Tag: Lucknow

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Starting the new year on a high

While the AAP has brought new energy into our politics, lit fests are striking the right note in civil society.
Humra Quraishiby Humra Quraishi

This new year has started on a note of hope. Yes, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) wave has a lot to do with that, at least here in the capital city. Everyone has a wish for the new year…mine is that AAP’s branches, offices, and the enthusiasm of its volunteers and workers spreads to other locales in the country and reaches the people across communities. I would dearly love to see the AAP dent the supposed strongholds of the BJP-RSS and the Congress and SP all over the country.

The other thing getting me considerably excited is the wave of new book releases. I particularly loved this line I recently heard: ‘Tomorrow is the first blank page of a 365-page book. Write a good one.’   

Books and literary festivals are back on the circuit. Even sleepy little towns are planning to host literary dos. And why not! If we can have a newspaper, Khabar Lahireya, published and compiled by a women’s group in the rural stretch of Eastern Uttar Pradesh, we can certainly have small towns hosting literary meets. Still, I was surprised to hear that two literary festivals could be coming up in Lucknow and Gwalior and Bhopal. The list is long: already about a dozen cities of this country are hosting these meets – Mumbai, New Delhi, Jaipur, Cochin, Bangalore, Agra, Chandigarh, Hyderabad, Chennai, Goa, Kolkata and Kasauli.

And I hear that an Urdu Literature festival is starting in Patna. Rakhshanda Jalil is organising it in collaboration with the Government of Bihar on January 4 and 5, 2014. Called Jashn-e-Urdu, it will have panel discussions, book exhibition, film screenings, mushaira as well as ghazal singing and a play by Tom Alter.

Can other cities and towns and villages start hosting such meets? I have been telling my writer friends living in different parts of the country to get together and organise a literature fest. But most of them look worried and nervous – of course, organising such an event cannot be without its pitfalls and stress, but there is no need to get too ambitious or go overboard. These fests could be small, and manageable to host, expanding gradually over the years.

But why do I insist on more literature fests? Because nothing unites and educates like the pen does. We saw this during the days of the Raj, when rebel writers and poets unleashed their disgust against British brutalities through their writings. What can be better than uniting our present-day society than a literature festival that educates as well as entertains?

Humra Quraishi is a senior political journalist based in Gurgaon. She is the author of Kashmir: The Untold Story and co-author of Simply Khushwant.

(Picture courtesy stevemccurry.com)

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In memory of Muzaffarnagar

A peaceful town in its earlier years is currently the battleground for communal hatred. What caused this change and why?
Humra Quraishiby Humra Quraishi

I was born in Uttar Pradesh and I spent my childhood and my carefree teenage years in that State. I travelled to several remote villages and locales there because my father was particular about his family – my amma and his children – tagging along in our open jeep or in our Baby Hindustan car.

We had travelled through Western UP’s Muzaffarnagar and the adjoining belt on several occasions. I can still recall the sights: sprawling sugarcane fields, dozens of workers on the fields, several zamindars and farmers walking about. There was never a bit of tension among communities and never any question raised about caste or creed, and certainly no communal hatred. We’d spent hours initially roaming about, even travelled late at night and it seemed so perfect. Not once did we hear any mention of so-and-so being a Yadav or a Jat or a Musalmaan or a Brahmin.

All of those idyllic images from my childhood were rudely shattered from the early 90s onwards, with worsening communal tensions over the years. The hatred spread all over, furious and uncontrolled. In 2007 or 2008, at a SAARC writers meet in Agra, I’d asked the New Delhi-based historian Rifaqat Ali details about the ground situation in and around that belt. His observations were particularly relevant because he hails from rural Aligarh.

He said, “The fact is this: only a Jat or a Yadav can have the confidence to write his name atop his vehicle. For a Musalmaan it will spell death or doom. He dare not flaunt his name, Muzaffarnagar picks up gunsespecially in an unknown area.” On another occasion, an academic who belongs to Western Uttar Pradesh told me that though his wife wears a burqa or a hijab, he finds the practice unsafe when they travel homewards. “It is prudent not to ‘look’ like a Musalmaan, for your vehicle could be stopped and damaged, and you could be attacked…anything could happen.”

If you ask about the cops and what they do to save or salvage the mounting tensions, the answers you receive reveal a complexity beyond the expected corruption in the ranks. Apparently, at the constable level, they are recruited as per their caste and creed, so when a situation arises, they act or attack based on whether their community is involved. A Yadav minister or Chief Minister would be more than tempted to enroll as many Yadavs in the force as possible. A Jat minister would do likewise, and this pattern continues across several castes. It would be interesting to know the exact percentage of cops vis-a-vis the community ruling at that moment.

And this communal hatred has spread to the nearby villages and qasbas and towns of Western Uttar Pradesh. Right-wing goons have turned the area into a cesspool. Till date, the BJP MLA from that particular area, Sangeet Som, has not been arrested and thrown into prison, despite uploading the fake video that started the recent mess and which will affect generations of people forever. Nor have other politicians involved in the issue.

Ironical, isn’t it, that the same belt of Western Uttar Pradesh, which had seen the start of the ouster of the British from our land with the Mutiny of 1857 is today embroiled in anarchy? But what happens next? Obviously, a thick-skinned politician or an absolute fool might appear on TV and say, “All is coming back to normal! Only 37 are dead and another 100 are injured, and several others have fled. But the situation is under control!”

What about the four BJP men accused on inciting violence and who have gone underground? What was the police doing? Where were the inputs from IB? What about the role of the Akhilesh Yadav Government? Even if the father-son duo of Mulayam and Akhilesh cry themselves hoarse with the “It’s a Right-wing conspiracy!” refrain, the question they are still not answering is: Why didn’t their police force act?

Humra Quraishi is a senior journalist based in Gurgaon. She is the author of Kashmir: The Untold Story and co-author of Simply Khushwant.

(Pictures courtesy www.thehindu.com, www.hindustantimes.com)

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Why the Railway Budget makes no sense

Humra Quraishi describes her adventures with the Indian Railways and wonders if travel basics would ever be taken care of.

Whilst reading my daily Thought For The Day a few days ago – Blaise Pascal’s ‘ Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary’, I muttered aloud that this thought seems to fit rather well with Railways Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal’s rail budget.

Typically, the Rail Budget comprised big announcements of bigger trains, especially from his home town Chandigarh, complete with hackneyed tricks of modern-day technology (he was trying to sound technology savvy, I think) without paying attention to the grim fact that e-bookings and reservations are beyond the reach of most of his countrymen. But the Honourable Minister doesn’t seem bothered to look into ground realities. Nor does he seem particularly concerned about the dangers lurking for rail passengers – no, not in the form of terrorists, but rats and cockroaches and stray dogs in and around train compartments.

Mind you, I am not talking of slow passenger trains but those special ones – the Rajdhanis and Shatabdis. I really want to see what the Minister’s new wonder – Anubhuti – will be like.

I’m not much of a traveller; the last time I took the train was the Lucknow-Delhi Shatabdi and the Delhi-Ajmer Shatabdi. There were rats in the coach and the railway staff’s only solution seemed to be to play hide-and-seek with them. We tried putting our feet in a high-alert (and higher-than-ground-level) posture, but you know how it is. After a point, you forget to remain so tense, only to be reminded by another darting rodent. We remained restless for long hours. As if that wasn’t enough, several well-fed cockroaches arrived on the scene, sniffing around the food trays that nobody would bother to take away hours after we’d eaten.

Then there were dogs on the platforms. Not one or two, but several loitering around as though it was their home territory (which it probably was). I was dismayed to see how the railway platform of the capital city was stinking with the filth and the animals around.

The Honorable Railway Minister should undertake a train journey one of these days, one of those unannounced and ‘spontaneous’ ones that his ilk is so fond of taking in the presence of press photographers and news channels, so that he can see the mess in the Indian Railways for himself. It will be even better if he carries a bag or two, preferably containing valuables, and experience for himself the many thefts taking place on station platforms. During one of our journeys, one of our handbags was cut into and left bereft of the last rupee tucked within its interiors; we rushed to the police station situated at the end of New Delhi Railway station, only to hear the paunchy policewallahs tell us that it was next to impossible to retrieve the stolen stuff. Very philosophically they added, “Madam, what is gone is gone.”

Mr Bansal, it is spring…that time of the year when there’s supposed bahaar in and around your bungalow, but do try and move out from your gardens and take a stroll on the railway platforms. Just like in your Budget speech, I am certain that you will utter some more of those moving couplets you regaled us with a few days ago, but this time, you may genuinely feel what you say. If you do take such a trip, be sure to watch out, apart from the filth and the mess, for the little children, some of them battered beyond recognition and several others made to beg. Look out also for the many unscrupulous activities that take place in the Railways’ premises. But no, don’t go as a minister with those sepahis and chamchas hovering around you, but as an average Indian who travels without security convoys.

Humra Quraishi is a senior political journalist based in Gurgaon. She is the author of Kashmir: The Untold Story and co-author of Simply Khushwant. 

(Picture courtesy bryansander.com)

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