It is generally agreed that the suspension of the young Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer Durga Shakti Nagpal as sub-divisional magistrate of Gautam Buddh Nagar - the district of Uttar Pradesh (UP) that borders Delhi - was unjustified. According to the UP government in Lucknow, she oversaw the demolition of an illegally-constructed wall to a local mosque; but it is believed that the real reason was that she had gone after politically-connected local toughs who were mining sand, also illegally. (I apologise in advance to prose purists for repeating the word "illegally" several times during this column. It is an occupational hazard when writing about India.)
Ms Nagpal may or may not have been taking on what headline-writers are evocatively calling the "sand mafia". My problem is, in fact, with the stated reason for her suspension, which strikes me as bad enough. How far down the road of pandering to religion have we gone when an acceptable excuse for suspending an IAS officer is that she did her job, even though it might have offended Religious Sensibilities?
From the point of view of the good people of Kadalpur, this argument is unfair - and I see why, too. All they want is a small mosque to call their own; and everywhere they see common land being illegally taken over by other people to build mosques, temples, dargahs, churches, and so on. But so it goes; make a single exception for one area's Sentiments, and then you must make it for everyone's, or lose secularism brownie points.
If someone had taken photographs of larger trees in, say, South Delhi at various moments in time over the past decade and a half, and then presented them to us as stop-motion animation, the process would become clear. First there's a tree. A nice big trunk; shade under which weary pedestrians can shelter a moment. Then someone puts up a calendar with a religious image. Then there are tiny little statues, barely bigger then your palm. And, as less than a decade flashes by, you have a white-tiled temple completely surrounding the tree, with iron bars in front and a hereditary priest, jutting into the road and causing traffic pile-ups. As well as, usually, a signboard with the word "Pracheen", or "ancient", on it.
Nor is this unique to any one religion, of course. The historian and writer Sohail Hashmi can tell you stories of how relatively recent graves of Muslims can metamorphose, when you take their eye off them for a year or two, into freshly-painted places of worship, claiming a lineage back to the Lodhis and men selling chadars in front.
And the process will repeat itself ad infinitum, too. A railway line cuts through South Delhi not too far from where I live in Defence Colony; and in the thin strip of land between the railway and the colony, there are three such rapidly-growing places of worship. One of them, the closest to where I used to live, began, with dubiously legal land title, as a pretty little shrine. It expanded into a courtyard. Now the deity has been moved to the back, a priest has been hired from out of town, the family of the original priest lives around, and lounges in, the courtyard - they can afford to, as the space in front has been illegally rented out to a mobile-repair shop. Indian industry at its finest. The residents of Kadalpur would say: why is that allowed, and not their mosque?
UP Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav would, of course, agree. In his benevolent dispensation, law-breaking is perfectly acceptable as long as everyone is allowed to break the law. All those emotions that can be tagged as "religious" are deserving of Lucknow's tender loving care. Says so right in the Preamble, doesn't it, where it declared we're a Sovereign Socialist Religiously Sensible Republic?
I hear the righteous bellow of the Hindutvavadis already: surely that cap-wearing Yadav goes out of his way to appease Muslims alone, right? I urge everyone to look up the Shri Kashi Vishwanath Temple Trust (Amendment) 2013, which exempts donations to that temple from income tax completely, and provides various other benefits, besides. The special benefits, according to reports, are modelled on those offered to the priests of Tirupati by the Andhra Pradesh government. This would be the same Tirupati trust that, after being granted concessions you and I could hardly expect, famously owed the state government dozens of crores in back taxes and then raised its eyebrows in shock when it was sacrilegiously asked to pay up. After the offending CM, Y S R Reddy, died in a helicopter crash, I even received SMSes suggesting that it was Tirupati's revenge.
And this attitude will institutionalise itself soon. The Income-Tax Appellate Tribunal in Nagpur, in a verdict near-unique in its ability to redefine plain English, declared in March that expenses on worshipping Hindu deities and maintaining temples weren't actually "religious activity" under the law. Thus, they became charitable activity by default, and so all expenses on them were tax-free. The Indian state is an awesome and terrifying thing, capable of breaking people and institutions effortlessly and casually; but it becomes a sweet wee puppy once Sentiments are involved.
Everyone knows this, even the tribes in distant Niyamgiri. Across India, forests have been cleared, hills excavated, rivers polluted and so on, irrespective of the opinions of indigenous local people on the subject. Ah, but the smart men of Niyamgiri learnt how to bring this juggernaut to a stop. Point to a distant hill that's made of bauxite, declare your gods live there - and, voila! See the Republic retreat. Who says our tribes aren't part of the mainstream? In Niyamgiri, at least, people have grasped the first rule of life in India: tolerance is optional, manners unnecessary, but Everyone Must Respect Sentiments.
mihir.sharma@bsmail.in
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