It began, as teenage capers tend to do, with laughter and a plan to evade familial injunctions. Six school girls — friends and neighbours — on their way back from NEET tuitions; a burqa and the sort of mischief that has animated childhood across generations. That this now sits at the centre of a police investigation tells us something unsettling about the times we live in.
Five Muslim schoolgirls in Moradabad, several of them minors, have been booked under Uttar Pradesh’s stringent anti-conversion law after a month-old CCTV footage showed them helping the only Hindu girl in the group don a burqa. According to family members of the accused, there was no other intent beyond helping the girl slip unnoticed to a local eatery for a quick snack with them, shielding her from the disapproval of her brother who had strict views on loitering after classes. Yet, what might once have remained a private joke between friends, perhaps to be recounted and laughed over in adulthood, has been reframed as something more sinister — an act of coercion, a supposed attempt at proselytisation. After the complaint from the Hindu girl’s brother, at least one of the six has dropped out of tuitions, another sent away to her grandparents’ place. The once tight-knit friendship has begun to unravel under the weight of accusations and scrutiny.
While the families of the accused remain hopeful of an amicable resolution, the Moradabad incident sits within a broader political climate in which religious identity has become overtly conspicuous, and more consequential. From paternalistic safeguards against “ghuspaithiye” — shorthand for illegal immigrants who might usurp employment and imperil safety and culture — to promises to root out “illegal Bangladeshi” students from classrooms in the national capital, political rhetoric has increasingly cast social relations in adversarial terms, stoking demographic anxiety, emphasising threat and the need for hyper-vigilance. In Assam, for instance, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma continues to ratchet up spectres of “jihad”, describing Bangladeshi-origin Muslims as a group whose presence must be curtailed through evictions and economic exclusion: “Assam is a polarised society, for the next 30 years we have to practise politics of polarisation if we want to live… But polarisation is not between Hindu and Muslim; polarisation is between Assamese and Bangladeshi… We don’t fight with Assamese Muslims. We only fight with Bangladeshi Muslims,” he said this week, speaking in the context of Assam’s Special Intensive Revision process.
Sarma may well represent an extreme articulation that often declines even the veneer of constitutionalism, but the logic underpinning his rhetoric is familiar: That coexistence is provisional and contingent on a majoritarian perception of belonging. In a year that will see several crucial Assembly elections, including in West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, what happens when such rhetoric works its way down from podiums to pavements?
In his book Ill Fares The Land: A Treatise On Our Present Discontents (2010), historian Tony Judt warned that the deepest damage caused by social and political division is rarely spectacular or immediate; it surfaces in the thinning of the texture of everyday life, in the slow corrosion of social habits and institutions that once made coexistence unremarkable. The result is a society that may continue to perform diversity in theory, but forgets how to practise it in real life.
Judt was writing of Europe and the United States, specifically of the aftermath of neo-liberalism and growing individualism, but the diagnosis travels easily to the Indian context. We often tend to speak of the nation in lofty impersonal abstractions, invoking civilisational pride, while overlooking the spaces where nationhood is actually experienced viscerally. In tea stalls where men gather to argue over sports or politics; in schools where children sit together and trade lunches and secrets, ignoring the rigid boundaries that adults insist on; in streets, neighbourhoods and marketplaces where people live, bargain, joke, transgress and learn to coexist. It is through these informal solidarities that society renews itself, that it learns to negotiate differences and build trust. But when every interaction carries with it a faint menace of risk, when the mundane world of give and take is seen through the binary of insider and interloper, cracks begin to appear. Suspicion travels faster, goodwill recedes and shared universes collapse into silos.
The girls from Moradabad deserve to know that friendship is indeed bigger than fear, that ordinary life, with its shared jokes, borrowed clothes and impromptu plans, is where hope lives.
As for the rest of us, we must ask ourselves this: Can we still imagine a future in which their laughter rings out untrammelled?
paromita.chakrabarti@expressindia.com
