on The spot
Tavleen Singh
Had the Government of Uttar Pradesh not been ‘secular’ it would have been censured in our newspapers on a daily basis for the inhumane manner in which it continues to treat the victims of the Muzaffarnagar riots. While the print media has failed to draw adequate attention to the wretched conditions of the refugee camps television journalists have done a better job so across the country we have seen images on prime time news shows of little children and small babies shivering in icy cold tents. We have seen young mothers washing their children and cooking on the edge of pools of filthy water amid fields of rotting garbage. CNN-IBN sent one of its reporters to spend a night in one of the camps and visuals of him standing in a freezing tent and pointing to the icy dew dripping through it as its occupants tried hopelessly to warm themselves in front of a small wood fire should have been enough to shake up the hardest hearted officials. They clearly were not. High officials of the Akhilesh Yadav Government went on television to pronounce that nobody could ‘die of the cold or there would be nobody alive in Siberia.’ They admitted that nearly forty children, mostly babies, had died in the past two months but blamed this on the victims’ refusal to go to Government hospitals. The Chief Minister in an interview to the Wall Street Journal said, ‘In every camp we have insisted against and again that people go to hospitals for treatment and get their babies delivered in hospitals. But people are not willing. They remain in the camp.’
Meanwhile, the Chief Minister and his Daddy, the man they once called Maulana Mulayam, were partying with Bollywood stars in their home village of Saifai at an annual festival that amplified brutally the Government’s contempt for the suffering of the riot victims. If this was not bad enough the Uttar Pradesh Government last week sent off a delegation of MLAs on a ‘study tour’ that takes them to several European countries with a return trip via Turkey and Dubai. When TV reporters accosted these MLAs to find out what they were going to ‘study’ they said they wanted to learn about the democratic traditions in the countries they were visiting. The very least they could have done was come up with a better excuse because even semi-literate Indians today know that they can find out everything they need to know about other countries on the internet. The money spent on this ludicrous ‘study’ tour should have been much better spent on winterized tents, blankets and warm clothes for the children in the refugee camps.
So what is it that makes one of the most ‘secular’ Governments in the country behave without even basic humanity? What is it that makes so ‘secular’ a leader as Mulayam Singh charge desperately poor Muslims with being agents of opposition parties for refusing to leave the refugee camps? What is it that prevents a ‘secular’ Prime Minister from doing more for the victims despite having personally seen the wretchedness of their living conditions when he visited the camps with Sonia and Rahul Gandhi? I have been asking myself these questions often this past week and even more so after participating in a panel discussion on the subject on Barkha Dutt’s show.
On Barkha’s show the representative of the Government of Uttar Pradesh was unable to explain even why the only official response to recent TV reports had been to use bulldozers to break down the camps. On the question of why the Government was unable to provide the victims with enough security for them to go back to their homes he had no answers at all. So why is a Government that won power two years ago largely because of the Muslim vote been so insensitive to their needs in a time of crisis? Why does the Chief Minister continue to assert, that ‘no Government has done more than us’?
The answer to these questions is not pleasant because it reflects as much on the media as the political culture of ‘secularism’ that we have helped manufacture but it is time to confront some harsh realities. The first of these is that secularism has become a shield behind which certain political parties hide when asked about their economic and social failures and it is unfortunate that the media has helped them by being less than fair to supposedly non-secular political leaders. Think what would have happened if Muzaffarnagar had been in Gujarat or Madhya Pradesh? In Rajasthan while there was the ‘secular’ Congress Government there were communal riots in Alwar that were mostly ignored by the national media. In Assam under a ‘secular’ Government there have been much worse riots last year but again the national media has chosen to mostly ignore them. Would we have done the same if the riots had happened in Gujarat? I think not.
In Muzaffarnagar the riots took place in September last year and the violence was allowed to spread either on account of the incompetence of the Akhilesh Yadav Government or on account of its taking sides. Had we in the media made more noise about this then it is possible that the U.P. Government would have done more to help the victims return to the homes they abandoned out of fear. Had we made more noise about living conditions in the camps before winter came it is possible that the children and old people who have died may still have been alive. As someone often charged with being ‘communal’ these days may I say that the real reason why Akhilesh Yadav has so far got away with criminal incompetence in the handling of both the violence and rehabilitation in Muzaffarnagar is because he has long been the ‘secular’ darling of the national media. And, the reason why the word secularism has become such a sham in a political context is also because we in the media have bought the lies that supposedly secular political parties have sold us. Had we not it is possible that communal violence in India would have become a relic of a more barbaric past long, long ago. The camps in Muzaffarnagar, the inhuman treatment of the people who still live in them, shames us all. And, it shames India.
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