This from the Sentinel/ cm --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Hindutva Campaign Tavleen Singh It amused me to come back from Varanasi last week and find those five star generals of Hindutva - Ashok Singhal and Praveen. Togadia - at it again. This time via audio cassette so if you're in the mood for Hindutva you can now have instant replay. Well, let me say this, if Singhal and Togadia had listened in to some of the conversations I had with devout Hindus in that holiest of our holy cities last week they would have been more circumspect about launching a new Hindutva campaign at this point. It is unlikely to go down well. Allow me to describe only two of the conversations I had. The first was with the son of a former Mahant of the Vishwanath Mandir. He is as devout a Hindu as I know but when I asked what he thought about the Ayodhya issue he had this to say. 'Who do these people think they are? Will one of them explain what it is they destroyed in Ayodhya? Was it a mosque or a temple? As far as I see it there was a temple in which Ram-lalla was being worshipped and that temple no longer exists. Can we trust the same fellows who broke it down to build another one now? He added that under a so-called Hindutva Prime Minister he had seen two ancient Hindu temples in Varanasi torn down recently in the name of a 'beautification' drive that has the sanction of our Tourism Minister, the unstoppable Mr Jagmohan. What sort of beautification can there be, he asked, that involves the demolition of a ancient temples? My next conversation was with Veerbhadra Misra, the venerable Mahant of the Sankat Mochan temple, a man so revered in Varanasi that the devout believe that to touch him is to touch Hanuman himself. Mahantji is a deeply unhappy man these days because he cannot believe what is being done to his beloved Ganga on a BJP Prime Minister's watch. Long before Rajiv Gandhi's Government discovered the need for a Ganga Action Plan, Mahantji, a scientist himself, had pointed out that the river was so polluted that its waters were septic in some parts. When he heard that more than Rs 200 crore were being spent on the Ganga Action Plan he spent time studying it and discovered, to his horror, that it was unlikely to make any difference because it would not stop sewage pouring into the river. Nobody listened to him, because Indian officials listen only to God, so the money got spent and the water of the Ganga remains as unclean as it was before the crores were spent. Mahantji points out that the only way to clean the river is by diverting the sewage that pours into it instead of trying to treat it en route. He has a plan to do this that would cost half what the second phase of the Ganga Action Plan will and, most importantly, the municipality of Varanasi has approved it but on account of stubborn resistance from the Central government and the Government of Uttar Pradesh a dispute has arisen that has been in court for more than ten years. "If we cannot save the Ganga" Mahantji says with tears in his eyes "then we will lose all the things that make us what we are and this globalization will reduce us to being just like everybody else. We are an endangered species." We speak in a room whose small, barred windows overlook the Ganga. Its water is iridescent in the light of a mother-of-pearl tinted dusk, temple bells sound from somewhere close and from a distance the start of the evening worship of the river. From where we sit Varanasi, the Ganga and Indian civilization seem as perfectly intact as ever but the minute I step out of the Sankat Mochan temple into a narrow street filled with stray goats and cows I recoil from the stench of rotting garbage, clogged drains and sewage. As I walk back towards my enchanting little hotel on the Assi Ghat I find myself picking my way through mounds of excrement, both human and animal. The stench mixes easily with the general smell of decay and death that pervades Varanasi. Those who love this city fear that it is in terminal decline and that no matter what anyone does any more it is already too late. And into this atmosphere of decay and despair has walked Jagmohan with ideas of improvement that only he seems to fully understand. So, in an attempt to deal with the garbage problem he ordered the building of four or five garbage centres which would have made sense if they were equipped with incinerators. Since they are not, though, the end result of this exercise is that now you not only see garbage rotting in the narrow, medieval bye-lanes of this ancient city you also see it rotting in cavernous sheds. Does it make sense? No. And, it would make even less sense if you had spent time watching rickety wheelbarrows trundle up to these garbage-filled sheds in an attempt to clean them out. The end result is that Varanasi now has more garbage instead of less. Jagmohan's intentions for the city are good. He wants it declared a Heritage site so that funds can come in from abroad to save one of the oldest cities in human history. This is a very good idea but surely we need to begin by setting up a system that would clean Varanasi and preserve its medieval streets and ancient buildings? If Jagmohan has any plans for this there is no evidence of them yet so you walk to the most famous of temples to Shiva - the Vishvanath Mandir - through streets so dirty that all thoughts of worship and spirituality become infected with the stench of excrement. It was while walking towards the temple that I heard from local residents of plant to 'widen the road' so that important officials could drive up in their cars. I was not able to verify whether there was any truth in this but if there is then you can be sure that Varanasi is likely to die even sooner. Even as someone who does not think of myself as a devout Hindu I find this heartbreaking. I find equally heartbreaking that despite the failure of the first phase of the Ganga Action Plan, hundreds of crores of rupees will now be spent on phase 2. We have a right to ask what is going on and we have a right to ask those who think of themselves as the guardian angels of Hindutva why they are wasting so much time on building new temples when our most sacred city is falling to pieces and our most sacred river is being slowly destroyed. The only time I had the dubious pleasure of interviewing Togadia I asked him this question and the only answer he could come up with was that I had no right to ask about the Ganga because I was a 'secularist'. Well, it is no longer just me who is asking this question there are many devout Hindus asking it now and when you look at people like Singhal and Togadia from a Varanasi vantage point they look really bad. In the two days I spent wandering around the city, I did not meet anyone who had a good word to say for either Hindutva or the Bharatiya Janata Party. Quite the opposite. I met a lot of people who said that the BJP's image had been damaged by its association with rabble-rousing groups who failed to see that Ayodhya was no longer an issue. If we cannot save Varanasi, if we cannot clean the waters of the Ganga, does it really matter if there is a new temple to Rama? _______________________________________________ Assam mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://pikespeak.uccs.edu/mailman/listinfo/assam
