…the youngsters of  Kanpur are only pawns in a larger political game

Culture cops are having a field day in India by laying down rules on what should be worn, painted, filmed and so on. SUGANDHI RAVINDRANATHAN examines the politics behind this new game.

BANGALORE --- When the Kanpur University Students' Union (KUSU) warned the local government that they were declaring a curfew on Valentine's Day to discourage unmarried couples from going out together, the administration posted security personnel at 13 restaurants in the city. Clearly that wasn't enough because the new messiahs of culture raided the Little Chef restaurant where a party was taking place. Though the guests were merely taking part in a quiz, and not dancing, KUSU activists beat up the boys and trashed the place. The owner of Little Chef, Vikramji Singh, and the other youngsters managed to put up a robust fight and chase away the vandals. However, Singh did get a nasty scare when one of the attackers pulled out a revolver.

Elsewhere in Kanpur, one of Uttar Pradesh's bigger cities, young couples were attacked and scores had their faces blackened for celebrating Valentine's Day. Two hapless girls had further humiliation heaped upon them when they were paraded on Mall Road, their faces blackened. Activists of KUSU and the Akhila Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), which owes allegiance to the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), raided other restaurants, card shops and florists and similarly "punished" young couples who were let off only after they promised to "uphold the values of Indian culture."

Vigilantes like these have also taken it upon themselves to pressure girls into wearing traditional attire instead of skirts, jeans and tights. But no one seems to have noticed that these high priests of oppression themselves are clad in Western accoutrements like shirt and trousers! But someone did mention that KUSU Secretary Chakresh Awasthi married his wife after a lengthy courtship. Today, young couples in love don't dare go out publicly in Kanpur. Instead, they meet secretly or communicate over telephone.

But why is KUSU according itself the honor of being the custodian of morality? To curb crime, apparently. Its president, Shamsher Singh Chauhan, told Outlook magazine: "A girl these days enjoys flirting with many boys instead of going steady with one. This … often leads to unhealthy rivalry and competition amongst the boys. To prove themselves they can even destroy one another."

Not surprisingly, a couple of days later, the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) got into the act by decreeing that teenage Muslim girls must wear a burqa outside their homes and would not be allowed to wear lipstick as it make the girls "look provocative".  This fatwa, it seems, was to preserve Muslim culture. Neither Muslim organizations nor the Sangh Parivar, a collective name for right-wing Hindu fundamentalist parties, condemned the other's acts.

Wrote Dileep Padgaonkar, a senior editor of the Times of India: "What explains this tacit "understanding"?  Simply this: such acts of intolerance enable both sides to demonize one another. To survive and thrive, they need to polarize people along religious lines. The Sangh Parivar is peeved that the Muslims refuse to join the "cultural mainstream"; the Muslim organizations bristle at the thought that the faithful might adopt unIslamic ways. But when the push comes to shove, the two sides appear to be willing to live with a situation of cultural and social apartheid."

The Kanpur incidents came just a fortnight after the row over filmmaker Deepa Mehta's Water broke out. Mehta had earlier attracted much flak over her film Fire, which portrayed lesbianism in a middle-class, Hindu family. Some cinemas showing Fire were vandalized at the time. But what happened on the sets of Water was unprecedented. A 500-strong mob, under the umbrella of the Kashi Sanskriti Raksha Sangharsh Samiti (KSRSS), destroyed to props and sets at Tulsi Ghat on the banks of the Ganga in Varanasi, costing the filmmakers millions of rupees. The demonstrators included members of the Sangh Parivar. Water, set in the 1930s, tells the story of widows abandoned by their families and who are exploited in every possible way.

Mehta, who is of Indian origin but settled in Canada, had the script cleared by the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. She is a mediocre filmmaker but where she scores is that she takes on bold themes. In Fire, she exposed Indian sexual hypocrisy. Her Earth didn't cause much trouble because it was an adaptation of Bapsi Sidhwa's novel on the Partition though the author was reportedly displeased with the result. But Water seems to have touched a raw nerve even before filming started. Self-appointed proponents of Hindutva ran amok and made filming impossible. Deplorably, the local administration did little to curb the protests and the ensuing destruction of the sets. District Magistrate Alok Kumar and Chief Secretary Yogendra Narain pronounced that the filming would adversely affect law and order. Eventually, the film's stars, Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das, who had shorn their hair for their roles as widows, had to leave Varanasi along with Mehta and her crew.

But why this extreme reaction by the activists? "Widows are being projected as prostitutes (which is) despicable. Is what she intends to show the real India?" spluttered B.P. Singhal, who is affiliated to the KSRSS. But Mehta insisted that the film was not aimed at offending Hindu sensibilities. According to actress Nandita Das: "It is about rising above and reaching out for a better life. It is about striving for emancipation and reaching out to a more progressive society."

But producer David Hamilton also sees other forces at work. He claimed that a month prior to the violence, some persons approached him saying they wanted the distribution rights to the film and threatened to obstruct the shooting if denied. Hamilton had turned them down.

Director Mehta and her stars condemned the Varanasi activists by saying that they had not read the script and were motivated by dirty politics and cheap publicity. Not so, said the activists who are sore about the fact that while filmmakers show the seamy side of Hinduism, they don't do so in the case of Islam. "Why don't people like Mehta ever make films about the plight of Muslim women arbitrarily divorced by their husbands?" demanded Seshadri Chari, editor of the Organiser, the mouthpiece of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

Mehta found an unexpected supporter in Veer Bhadra Mishtra, the mahant of the Sankat Mochan temple in Varanasi, whose efforts to clean the Ganga, one of the most polluted rivers of India, have earned him international recognition. He brushed aside reports that the protests were widespread and said only a few dozen participated in them. However, they did manage to launch a successful disinformation campaign. He told Outlook magazine he found nothing objectionable in the script. He also confirmed that it was an accurate portrayal of Hindu widows in the 1930s. However, some protesters countered this, alleging that Mehta had two versions of the script.

The Water crew was, ironically, invited by Bengal Chief Minister Jyothi Basu to shoot there. But everyone seems to have forgotten that activists of the ruling Communist Party of India (Marxist) made it impossible for Roland Joffe to shoot The City of Joy there. After several protests, which included a bomb attack, Joffe was forced to move his crew, incurring heavy losses. When the film finally was released in India, it was deemed bad and sank without a trace, making a mockery of all the tension that went into making it. Mehta has also been invited by Chief Minister Digvijay Singh of Madhya Pradesh, which itself saw protests by Congressmen against Kamalahasan's recent film on Mahatma Gandhi's assassination, Hey Ram.

Later Mehta agreed to make some changes in the script after she met Union Minister for Information Arun Jaitley. To his credit, neither Jaitley nor Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee buckled to the Sangh Parivar's pressure to ban shooting. Even so, the violence exposes the schism in the Sangh Parivar between the hardliners and the liberals. (Currently Mehta is embroiled in another controversy, that relating to plagiarism. It has been alleged that her script and some characters bear more than a passing resemblance to a book written by Bengali writer Sunil Gangopadhyay more than 20 years back.)

In the midst of all the brouhaha over Water, actress Shabana Azmi, a Muslim, had fatwas issued against her by five Islamic seminaries of Hyderabad, criticising her for shaving her head ("unIslamic and against the Sharia law") and forbidding her from acting roles of Hindus. The feisty actress dismissed the fatwas contemptuously and said that she has been targeted by both Hindus as well as Muslims for her politics. Azmi was also criticized by Islamists a couple of years back for receiving a grandfatherly peck on the cheek from then South African President Nelson Mandela! The Islamic seminaries, for good measure, issued fatwas to all Muslim actors of Bollywood, including reigning superstar Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan and Salman Khan saying acting was unIslamic, especially when they were expected to play the roles of idol-worshipping Hindus.

The color of culture in India varies from saffron to red to green. And its oracles seem to find soft targets in artistic expressions. Any charlatan who invokes religion immediately rises above the law of the country, wrote respected journalist Prem Shankar Jha in Outlook magazine. It is as if religion accords license to get away with anything. Some time back, artist Maqbool Fida Husain, one of India's most famous artists, was hounded for his paintings of a nude Sita and Saraswati, both Hindu deities. Protesters vandalized several of his paintings.

It is not just the art, which is being targeted by the culture police. A controversy has erupted with the Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR), a prestigious government body, announcing that it was withdrawing four volumes of Towards Freedom: Document for the Movement of Independence in India. The compilation is the result of years of costly and painstaking research work by two of the country's most respected historians, Sumit Sarkar and K.N. Panikkar.

The ICHR, which is dominated by right-wing Hindu ideologues under the present government's auspices, says that the work distorts history. B.P. Singhal, who is also a BJP Member of Parliament, wrote in The New Indian Express that "the volumes contain nothing but Marxist ideology. This reflects the work of people who were Mahatma Gandhi's critics… They were supposed to rebut documents from 1942-47, which was the pro-British angle of Independence. They weren't supposed to give opinions or present papers on philosophy. Unfortunately, the volumes did not even speak of any arrest made during (the) struggle."

Both Panikkar and Sarkar, who have Marxist leanings, dismiss the charges of bias. They in turn accused the ICHR of kowtowing to the right wing forces. The issue is still hanging fire.

Why is India facing such threats from self-appointed culture cops? It would seem that there are certain political compulsions involved. For example, in Uttar Pradesh, the BJP is trying to establish itself at the grassroots after poor performance in the national elections and assorted crises. As Venkitesh Ramakrishnan wrote in Frontline: "The party needed an emotional issue to regain lost ground among its upper-caste Hindu support base and Water provided that. By pushing the Hindutva agenda (Chief Minister Ram Prakash), Gupta is also trying to cultivate a personal political constituency, one that has been vacated by mascots of the Hindutva movement…"

So, people like Deepa Mehta and the youngsters of Kanpur are only pawns in a larger political game. In the midst of this depressing state of affairs, there was a heartening report of how the culture cops got a taste of their own medicine in Kanpur. Two girls of S.N. Sen Girls Degree College, Chetana and Henna, already angry over the new dress code, were stopped by staff members from attending a farewell function for their seniors as they wore jeans and T-shirts. The two, experts in martial arts, returned with 15 other girls. When they were stopped again, this time by Principal Madhulekha Vidyarthi, they wrestled her to the ground. Vidyarthi fled the scene to call the police. When Priya Trivedi, the students' union leader confronted the girls, she was beaten unconscious by them. When the police arrived, Chetana and Henna stood their ground even as the others beat a hasty retreat. "When our parents don't object to our clothes, why should the college bother?" they asked the police.