained in the public space, for streets have a compulsion to connect.
Sometimes, all streets become dead-ends. The public space becomes a site of corrupted meanings – witness Gujarat in the last six months. What is celebrated as a ‘Gaurav Yatra’ is in reality a bullish flag-march through streets turned communal battlefields. It is meant to stake out territory, keeping all recent wounds alive.
Similar tactics of processions have been used by the opposition as well. Politics in Gujarat is obviously moving from the processual to the processional. So why can’t concerned citizens’ groups embark on a qualitatively different kind of procession? Why not a few ‘Lajja Yatras’, that actually exhibit for public viewing, from up close, the scale of brutality of a partisan State? A yatra that creates a powerful and universal humanist aesthetic to cleanse the public space and has the potential to counter an aesthetic of violence that parasites on the religious faith of people.
One such political and activist alternative has already been movingly demonstrated recently, when over 3,000 A’mdavadis, dispossessed of homes and families, livelihood and security, denigrated and terrorised, shed their numbness to curate Independent India’s most ambitious and moving multimedia installation of life as art.
Despite a pall of fear, a huge turnout of victims of the two-month long carnage finally spoke out at the ‘Sah Nirman Rally’, walking a five-kilometre stretch they had not dared step upon these last few months. Organised by the Society for Promotion of Rational Thinking (SPRAT) with groups, including the Citizens’ Initiative, Swaraj, Darshan, Prawah, Democratic Youth Federation of India, Action Aid, Abhikram, MKSS, Janpath, and Gujarat Sarvajanik Relief Committee, and supported by 120 organisations across Gujarat, the rally in Ahmedabad was like an underground stream that gushes to the surface with an awesome purity of purpose.
The ‘Sah Nirman Rally’ was dedicated to the memory of Deepak Kosti, a tailor in his early 30s, who was killed on February 28 when he tried to save the dargah of Hazrat Syed Shahid at Bapu Nagar in Ahmedabad. The dargah was a part of his life, he prayed there every day. The caretaker of the dargah was a friend of the family. Standing alone before a baying mob as if to physically stop it, Deepak was killed by a revolver fired at close range. The dargah has been vandalised; only the graves remain.
It was at that spot that the 3,000 men, women and child victims – accompanied by artists, writers and citizens’ groups – came together to display the extraordinary range of material that had been worked upon by toiling rioters: the wood of doors, the metal of vehicles, the alloy of time in clocks, the steel and rubber of sewing machines, fans and cycles – all torched by gas or chemical fires. And, yes, the memories of charred flesh branded in the eyes of the living.
It was the kind of procession that would make blood turn to ice.
*The shell of a Maruti van atop a camel cart carried the legend: ‘Toward the 21st century India! Maruti van on 27th February, Rs 1 lakh. Now fit for the junkyard’.
*A motorless sewing machine on a push cart read, ‘Once it clothed, now itself naked! Value before Rs 1,600, now Rs 200’.
*Cindered doors and windows torn out of their jambs, a few remaining pots and pans hanging from a slender thread spoke of a ‘House Hanged’.
*An enlarged copy of a cheque for Rs 180 as compensation for a house destroyed, told its own story: ‘The worth of my house on 27th February – Rs 50,000. Now, Rs 180’.
And what of the human chain of women who had seen their husbands and children perish in the inferno that raged ceaselessly for several days? Or the orphaned children who held aloft placards asking, “Where are our parents?” In their eyes reflected the flicker of a home that once was, a loved one who was; in one eye was embedded the image of a tree also consigned to the flames, along with humans. It had a nest in it. The opaqueness of death was palpable.
And like all civilisational journeys of the dispossessed, which transform the landscape of the oppressor in subtle ways, by creating long-lasting expressions born of lived experience, this one was no different. There is always a sense of heroism involved in turning around a context that is like a tightening noose and coaxing meanings never intended by the perpetrator. It is these meanings, often categorised as art, that ambush the authoritarian mind and rejuvenate the human spirit.
But, like many epochal moments of our time, this event too missed the media’s electronic eyes and ears, busy with the Chief Election Commissioner’s visit to Gujarat. That makes it all the more important to record this display of reclamation of public space by a group of victims, even if it was for a day.
There cannot be a better beginning to a long fight against injustice than a ‘Lajja Yatra’ transforming into a Gaurav Yatra honouring the humanist spirit of individuals like Deepak.
