Partitions of the Heart
Author : Harsh Mander
Publisher : Penguin, Rs 499
Harsh Mander’s Partitions of the Heart is a worthy intervention at a time when most public protests are being deemed anti-national, writes Himanshi Sharma
Primo Levi, in The Reawakening, sequel to his classic memoir Survival in Auschwitz, writes: “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” It is an important lesson. It is a reminder that genocides aren’t a result of one bad straw-man’s evil actions; they are a result of public acquiescence to crumbling institutions, apathy towards discrimination and dehumanisation of large segments of people, and indifference to politics as long as it doesn’t personally affect us. Harsh Mander’s Partitions of the Heart is a worthy and timely intervention at a time when most public protests are being deemed anti-national, and when independent administrative institutions are slowly being stripped of their autonomy.
Mander’s book is a scathing indictment of the ruling party in power, who he sees as culprits as well as catalysts behind the contemporary climate of communal hate, and minority discrimination within the country. He dubs this phenomenon ‘command bigotry’ which has emboldened ordinary and less powerful everyday hate-mongers to exercise their worst instincts in public without fear of Governmental censure. The narrative begins in the Gulberg Society during 2002 Gujarat riots where the callousness of the Gujarat Model towards the rights of its Muslim minority, even in the face of their persecution and death, was first put on display. Mander carefully details the apathy of police forces even as Lok Sabha MP Ehsan Jafri made repeated phone calls to local police stations as well as people in the uppermost echelons of the State Government, allegedly including the then Chief Minister Narendra Modi, to no avail. The next Chapter, “The Ethics of Collective Vengeance” takes a closer look at the fall-out of this Government sanctioned bigotry. The segregation of Muslim communities in villages of Gujarat post 2002, as well as their unofficial economic boycott is juxtaposed with the uninterested Government machinery which failed to do the absolute minimum to maintain refugee camps, or ensure communal reconciliation or social integration.
Divided into 12 chapters, the book takes care to focus on various interrelated issues like increased public lynching of minorities, cow vigilantism, love-jihad politics, religious conversions, and profiling of young Muslim men as terrorists. He also dedicates an entire chapter to the ‘betrayal’ of ‘secular’ political parties which led to the rise of such a tendency. The culpability of the Left parties, Congress, Samajwadi Party et al in deepening religious divide for their own short-term political gains is discussed and thoroughly criticised in the text. He proposes that these circumstances have reduced minority groups to second class citizenship within their own country. He terms this perpetual feeling insecurity and their manufactured outsider-status as a “bloodless phase of genocide”. “They make a desolation and call it peace”, Agha Shahid Ali had written in A Country Without a Post Office, a slight rephrasing of Tacitus’ “solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant”. In Partitions of the Heart we are made to confront a jarring reality where this desolation of Kashmir has come to haunt the minorities of the rest of the country too. It lifts the curtain on the ugly side of aggressive, masculinist Hindutva fascism that has taken large parts of the country in its grip. Mander’s book is part journalistic, part academic and meticulously researched in keeping with the requirements of both these fields. The author tries to include as many examples of news-reports, eye witness accounts, and documentary evidences as part of his argument in true journalistic style. His academic rigour ensures that these individual events and issues don’t sit in vacuum but are linked to larger social patterns of social and political complacency.
One of the primary weaknesses of the book, in my opinion, is Mander’s ‘all was well’ syndrome. Time and again, he describes each post-riot affected area as an erstwhile model of communal harmony. India of pre-2002 years might have had problems, but in Mander’s worldview it was a tolerant, harmonious country where people of all faiths co-existed in peace. The truth is more complex than that. While the role of certain political forces cannot be ignored in stoking communal tensions over the past few years, it is historically inaccurate to claim that the subliminal anti-Muslim rhetoric isn’t deeply coded in the very fabric of the social and cultural idea of India. The battle for a secular Constitution was hard fought and hard won; to ignore that is to ignore the tremendous courage that Nehru and Ambedkar displayed when they persisted in countering the Hindutva forces that wanted India to be a Hindu nation in opposition to our newly divided Islamic neighbour. One dangerous consequence of this is that it completely frees ‘us’, who are tolerant, from all responsibility for the actions of ‘them’ who engage in bigotry. This inability to make ourselves accountable for perpetuating the very structures we claim to be fighting against cannot but be a band-aid solution. The book shies away from engaging in a nuanced understanding of the legacy of Partition on the citizenry of India despite mentioning it in its title. I also felt that Mander could have spent a little more time in exploring the economic conditions that may have led to the radicalisation of so many people in Hindutva ideology. Finally, the book takes for granted the reader’s knowledge of the workings of the RSS, and its ideological influence in BJP. This limits its readership to people who already agree with Mander in their perception of the organisation. Perhaps that was intended by the author, but I do believe that this book could have made a case for newer converts to Hindutva ideology to reconsider their affiliations in light of the information presented here.
The above critique notwithstanding, this book serves as a poignant archive of the times we live in. In the tradition of faithful truth-keeping of writers before him, Mander bears witness to the systemic erosion of inter-community ties through this book. It should be recommended to everyone who wishes to understand contemporary India.
