 "Crowd forces artists to deface Urdu wall painting")
A crowd forced a French artist and an Indian associate earlier this month to deface their own paintings on the wall of Delhi Jal Board pumping station in northeast Delhi, reported The Telegraph. The artists were painting an Urdu couplet praising Delhi. The crowd, instead, forced them to write 'Swachh Bharat Abhiyan' in Hindi.
The artists are a part of a cultural project called #MyDilliStory commissioned by the Delhi government's art, culture and language department, as part of which the artists will paint 40 couplets on the walls in four languages across the city. The group of astists is known as Delhi I Love You (DILY).
Ahmad, one of the painters, told that as they painted the first line on the wall, a crowd started gathering around them. From the crowd, a man approached them, asking them not to write in Urdu. He claimed to be a member of RSS. When Ahmad told him that the couplet was prasing Delhi, the man said that Urdu was not acceptable. Soon, about 150 people gathered around Ahamd and his French colleague, Swen Simon.
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"He had a few supporters who yelled abuses about our mothers and sisters and started shouting 'Jai Shri Ram'. I said my name is Shabbu and they assumed I was Shambhu, a Hindu. So they turned their ire towards my French colleague, Swen Simon, asking him to pay me my wages and go back to Lahore. Swen doesn't know Hindi. I pleaded with them to leave him alone, saying he's French not Pakistani," Ahmad told The Telegraph.
People from the crowd too matter into their own hands and started painting over the Urdu characters. "They yelled at me, saying paint in 'yellow, orange, blue'. They held my hands and tried to force me to paint. I agreed to paint whatever they wanted to save ourselves. They said paint 'Swachh Bharat Abhiyan' (the Clean India campaign promoted by the Narendra Modi government) and 'Narendra Modi' in Hindi, which I started doing. By the time I painted the first line, police arrived," said Ahmad.
The artist tried to photograph the mob but the self-proclaimed RSS man took their phones and deleted the photographs. Hearing the police sirens, the RSS man disappeared into the crowd. "The police were quite rude and took away my phone. They kept questioning our motives after I told them I live in Batla House (where two alleged terrorists and a police officer were killed in 2008). Thankfully, (Delhi) culture minister Kapil Mishra called the police up when we were in the van, after which the cops were apologetic and offered us soft drinks and food," Ahmad said.
Mishra said such intimidation would not be tolerated. "These RSS men neither understand culture nor religion, especially Hinduism. Otherwise, they wouldn't have done this to our foreign guest who is doing a service to the city. The option of taking legal action is open to us but we first want to create social awareness and expose their plans to create communal tension," the minister said.
However, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Northeast Delhi) A K Singla said that he had no information of any such incident and will look into the matter.
Kush Sethi of DILY said the group will no longer work on the site. "We didn't expect this as it has never happened before," he said.