| CHAPTER RIOT AFTER RIOT BY MJ AKBAR |
A Split-level War in Jamshedpur
The steel city of Jamshedpur has witnessed communal strife ever since the first steel mill was built. It is now a nouveau riche city with different communities competing for as much of the trade and commerce as they can. Wealth breeds crime as well as prosperity; the city has its share of the underworld. Tension has many causes. many faces. Religious festivals and processions lead to rioting which politicials are quick to exploit to their own advantage. Early in April 1979. Bala Saheb Deoras, head of the Rashtriya Swayam-sevak Sangh (RSS). a Hindu fundamentalist organization, visited Jameshedpur and exhorted Hindus to assert their rights in a Hindu country. Ten days later the city went up in flames. reducing entire localities to ashes and leaving scores of innocent men, women and children dead.
The city of Jamshet’s (Jamshetji Tata, the founder of the House of Tatas) dreams has developed some ugly warts. It is an adolescent city, immature, vigorous, energetic, even rich; it wears fancy clothes and uses a good deal of cosmetics; but a disease has entered its lungs and heart, and its face breaks out in a hideous rash every now and then. Cosmetics and ugliness; the first does not hide the second, they exist side by side, in amazing complacence. The contrasts are startling. You see young engineers with their beautiful wives, the women laughing at some private joke as they motor home in the late afternoon, perhaps after lunch and tennis at the club. But ,in the city, down a broad, paved road lined with trees, fanned by cool breezes from the hills of Chotanagpur, is the posh and antiseptic Tata Medical Hospital where the more fortunate of the victims of communal violence are suffering, the sores now bandaged, but the wounds of the heart festering, and hate oozing from the eyes like a malignant pus that will contaminate all that it touches. The rose garden of the Jubilee Park is a square of red on flowing green; charming, very charming, so soothing that you could sleep forever on the grass; why, so pretty that even Bombay film producers use it as a venue for songs that echo into the blue hills as macho hero and pneumatic heroine race into each other’s arms and cling hard till the camera pans to two flowers making love. But the perfume is overwhelmed by the stench of the burnt, mutilated, shot, wounded, dying, dead, men, women and children at the Government hospital. The walls of this hospital are splashed with the black soot of age and carelessness; the atmosphere is septic, and the stench wafts out and onto the road, the nurses work hard for little reward, and on a bed sits a man injured in the head and leg, staring into space; beside him is his mother, also staring into space. Their world has burnt down. In the recesses of the hospital lie the dead, in hideous shapes, and each of them, each man, woman and child, has written a will in the presence of a hundred witnesses, and the will says that each member of the dead person’s family receives a legacy of hate, an equal share each; and this legacy has no limits, no boundaries, so each member of the deceased may take what he or she can carry away.
Have you ever heard the silence of a city? Curfew time is five o’ clock but long before that the silence has been building up. The city stopped roaring on 11 April 1979, but now as the sun enters the last quarter of its daily journey even the half-raised voices of the morning have hushed. The daylight is strong still. A cat drops quickly from a parapet onto Masjid Road and the eye, in reflex, catches the soundless movement for nothing else stirs, nothing else moves, there is no one on the street. Our car moves on, a window quickly shuts, soundlessly. Even the huge, squat, serried factory structures that fill the skyline of Jamshedpur seem afraid of making any noise. Dogs, scampering in the rubble of destruction, do not bark so much as whimper. The one sound that follows us is of the police; they are present at each street corner, neat and deadly guns in their hands, each picket with a plainclothes magistrate, and each picket stopping our car to check our curfew passes : the bold “Press” signs taped on the car are not sufficient proof of our innocence, and rightly so: stranger things are happening here than gun-running by fake journalists. A Muslim was nabbed carrying weapons in a Marwari’s car; traders have no religion, as we have all heard, particularly traders in illegal arms. Chickens, owned by nobody now, are wandering about busily in deserted, broken, burnt and looted homes. Jagged bricks pockmark both sides of the road, bricks which are witnesses, weapons and finally victims of battle. A single slipper lies in the middle of the street. A lone cyclist, a Sikh, passes us, stares at us; he is on his way from work. The street lights are on; they have been on for the last few days as no one, in fear, has gone to switch them off; they become a little more noticeable in the gradually weakening sunlight, as dusk seeps towards this silent city. From the boundary walls of Agrico factory, Rajesh Khanna and Rekha promise Prem Bandhan. A bunch of crows sits on a speedbreaker; as our car nears, the crows trot off together, literally trot off. Now to less deserted streets; or seemingly less deserted — the shops and signs on either side make this street less forlorn. But in the shadows there is movement; beggars, without a home, stuck against the drawn shutters of the shops, wearing black rags, staring at the empty roads. Beggars and guardians of the law and a handful of journalists; that is all that moves in a curfew.
There is curfew too in the narrower lanes of Jugsalai, the business centre of the city, but here there are signs of life. This is where the merchants live and earn, and they are spending these unproductive evenings chatting on the verandahs, looking at the streets. It is getting dark now, and our car winds through lanes and bylanes in search of mood and battlefields. At one turn a loud ‘Halt’ stops us abruptly. Police scamper down from a rooftop. We are on the border of a Muslim area. The officer of the law is sceptical about our verbal assurances. He demands to see our curfew passes, and is not totally convinced by them. S. P. Singh, the editor of Ravivar is in our car. The policeman looks hard at S. P. Singh who wears a beard; ‘Are you S. P. Singh?’ he asks, and his voice has disbelief in every syllable. The editor of Ravivar has to show his identity card with his photograph to prove his point, and then the policeman almost reluctantly gives us back our curfew passes. We are two Muslims and two Hindus (purely by chance) in the car, and the two Hindus both wear beards that would do a Muslim proud. The picket thinks we are carrying arms for the Muslims. And in case we have any doubt that their attentions are only routine, one of them calls out as we depart: ‘I hope there is nothing lethal in the boot’.
The steel city of Jamshedpur has witnessed communal strife ever since the first steel mill was built. It is now a nouveau riche city with different communities competing for as much of the trade and commerce as they can. Wealth breeds crime as well as prosperity; the city has its share of the underworld. Tension has many causes. many faces. Religious festivals and processions lead to rioting which politicials are quick to exploit to their own advantage. Early in April 1979. Bala Saheb Deoras, head of the Rashtriya Swayam-sevak Sangh (RSS). a Hindu fundamentalist organization, visited Jameshedpur and exhorted Hindus to assert their rights in a Hindu country. Ten days later the city went up in flames. reducing entire localities to ashes and leaving scores of innocent men, women and children dead.
The city of Jamshet’s (Jamshetji Tata, the founder of the House of Tatas) dreams has developed some ugly warts. It is an adolescent city, immature, vigorous, energetic, even rich; it wears fancy clothes and uses a good deal of cosmetics; but a disease has entered its lungs and heart, and its face breaks out in a hideous rash every now and then. Cosmetics and ugliness; the first does not hide the second, they exist side by side, in amazing complacence. The contrasts are startling. You see young engineers with their beautiful wives, the women laughing at some private joke as they motor home in the late afternoon, perhaps after lunch and tennis at the club. But ,in the city, down a broad, paved road lined with trees, fanned by cool breezes from the hills of Chotanagpur, is the posh and antiseptic Tata Medical Hospital where the more fortunate of the victims of communal violence are suffering, the sores now bandaged, but the wounds of the heart festering, and hate oozing from the eyes like a malignant pus that will contaminate all that it touches. The rose garden of the Jubilee Park is a square of red on flowing green; charming, very charming, so soothing that you could sleep forever on the grass; why, so pretty that even Bombay film producers use it as a venue for songs that echo into the blue hills as macho hero and pneumatic heroine race into each other’s arms and cling hard till the camera pans to two flowers making love. But the perfume is overwhelmed by the stench of the burnt, mutilated, shot, wounded, dying, dead, men, women and children at the Government hospital. The walls of this hospital are splashed with the black soot of age and carelessness; the atmosphere is septic, and the stench wafts out and onto the road, the nurses work hard for little reward, and on a bed sits a man injured in the head and leg, staring into space; beside him is his mother, also staring into space. Their world has burnt down. In the recesses of the hospital lie the dead, in hideous shapes, and each of them, each man, woman and child, has written a will in the presence of a hundred witnesses, and the will says that each member of the dead person’s family receives a legacy of hate, an equal share each; and this legacy has no limits, no boundaries, so each member of the deceased may take what he or she can carry away.
Have you ever heard the silence of a city? Curfew time is five o’ clock but long before that the silence has been building up. The city stopped roaring on 11 April 1979, but now as the sun enters the last quarter of its daily journey even the half-raised voices of the morning have hushed. The daylight is strong still. A cat drops quickly from a parapet onto Masjid Road and the eye, in reflex, catches the soundless movement for nothing else stirs, nothing else moves, there is no one on the street. Our car moves on, a window quickly shuts, soundlessly. Even the huge, squat, serried factory structures that fill the skyline of Jamshedpur seem afraid of making any noise. Dogs, scampering in the rubble of destruction, do not bark so much as whimper. The one sound that follows us is of the police; they are present at each street corner, neat and deadly guns in their hands, each picket with a plainclothes magistrate, and each picket stopping our car to check our curfew passes : the bold “Press” signs taped on the car are not sufficient proof of our innocence, and rightly so: stranger things are happening here than gun-running by fake journalists. A Muslim was nabbed carrying weapons in a Marwari’s car; traders have no religion, as we have all heard, particularly traders in illegal arms. Chickens, owned by nobody now, are wandering about busily in deserted, broken, burnt and looted homes. Jagged bricks pockmark both sides of the road, bricks which are witnesses, weapons and finally victims of battle. A single slipper lies in the middle of the street. A lone cyclist, a Sikh, passes us, stares at us; he is on his way from work. The street lights are on; they have been on for the last few days as no one, in fear, has gone to switch them off; they become a little more noticeable in the gradually weakening sunlight, as dusk seeps towards this silent city. From the boundary walls of Agrico factory, Rajesh Khanna and Rekha promise Prem Bandhan. A bunch of crows sits on a speedbreaker; as our car nears, the crows trot off together, literally trot off. Now to less deserted streets; or seemingly less deserted — the shops and signs on either side make this street less forlorn. But in the shadows there is movement; beggars, without a home, stuck against the drawn shutters of the shops, wearing black rags, staring at the empty roads. Beggars and guardians of the law and a handful of journalists; that is all that moves in a curfew.
There is curfew too in the narrower lanes of Jugsalai, the business centre of the city, but here there are signs of life. This is where the merchants live and earn, and they are spending these unproductive evenings chatting on the verandahs, looking at the streets. It is getting dark now, and our car winds through lanes and bylanes in search of mood and battlefields. At one turn a loud ‘Halt’ stops us abruptly. Police scamper down from a rooftop. We are on the border of a Muslim area. The officer of the law is sceptical about our verbal assurances. He demands to see our curfew passes, and is not totally convinced by them. S. P. Singh, the editor of Ravivar is in our car. The policeman looks hard at S. P. Singh who wears a beard; ‘Are you S. P. Singh?’ he asks, and his voice has disbelief in every syllable. The editor of Ravivar has to show his identity card with his photograph to prove his point, and then the policeman almost reluctantly gives us back our curfew passes. We are two Muslims and two Hindus (purely by chance) in the car, and the two Hindus both wear beards that would do a Muslim proud. The picket thinks we are carrying arms for the Muslims. And in case we have any doubt that their attentions are only routine, one of them calls out as we depart: ‘I hope there is nothing lethal in the boot’.
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