Square One

[Article originally appeared in The Caravan.]

On the morning of April 18, 2008 a young woman, holding her two-year-old daughter, was inconsolably mourning the death of her husband. Friends and family had arrived to the funeral at her home near the Central Ordinance Depot in Jabalpur, where the body of Praveen Balotya, a 25-year-old who had died of tuberculosis, lay. Suddenly, there was commotion. A bunch of youngsters descended and tried to pull the body out of its coffin.

Balotya, a Brahmin by descent, had chosen to become Christian in 2006. The activists of a local Rightwing group, the Hindu Dharam Sena (HDS), led by its chief, Yogesh Agarwal, demanded that they be shown the ‘certificate of conversion’ before they would allow the funeral to proceed according to Christian rites. Left with no option, a sobbing Benjlive Minj Balotya went into her house to look for the affidavit that her late husband had signed.

In the meantime, the police got a whiff of the simmering tension and a jeep full of policemen rushed to the spot. But Agarwal carried on with the noisy protest, and Inspector Mohammed Azim Khan of the Ranjhi Police Station ordered his policemen to baton charge them. The police action left Agarwal and his associate, Arvind Baba, with fractured bones, but the widow was finally able to perform Balotya’s last rites according to his wishes.

What happened on April 18 was not an isolated incident in Jabalpur. Attacks on the minority Christians are commonplace in the city, located in the geographic centre of India in the Mahakaushal region in Madhya Pradesh, where the Rightwing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been in power since December 2003. Jabalpur has been plagued by at least three such attacks every month since the beginning of 2006, thanks to the HDS.

The high incidence of anti-minority attacks in a city barely one-fifth the size and with a population one-tenth of Delhi is alarming, but what is more worrisome is that the scenario in Jabalpur echoes a trend in several other parts of the country. In their effort to gain prominence in the Hindu nationalist movement, splinter groups from the Sangh Parivar are revising their battle strategy from ‘communalism’ (the inciting of divisive socio-political concerns between religious communities for electoral gains) to ‘fundamentalism’ (fighting to protect Hinduism against perceived threats from Muslims and Christians).

Jabalpur is one of the cities where the September 29, 2008 blasts in Malegaon in Maharashtra were planned. According to investigating agencies, the accused in the case, Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur, Dayanand Pandey, and Lt Colonel Shrikant Purohit and Sameer Kulkarni of the Rightwing group Abhinav Bharat (AB) – which was formed by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1905, disbanded in the 1950s, became active again in June 2006, and led till 2007 by his historian granddaughter, Himani Savarkar, when it was effectively reborn as a militant Hindu outfit after she lost control of it to hardliners – met in the city to plan the explosions in the Muslim-majority areas of Malegaon town which killed eight and injured over 80.