Just let me be

What was the idea? Fostering secular bonding? Who can argue against that? But one can and must point out that life, and life in Gujarat, is not Amar, Akbar, Anthony. Manmohan Desai had the three brothers of different faiths united via an impossible conjunction of medicine and maa — siblings simultaneously donating blood to their mother, tubes running from their arms to their mother’s. Such ideas of the heroic potential of inter-faith bonding seemed quite apt when the organisers of the Quresh Hall meeting said that the attempt was to “bridge the gap” and “get them talking to each other in empathy, with sympathy”. “Our grief is same, our pain is same, our tragedies are similar, even if our faiths are different.”

Gujarat, let’s say it again, is becoming a strange place. The strange response to its brand of politics is now not only from society, but also from even civil society groups. Gujarat is perhaps the only Indian state to have the intriguing distinction of a memorial planned for riot victims — as CJP plans one in Ahmedabad’s Gulberg Society, the site of one of the most gruesome riots in 2002, where ex-MP Ehsan Jafri died. So we are to have a Gulberg Museum of Resistance. The sponsors didn’t ask anyone, didn’t ask me, for example, whether I want this. Whether as a Muslim or a Hindu, or Gujarai or Indian, whatever one’s identity is, such a memorial only brings deep discomfort.

This museum is not my culture, not my language. This is supposedly to be a museum that will be a reminder of human frailties and depravity. But will it soothe, will it heal? No, it will just help the wounds to fester. Gujarat has more than its fair share of slogans, hoardings, anniversaries and memorial functions. They are all over, in all shades and nuances. And they all bring discomfiture — they don’t help.

... contd.