DM Monitoring
(By Apoorvanand)
My eyes followed the cart. It stopped before a CRPF man and one of the volunteers pulled out a plate for him. Others filled it with food items. Then the group moved to the next spot where the paramilitary jawans were standing.
I realised that the food and beverage cart was a community service for the CRPF men guarding the peace of Khajuri Khas.Some of the CRPF jawans were reluctant to accept the goodies, but with a little cajoling the volunteers managed to break the ice. The gratitude for this act of kindness and brotherliness was writ large on the faces of the jawans.
This group of Samaritans was wholly male and slightly more formal than the group of women we had seen the previous day. The thought crossed my mind that they could well be members of some Hindu organization.
One thought bothered me: should the Jawans have accepted their food? Would it in any manner influence their behavior towards Muslims?
Suddenly I noticed a bearded, middle-aged man who had stopped his scooter to talk to a CRPF jawan. I inched closer to where they were so that I could hear their conversation. What I overheard was the CRPF jawan telling the man, “But it was your brothers who killed him.”
I took the Muslim man aside and asked him what the conversation was about. He smiled helplessly: “The jawan was telling me that it was my co-religionists who had murdered Ankit Sharma, the Intelligence Bureau man.” “How could he say that?” I exclaimed, and realised the foolishness of my question the instant I spoke.
“Well, how could I say that?” the gentleman replied. “It could have led to unpleasantness, you should understand,” he said.
A journalist friend who happened to be there, shared with me his exchange with a commandant of the CRPF who was tasked with maintaining order and peace in that locality. ‘How can you live with your enemies?’ he had asked my friend, leaving my friend in no doubt that for him the words enemy and Muslim were interchangeable.But I had also come across a jawan muttering to himself, “Jo bhi hua, bura hua” (‘Whatever happened was bad’).
I shared what I had seen and heard with my friends. They told me that there was a campaign among Hindus that if they see policemen or paramilitary jawans in their locality or at their doorsteps, they should offer them tea and refreshments.
I remembered another gesture of support for the police, namely the slogan, “Dilli Police latth bajao, hum tumhare saath hain” (‘Delhi Police, let your lathis speak, we are with you’), popularised recently by frenzied Hindu mobs in Haryana and then in parts of Delhi.I am perplexed.
In this context, how should we read the acts of the women and men who went around providing tea and refreshments to the jawans in the Khajuri Khas area? Should we read the acts of kindness as those of partisanship?
Is this yet another instance of solidarity between Hinduness and the Indian state which is being seen as pro-Hindu and anti-Muslim? Apoorvanand teaches at Delhi University.
(Concluded)
