The year was 1975, a Holi that remains etched in my father’s memory. For several years leading up to that moment, he had been longing for a particular special pichkari, a symbol of extravagance in those days. Bright and colourful, those pichkaris would dangle outside shops, teasing those who passed by, for weeks before Holi. When asked, the shopkeeper said it would cost Rs 7.
Having managed to set aside around Rs 2 through a combination of personal savings and a modest loan from a friend, my father still found himself Rs 5 short. He told me, “Around a week before Holi, I had gone to play with my friend Arif. In a joint family with his father and uncles being vegetable sellers, they used to live in what could loosely be described as a Muslim ghetto.” He added, “All of us were very excited about Holi. I remember telling Arif that this Holi, all I desired was that coveted pichkari, but I was still short of money. Arif tried to reason with me that it was too expensive and we could even play without a pichkari. But I was adamant. We talked and had lunch together at his place. Then I left.”
My father continued, “Around two days before Holi, Arif came running to my house and whistled to call me outside. He said, ‘Let’s go and buy that stupid pichkari for you.’ I reminded him that I didn’t have the money. In response, he tapped his pocket which was clinking with coins. He gave me a peek – it was filled with Re 1, 50 paisa and 25 paisa coins. Puzzled, I asked where he got the money from. Arif replied that he took it from his grandmother, and dragged me to the shop where we bought the pichkari. Afterwards, I asked him again, “Did your grandma just give the money to you? Wow.” It was then that Arif revealed, ‘No. She has a potli where she keeps loose change. She has been saving it for zakat and her Hajj pilgrimage. I stole it from there.” Brimming with emotions, I asked him, ‘Won’t Allah be angry with you?’ To this, he winked and said He would understand.”
This story is from Lucknow, around 600 km from Muzaffarnagar, from where the horrifying video of a teacher asking her students to slap their Muslim classmate recently went viral. “Why are you hitting him so lightly? Hit him hard… His face is turning red. Hit him on the waist instead,” the teacher declares. And there he is, made to stand in front of the class, with tears rolling down his cheeks, his dignity shattered, as his classmates – some perhaps even counted as friends – are commanded to slap him ‘hard’. As the teacher hurls communal abuses at him, a staff member records the whole incident, with a disturbing chuckle of approval.
Also read: The Other Children, that Day in Muzaffarnagar
“I don’t know,” the Muslim child mumbled when surrounded by a herd of media microphones, asking him why Tripta Tyagi – his teacher – made his classmates beat him. Underneath the superficial reason – he got a multiplication table wrong – I believe he knew why he was subjected to the abuse. Somewhere in his little heart, he knows it was a hate crime. And this knowing stings too deeply to be put into words. Perhaps every Muslim child in today’s India has been forced into the awareness of being a religious minority. Howsoever ignorant to the politics and its jargon, those young hearts sense the perils that shadow their identity. The assaults that befall their existence. We know that age is no insulation from hate crime, when Bilkis Bano’s three-year-old daughter can be smashed to death on a rock.
Disturbing to the core, but the scene within those walls of Neha Public School is merely an enactment – a fragment of the larger theatre of hatred. The classroom is but a stage; and behind the curtains lie the writing and direction of a bigger, much more sinister script. The viral video, capturing solely those classmates called upon to strike the Muslim boy, conceals a much longer queue hidden behind the drapes.
At the forefront of this line is India’s media. TV anchors scream their veins out to broadcast hatred and feast upon the conscience of their audience, pushing them to be haters, bigots and lynch mobs. They fabricate, label and locate an imaginary enemy needed for every majoritarian regime (for India, it is the Muslims) and then, incite the public to not just despise it but to go ahead and annihilate this enemy.
The second is the vast majority of the public that has metamorphosed into hungry mobs cooking, relishing and savouring the hatred for Muslims. They participate in the grim spectacle of hate – ranging from a ‘subtle’ exclusion of not allowing a Muslim to be their tenant to sharing an Islamophobic WhatsApp forward to carrying out rallies and raising provocative slogans in Muslim neighbourhoods to lynching them in the name of gau raksha and love jihad. United in their hatred, these hungry mobs carry out meetings and conclaves to strategise their genocide. And in this process, they receive undeterred backing from the third actor in our queue.
The police, a cornerstone of law enforcement, unfortunately, seems to have assumed the role of genocide-enabler agencies. Transitioning from being a mute spectator to occasionally even becoming complicit in violent acts against Muslims, and further proceeding to apprehend victims of these grievous offenses while allowing the culprits to evade consequences – the recurrence of such events has cast a shadow of doubt upon the integrity of the police force.
Coming fourth in this chain is the judiciary, an institution entrusted with the duty of safeguarding minority rights. But when a court overturns the conviction of BJP leader Maya Kodnani her involvement in the 2002 Gujarat pogrom; when Hindutva hardliner Babu Bajrangi who boasted of ripping out the womb of a pregnant Muslim woman and dragging the foetus with a sword receives a reduction in his sentence; when a special court exonerates all those implicated in the Samjhauta Express blasts; when, after 28 years of the demolition of Babri Masjid, the highest court of India grants the land for the construction of a temple; when a special court clears all the accused involved in the Mecca Masjid Blast case in Hyderabad – one can only imagine the terror and insecurity that India’s Muslims must be grappling with.
Also read: UP: Pressure on Boy’s Family to ‘Compromise’ in Slapping Incident As Politicians Swarm Village
From the Supreme Court in 2022 saying, “We cannot stop demolitions,” in response to a petition by Muslims in Uttar Pradesh that had highlighted that the state was punishing them for participating in protests t0 a court pronouncing that the headscarf is “not integral” to Islam considering the prohibition on Muslim girls wearing hijabs to schools, the list is long and it raises serious questions whether the judiciary has transformed into a tool wielded by the Modi government. A series of anti-Muslim verdicts have underscored its alignment with the Hindutva ideology and its failure to safeguard the rights of Muslims.
Last in the queue to slap the little boy stands the indifferent populace – the silent chorus of the disinterested who have made the conscious choice to look away from the prevailing oppression, hence enabling the oppressors. It brings to mind words from Dante’s Inferno, echoing through the corridors of time — The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in times of moral crisis preserve their neutrality. Beyond the convoluted realms of political, social and economic turmoil, our society finds itself standing in a moral crisis today, when our shared moral compass seems to have lost its direction, obscured by a haze of indifference. As some among us look away, refusing to acknowledge the shadows that loom, and as silence surrounds us like a shroud, we are inadvertently marking our stance in the annals of history, which the future generations will question.
The ghosts from Nazi Germany – where, during lessons on ‘racial impurity’, the Jewish students were picked out to stand in front of the class whilst teachers pointed to their eyes, ears, nose, mouth and hair, comparing these to characteristics on Nazi propaganda sheets – have come to haunt us. After the Muzaffarnagar incident, a chilling photograph from the 1930s resurfaced where two Jewish boys can be seen standing in front of the class, being humiliated, while the blackboard behind them reads, ‘The Jew is our biggest enemy. Beware of the Jew.’ It is the silence of the parents of all the non-Jewish students in that classroom which must have echoed through the corridors of history as their children were stripped of humanity. And it is the same ghosts of silence that have come back to haunt us.
And so will the silences of the parents of all non-Muslim students who were asked to slap their friend, or the parents of the classmates of Arnazbanu, the Class 10 topper of Shri K. T. Patel Smriti Vidyalaya in Gujarat who returned home in tears after the school refused to honour her while awarding all other toppers. In dark times like these, such silences are expensive.
Time stands as a relentless recorder of the sins of these silences. An unforgiving chronicle, it carries the weight of remembrance for those who looked away when Anne Frank and her friends murdered. In Hannah Goslar’s poignant memoir, My Friend Anne Frank, another tale is told – that of Lucie, a once-dear friend who would later join the Nazi youth group, severing her friendship with Jew children, “Anne and I were shocked to know that Lucie’s parents had joined the Dutch Nazi party, the NSB. Lucie had stopped inviting us to her birthday parties — at least now we understood why… We found out later that Lucie joined for a time the Jeugdstorm, the Nazi youth group, the name of which meant ‘Youth Storm’. I saw her once in the neighbourhood in uniform: knee-length belted black skirt, red-topped black cap, long-sleeved sky-blue button-down shirt. I couldn’t tell if she saw me but I hurried on, not stopping to say hello.”
Had Neha Public School not been sealed and the young Muslim boy’s best friend had gone back to class the next day only to find his friend’s seat empty, what thoughts would cross his mind? At a very young age, he would have learnt the power of hate. Goslar’s words point to a similar ache, “That first day of school when I came in to see Anne’s seat was empty, I felt as if a knife had grazed my heart. Several other seats were also empty… Every day it seemed there were more students missing. We never knew if an absent student that day meant they were simply sick or if yet another family had been deported or if that friend had gone into hiding. I felt it was hard to keep up morale when I never knew what awaited us when we got to our classroom.”
When we come across a video from Madhya Pradesh where a 12-year-old Muslim boy can be seen sobbing hard, gripped with fear as three minors are seen stripping him and forcing him to chant religious slogans as well as slogans like ‘Hindustan Zindabad’ and ‘Pakistan Murdabad’, we cannot escape being huanted by the infamous image of 1941 where Nazi German children are chasing a wounded Jewish woman. The parallels between these two unsettling moments – separated by decades and distance – is a stark reminder of the capacity of hatred to fuel cruelty, even in the hearts of the young.
As we witness the chilling repercussions of young impressionable hearts being marred by prejudice and hatred, there are a few fresh buds of hope waiting to bloom, a few dreams of compassion waiting to soar. I was once told by a 13-year-old girl who stays in my neighbourhood, “We are close friends with a Muslim boy in our class. One day, when my friend’s mother got to know, she shouted – Stop talking to him. How can you talk to a Muslim. Aren’t you a Hindu?” When I was told the little girl’s reply, I knew though still miles ahead, we will find this future of hope. There, where love triumphs over hate. She had replied, “My religion is secular.”
Khalil Gibran once wrote — And like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring.
Children are those baby seeds sleeping, or perhaps buried, beneath the heavy layers of icy hatred. But on its toughest days, when our world dares to dream, it dreams through the spring in these little hearts. Yes, its streets are burning with communal hatred. Its people are lying cold on those burning streets. All around her are hungry mobs savouring deaths. But standing amidst the horrific carnival of deaths, my world’s fractured heart dares to dream. It dreams through the eyes of its children.
Astha Savyasachi is a journalist based in New Delhi.