Vibhuti Narain Rai

Vibhuti Narain Rai, born on 28 Nov. 1951, is an IPS officer of 1975 batch allotted to UP cadre. He is an acknowledged fiction writer of Hindi . His novel Shahar Mein Curfew has been widely talked about and was translated in English, Urdu, Punjabi,Bangla , Marathi,Assamese, Orria and Malayalam He is well known as an activist who has been fighting against obscurantist and communalists in the Indian society. He established a library in his village Jokehara, Azamgarh.

Saturday, November 21, 2009

representation of communal violence

Author: Bede Scott a

Affiliation: a Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
DOI: 10.1080/17449850802410457
Publication Frequency: 4 issues per year
Published in: FPRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=journal" Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Volume 44, Issue 4 December 2008 , pages 345 - 354
Subjects: Creative Writing; Post-Colonial Studies;
Formats available: HTML (English) : PDF (English)
Previously published as: World Literature Written in English (0093-1705) until 2005
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Abstract
This article explores the representation of communal violence in Vibhuti Narain Rai's 1988 novel Curfew in the City. Through a close reading of Rai's novel, I argue that such violence serves to “communalize” urban space on the Indian subcontinent - framing and reframing the boundaries between communities, establishing distinct ethno-religious enclaves, and attaching new meanings to public and private space. I then discuss the adverse impact this reconfiguration of space has on the status and disposition of minorities, alienating them from their environment and inducing in them a profound sense of displacement or “unbelonging”. In order to clarify this process, I invoke the concept of the architectural uncanny - Anthony Vidler's term for the feelings of “estrangement, alienation, exile, and homelessness” to which modern architecture gives rise. In this instance, however, I use it to describe the way in which communal violence defamiliarizes the Indian city, and in so doing transforms minority communities into symbolic foreigners or “virtual” refugees, permanently estranged from the urban space they occupy. Keywords: Vibhuti Narain Rai; communal violence; urban space; architectural uncanny

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Vibhuti Narain Rai- A profile

Born in 1951, Vibhuti Narain Rai did his Masters in English Literature from Allahabad University in 1971 and joined the Indian Police Service in 1975. His eventful police career of 36 years saw him winning many laurels. He was awarded the Police Medal for Meritorious Services and President’s Police Medal for Distinguished Services during his career, which included posting in anti-insurgency operations in the Kashmir Valley (1992-1993), SSP Kumbh Mela Allahabad (1988-89) and many communally sensitive districts of Uttar Pradesh as SSP and Inspector General of Police. Besides being a distinguished police official, Vibhuti Narain Rai is an acclaimed Hindi fiction writer and has published five novels -- Ghar, Shahar Mein Curfew, Kissa Loktantra, Tabadala and Prem KI Bhootkatha. Novel Shahar Mein Curfew invited the wrath of Hindutva forces, who at one time demanded a ban on it. The book was translated in English, Urdu, Punjabi, Bangla, Marathi, Manipuri, Oriya, Malayalam, Kannada and Assamese. The novel Tabadala was awarded Indu Sharma Katha Samman by Katha UK, a South Asian writers forum of UK.This novel was also translated in Urdu and English. Other novels Ghar (Bangla), Kissa Loktantra (Punjabi) and Prem Ki Bhootkatha (Kannada, English and Urdu) were also translated in other languages. He has also written satires and his collection of satires has been published under the title Ek Chhatra Neta Ka Roznamcha. He founded the leading literary Hindi monthly magazine Vartman Sahitya and edited it for more than 15 years. Vibhuti Narain Rai is an activist who has been fighting fundamentalist and obscurantist forces for years. He has raised his voice and written boldly against communal biases of Indian Police. He was awarded a fellowship by National Police Academy, Hyderabad, to work on the Perception of Police Neutrality During Communal Strife in India and his dissertation was published under the title Combating Communal Conflict and was translated in Hindi, Urdu and Kannada. This work has been widely quoted and is considered an authoritative piece on the sensitive issue of relationship of Indian State and minorities. His other famous book is Ranbhumi Mein Bhasha which is a collection of articles published in various newspapers and journals. At present, he is the Vice-Chancellor of Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Hindi Vishwavidyalaya, Wardha. This university was established in 1997 and existed mostly on paper only. He brought it into the realm of reality with several initiatives and converted it into a throbbing temple of learning. During the last three and a half years, it has been transformed into a vibrant residential campus with beautiful buildings, competent faculty and a greater number of students. It is the first time since it has been created that it has attracted students from countries like China, Thailand, Mauritius and Sri Lanka. With his rich administrative experience, he could address successfully the biggest challenge on campuses of India – anarchy, indiscipline and lethargy.

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Books & Authors/ DAWN, January 29,2006

Vibhuti Narain Rai : Observation at close quarters -
By Asif Farrukhi
A writer is often described- and rightly so-as the conscience of the age, a guardian angel or a watchdog against all that is wrong in society. But what if the guardian turns into an actual guard? The writer as a real life thanedar. Can one speak of a portrait of an artist as a policeman? In the case of Vibhuti Narain Rai, the answer is a big ‘yes’. But then, he is an exception on more than one count.
Police officer and writer, Rai was born in 1951 in a small village near Azamgarh in eastern Uttar Pradesh. He did his masters from Allahabad University in 1971 and in 1975 he joined the Indian Police Service. During his association with the police, he came to see the Hindu-Muslim riots at close hands and while he was associated as a fellow with the National Police Academy in Hyderabad he carried out research on “the perception of police neutrality during communal strife”, which was published as a book and was later translated into Hindi and Urdu.
He depicted the same theme in his short and intense novel Shahar Main Curfew which created a stir in the Hindi circles when it was first published .It viewed the communal issue from the perspective of the victims, who happened to be poverty-ridden Muslim beedi –workers in this case, and was dubbed “pro-Muslim”. The novel was translated into Urdu by Waqar Nasiri and published in India as well as in Pakistan , where it was printed in two journals before being released in book form. The well-known scholar Prof C.M. Naim translated it into English with the title, Curfew in the City in 1998.
While this novel remains his best known work, Rai has penned a number of others, including the novels Ghar, Qissa Lok-Tantra and Tabadala. He has served as editor of a literary journal in Hindi and has also published a collection of satirical pieces.
Posted in Lucknow at present, Rai was recently in Pakistan to participate in the Sajjad Zaheer Centenary celebrations organised by the Irtiqa group. In his busy schedule, he listened patiently to the lengthy deliberations, seemed more relaxed while exchanging notes outside the conference hall and drove down with me to chat about things in general over a cup of tea.
Rai does not see any contradiction in his work as a police officer and his vocation as a writer. At ease with questions, he sits back to talk, looking more like a professor of Hindi literature than anything else.
“The situation in Hindi is bad and with freelancing, it is not possible to lead a comfortable middle-class life,” he says. “So I had to look for a job and it so happened that I joined the police. I am asked this question often that there is no direct relationship between literature and the police department and the two seem contradictory. But my work has also presented me with some opportunities. I was able to meet more people and see certain things closely which if I had been in some other department; I would not have been able to do. These include criminals, touts, corrupt politicians, corrupt officials and other such elements of our society. I was able to observe at close quarters the criminal violence which stems from fundamentalism and is gaining grounds in our society. I don’t think I made any mistake in selecting my job.”
According to Mr. Rai, the ideas for three of his novels emerged from his experience as a police officer. In Tabadala he has tackled the issue of corruption rampant in the system. He says. that he was interested in the issue of communal violence. While he was posted in Allahabad in the initial phase of his career ,he had to deal with such a riot." Although I was still relatively junior in my service , I had the opportunity to deal with it independently. I was witness to many events which were later incorporated in the novel," he says revealing his source.
The novel was even more appreciated in the Urdu circles, being reprinted, serialized or extracted in more than a hundred periodicals, "It is ironical that it was a critique of the Hindu behaviors , or the Hindu police," he says indicating that he is aware of a possible misleading of the book. He recounts that in certain Hindi circles, it was not accepted as a novel and some people termed it as "a mere reportage, a newspaper report". "Behind it was also the fear that Hindus have been shown as oppressors or perpetuators of violence," he explains.
"As a writer I was not concerned with favouring Hindus or Muslims. I wanted to depict my observations during the communal violence and as a writer, I will stand with those who suffer. I am saying this with reference to all writers not only myself. This is my commitment as a writer." He agrees that the novel has a feeling of empathy for Saeeda, its protagonist, " this is not only the story of Saeeda but the story of women in all the homes of Rani Mandi," he emphasizes.
This novel brought a large readership to Rai and he is more satisfied with it than his other books. There were 13 or 14 editions in Hindi alone and the book is translated in to Marathi Bangla and Punjabi. However Rai is not a one-book Writer. He smiles as he says that here in Pakistan he is known to many people by the name of his book rather than his own name.
He goes on to talk about his other books. His other well-known novel deals with what he calls, "the criminalization of politics in recent years and the rise of the mafia" when the mafia realized that all this time they working for others they could serve their own purpose better by running in elections." His recent work includes a collection of essays; mostly on communal issues and the dalit question.
Currently he is working on two novels. The first is a love story which he hopes to complete this year. The other novel is set in his native village. The story starts fro 1966, which he considers a watershed year "when the politics of the country changed. The Congress lost the elections in many states. The upper casts began to decline and the dalits began to open up spaces around themselves. Those changes are at the heart of this novel," he says.
Rai is familiar with the work of a number of Pakistani writers. He mentions Zaheda Hina and Fahmida Riaz, Saying that he would also keep a lookout for their new writings. He says that a good new work from Pakistan gets translated into Hindi fairly quickly. Going back to the previous generation of writers, he singles out Manto, Ibne Insha and Intizar Husain as writers whom he has cherished.
Rai is equally vocal about the other Hindi writings on Communal issues. "Our mainstream is anti-fascist and anti-communal," he says with a sense of pride. "Those who take a communal stance are not part of the Hindi mainstream. "This is our good fortune. Much has been written since Babri Mosque on this issue and our dominant stance is against all forms of communalism." He cites the work of a number of writers on this issue and the many collections of stories and poems which have appeared around this theme.
He takes a critical view of Nirmal Verma saying that he was openly and sometimes discreetly close to Hindutya. "Look, where he had started from and where he reached," he shakes his head. "But he is an exception rather than the norm," he says and goes on to talk of the Hindi writers who believe in freedom of expression, democracy and secularism. As he speaks of his cherished values, the face of this Hindi novelist is lit up with passion.

Letter addressed to all IPS officers of the country during Gujrat riots of 2002

Dear Colleague,
I am writing to you at a very difficult time as an Indian Police Service officer and with a sense of anguish. The recent events related to the communal holocaust in Gujarat are a matter of great concern for the country and should inspire serious introspection among all of us IPS officers. The terrible carnage that occurred at Godhra was an early warning of the fact that big events of communal destruction could occur the next day all over the State and the expectation from a professional police force was that it would oppose all actions of revenge and counter-violence with all the force that it could muster. But this did not happen. Not only was the police unsuccessful in containing the violence of the next few days but, it seemed, that in many places policemen were actively encouraging the rioters. The failure of the police should not be attributed to the lower ranks but must be seen as a failure of leadership, that is, a failure of the IPS.
The events that followed the beastly incident at Godhra did not surprise a person like myself who is not only a police officer but also a keen student of social behaviour. The same old story was repeated everywhere from Ahmedabad, the capital, to the rural areas. Since l960, in almost all riots that have occurred, the same picture has been painted in the same colours, a picture of a helpless and often actively inactive police force that allowed wailing members of the minority community to be looted and killed in its presence, that remained a mute witness to some of their members being burnt alive.
Whatever may be my concerns as an ordinary citizen, as a police officer, my greatest concern is the preservation of the professional character of the police force. An insensitive chief minister can pat his incompetent police force on the back and the senior police leadership can also blame the ‘misleading media’ and the ‘anti-national minorities’ for any criticism made of its handling of the situation. But the truth is that after every riot the same criticism is made of the police, that of its not only having failed to protect the lives and property of the minorities but of siding with Hindu rioters and encouraging them. And after this recent rioting also the same criticism is being levelled against the Gujarat police.
Whatever happened in Gujarat is not something new. It only once again underlines the fact that the senior leadership of the police will have to sit down and think as to why after every riot the same story is repeated: that of incompetence, inactivity and criminal negligence. Until we accept that all is not in order in our own house, nothing can be put right.
The first: institutionalised opposition to communal violence is initiated by the police. This occurs at several levels: collection of intelligence before the outbreak of violence, preventive measures while tension is escalating, use of force to stop violence and, after peace is restored, initiation of legal proceedings against the guilty. These are some of the steps taken by the police to combat communal riots. None of these steps can be taken effectively if we ourselves are infected with a communal bias.
For an average policeman, collection of intelligence is limited to gathering of information about the activities of communal Muslim organisations. It is not easy to make him realise that the activities of Hindu communal organisations also come under the purview of anti-national activities and, therefore, it is necessary to keep an eye on their activities also. It is a fact that very little input on the activities of communal Hindu organisations and their activists is to be found in the police station records.
Similarly, preventive arrests, even in riot situations in which Muslims are the worst sufferers, are restricted to members of the minority community. Further, even where Muslims are being attacked and the police resorts to firing, their main targets are Muslims. House-searches and arrests reveal the same bias.
What happened in Gujarat was a repetition of the above but on an unprecedented scale where the extent of violence and destruction was unparalleled and one-sided. The other difference was that for the first time the inaction, connivance and bias of the police were all on display on television screens in every Indian (and many foreign) homes. Now we have lost even the fig-leaf of alleged misrepresentation by the print-media.
It may be relevant to mention here that on many occassions when leadership was provided which was professionally sound and free from any communal bias, the same bunch of policemen have won confidence of various sections of society and made their organisations proud of them. The old truism is borne out that generals fail and not the troops. Very often the officers blame lower ranks of the force for their inability to control communal conflicts effectively. But we have seen even in the recent Gujarat happenings that in the midst of failures there were success stories in which upright IPS officers led their men from the front and ensured that there was no loss of life and property in their area of responsibility.
It is a sad fact that police-officers who have not just failed to control riot situations but who have actually given them their active support have not been punished in even one instance. The anti-Sikh riots of l984, especially in the capital of the country, one of the best-policed cities, saw the killings of thousands of Sikhs that could not have taken place without the active connivance of police. Despite indictments not only by the press but by several inquiry commissions, in some of which distinguished IPS officers like Sri Padma Rosha were also involved, not one police officer was punished and none of their careers was adversely affected. The Madon Commission and Srikrishna Commissions have suffered the same fate.
It is very clear that no outside agency can reform us. This is a job we will have to do ourselves. If we have any sense of pride left in the service to which we belong which has had an illustrious past and has enjoyed great prestige in the country, the time has come for us to set about this task in right earnest. We must call a general house of the Central IPS Association and demand that the government take action against Gujarat officers who have failed in their primary duty to maintain law and order and prevent violence; and against all officers who have failed in similar situations since l984. We should not treat the association as a trade union body to fight for better pay and service conditions but as a medium to improve the service itself. If the government does not take any action, the very least that we can do is remove such officers from the membership of the Association.
Hoping to hear from many of you shortly,
— Vibhuti Narain Rai, IPS (UP, RR,3 l975).

Human Rights Features

Vibhuti Narain Rai, former Inspector General (Border Security Force), now with the Uttar Pradesh state Police, noted in a 1999 article, communal overtones coloured police perceptions of citizens as well as the community’s perception of the police as far as back as the pre-Partition days. A police officer, Hindu or Muslim, adds Rai, “continued to be looked upon primarily as a protector of his own community.”
Rai undertook a study on police neutrality during communal riots, in which he found that the relationship between the police and Muslim citizens in most parts of the country was “inimical” and that “community perception of the police in situations of communal tension was that of an enemy”. In most major communal riots in the country, according to Rai’s findings, Muslims suffered the most, “both in terms of life and property”. Additionally, he found that “even in riots where the number of Muslims killed was many times more than the Hindus, it was they who were mainly arrested, most searches were conducted in their houses, and curfew imposed in a harsher manner in their localities. This observation holds good for even those riots where almost [all those] killed were Muslims” (emphasis in original).

Dark Facts Behind The Men In Khaki- August 24, 1998

A recently released study by a senior cop unmasks the bias that infects the police during communal riots By : Saibal Chattergy: During the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, Taran Gujral, a Punjabi writer and principal of a Kanpur college, discovered the bitter truth quite by accident. She realized , perhaps for the first time in her life, how misplaced her faith in the police force was. Her locality was surrounded by a frenzied mob and an armed attack was imminent. She telephoned the police control room for help. The response was derisive laughter and a curt" Hum bhi Hindu hain (after all, we too are Hindus)". The account of a hapless lady's experience in the face of a grave threat to her life and property is only one of the many shocking stories about partisan policemen that Vibhuti Narain Rai, inspector-general , BSF, unearthed during a path-breaking research project that confirmed his worst fears. His conclusion :the police force does indeed suffer from a pronounced communal bias during riots. The man khaki is the most visible, if not always the most potent, symbol of State power. Under the rule of law, it is his job to protect every citizen, no matter which religion he or she professes. But when he is put to his severest test in a communal riot situation, does he stay true to his uniform ? Does he forget that he is a policemen first , a Hindu or Muslim later? According to Rai's dissertation, commissioned by the National Police Academy, Hyderabad, he doesn't . Because of the irrational prejudices that policemen often demonstrate during Hindu-Muslim riots, the minorities have lost faith in the ability, perhaps even the inclination, of the force to deliver justice. Rai, who was the superintendent of police, Ghaziabad, when the Meerut riots of 1987 happened, bases his candid conclusion on interviews with riot victims-200 Hindus and an equal number of Muslims-as well as 50-odd serving and retired police officers. "I identified 10 riots which were major in terms of the physical and psychological damage they wrought, and where the conduct of the law-enforcing agencies came in for sharp criticism," says the 47-year-old police officer who has another significant identity. That of a Hindi litterateur with five novels to his credit. Rai also edits a literary magazine. Backed by figures drawn from the files of the Home Ministry and the Police Bureau of Research and Development as well as a thorough analysis of the Data yielded by his survey, Rai's dissertation also belong to the minority community. "This defies logic," says Rai. "If 80 percent of the victims are Muslims, it must follow that Hindus would constitute at least 60 to 70 percent of those arrested. But that never happens." Is it any wonder, then , that 97 percent of 200 Muslim respondents told Rai that they regarded the civil police as their enemy, while over 71 percent of the Hindus interviewed by the senior police officer said they considered the force to be a friend ? "There is a grave danger inherent in this situation," warns Rai. "When the minorities lose faith in the police force, it means that they have lost faith in the State. They become easy prey to Organisations like the ISI. That is when Mumbai and Coimbatore happen." Forty-eight percent of the police officer interviewed responded in the affirmative to the query : "Have you ever noticed a communal bias in the behaviour of police men during a communal riot?" And 52 percent said no. Significantly , officers from southern India were almost unanimous that the virus of communalism has not affected the force. Officers from the north, or from the states where communal riots have become a regular occurrence , admitted to policemen behaving in a less than fair manner, The Srikrishna commission report has vindicated Rai's stand. But it is difficult to get the police leadership to accept the findings of his gutsy study. The National Police Academy, which had granted Rai a fellowship to pursue the project, found the findings unpalatable and quickly disowned them. It was left to the National Academy of Administration, Mussoorie, to publish the dissertation. In his foreword to the book, Padam Rosha, who retired as a director-general of police 17 years ago, writes : "I strongly suggest that this study should be made compulsory reading for all officers of the administration and the police." Sys Rai, "The initial impulse is to deny the accusation of communal bias. And when they are confronted with facts that can not be challenged, the police leadership comes up with other usual alibis : Limited manpower, lack of vehicles, shortage of weapons ….." But unless the problem is acknowledged , the Police force and the political establishment cannot even begin to eliminate the virus that seems to have infected the khaki-clad lawman. "Knowledge and skills are easy to impart to policemen, but it is difficult to inculcate the right attitudes," says Rosha, who was also former director of the National Police Academy. This is the crux of the problem, he suggests. "Whenever the police have failed to act impartially in a crisis, it has mostly been due to poor leadership rather than any bias ingrained in the rank and file. It is the function of a good leader to inspire the force with the correct attitudes." Training is the must. " A professional police force can only be built upon correct and intensive training," says Rosha, "The role of police leadership crucial in every communal crisis and training should initially focus on senior levels." But unlike Rai, who speaks of the need to rectify the imbalance in the composition of the police, Rosha, whose last posting was in Jammu and Kashmir as director general (security), warns that , "any attempts to have reservations for various communities will only be counter-productive". Nobody who joins the police, he argues, "can be allowed to have the feeling that he represents any particular section or is there to protect any sectarian interest". As the Gore Commission on police training had observed ; "All the modern equipment and training available to the police can achieve nothing if their minds are not prejudices of caste, religion and parochialism." Rai's study, of course, reveals that the representation of the minorities in the police is disproportionately less than their percentage of population in the country. In some of the communally sensitive states, it is less than 5 percent. In Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra it is 4.2 percent and in Uttar Pradesh 4.9 percent. "It is not just Muslims . " says Y.P.Chibbar, general secretary, Peoples Union of Civil Liberties, "but upper caste Hindus, Christians and other groups who should have greater representation in the police for it become a truly secular outfit." For Rosha, the administration's failure to put down communal riots is more a failure of governance than an evidence of the prejudices that policemen nurture. "Impartial and determined officers, when they are backed by political will, have shown time and again that communal disturbances can be effectively quelled within hours, if not prevented altogether," he says. The question is : where is the political will ? As Rosha points out, the communal mob can sense when the administration is dithering and extends its depredations when it comes to believe that persons in authority have sympathy for the 'cause'. In such a situation, it is not difficult for policemen to go astray. Communal bias in the police force is a reality, as Rai has so authoritatively proved, but given a well=intentioned political establishment which is serious about clamping down on troublemakers, it can be keot in check, if not weeded out completely.

Justice out of sight-Siddharth Narrain

hinduonnet.com/thehindu/thscrip/print.pl?...&date=fl2210/&prd=fline

Trial in the Hashimpura massacre case, in which personnel of the Provincial Armed Constabulary in Uttar Pradesh allegedly shot dead 42 Muslims in May 1987, is yet to begin in earnest.
EIGHTEEN years after the Hashimpura massacre in Uttar Pradesh, in which members of the State Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) allegedly shot dead 42 Muslim men, no charge has been framed in the criminal trial. Even after the case was transferred from the Ghaziabad court to Tis Hazari on the orders of the Supreme Court, the Uttar Pradesh government has shown little interest in pursuing the prosecution of the 19 accused police personnel. During the communal violence in Meerut in May 1987. The Hashimpura massacre occurred during the communal riots that broke out in Meerut in May 1987 (Cover Story, Frontline, May 30-June 12, 1987). Apparently, the immediate provocation was the Rajiv Gandhi-led Central government's decision to open the Babri Masjid for worship by Hindus. In April several areas of Meerut city were affected by communal violence during the Muslim festival of Shab-e-Barat. But the Congress government in U.P., headed by Vir Bahadur Singh, withdrew the security forces soon after the violence subsided. Meerut exploded again, and the State government was caught unawares. Thousands of people, incited by inflammatory speeches and slogans broadcast over the public address system, barricaded the national highway and burnt factories, shops, houses, vehicles and petrol pumps. The scale of the riots can be imagined from the fact that 50 gazetted police officers and more than 60 companies of the PAC, the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and later, the Army, had to be pressed into service.
Curfew was imposed and PAC personnel conducted searches in several Muslim localities in the city. On May 22, 1987, they booked hundreds of Muslim youth from Hashimpura, though there was no rioting in that area of Meerut city. Nineteen PAC personnel, under platoon commander Surinder Pal Singh, allegedly took about 50 of them, most of them daily wage labourers and poor weavers, in a van from Hashimpura Mohalla in Meerut to the Upper Ganga canal in Murad Nagar, Ghaziabad, instead of taking them to the police station. They then shot some of them, one by one, and threw them into the canal. A bullet injured one of the PAC constables. Four of those shot escaped and one of them filed a first information report (FIR) at the Murad Nagar Police Station. The remaining men were taken in the truck to the Hindon Canal in Makanpur and shot. Two of the persons who were shot survived and lodged an FIR at the Link Road Police Station.
The horrific incident outraged sections of the media and minority rights organisations. The State government announced a compensation of Rs.20,000 for the victims. The People's Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court seeking more compensation and an inquiry into the incident. The Supreme Court directed the State government to pay an additional compensation of Rs.20,000 to each of the families of the victims. In 1988, the State government ordered an inquiry by the Crime Branch Central Investigation Department (CBCID). The CBCID's report, submitted to the State government in 1994, was never made public. In 1995, some of the victims moved the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court to make the report public and to prosecute those indicted in it. The petition sought an increase in the compensation amount to Rs.1 lakh. The petition is pending before the High Court. The CBCID, in its affidavit, has detailed the findings of its investigation, describing the events that led to the deaths. Hindon Canal, where bodies of the men killed allegedly by PAC personnel were found.
During the CBCID inquiry, Sub-Inspector Virendra Singh, who was in charge of the Link Road Police Station, said that when he received information about what had happened he set off towards the Hindon Canal. On his way, he saw a PAC truck heading back from the place where the incident occurred. He then tried chasing the truck and saw it enter 41st Vahini, a camp of the PAC. The gatekeeper on night duty stopped it. Soon, Vibhuti Narain Rai, Superintendent of Police, Ghaziabad, and Naseem Zaidi, District Magistrate, Ghaziabad, reached 41st Vahini. They tried getting the truck traced through senior PAC officers, but to no avail.
The CBCID identified 13 of the 16 bodies recovered from the Hindon Canal and filed the charge-sheet against 19 of the PAC personnel under Section 197 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC). Since most of the accused were public servants, the State government's sanction under Section 197 was needed to prosecute them. The policemen were accused of murder, attempt to murder and destruction of evidence. The charge-sheet was filed before the Chief Judicial Magistrate (CJM), Ghaziabad. (Framing of charges is a step in the subsequent stage, in which the accused are intimated about the nature of the accusation.)
The CJM issued warrants to the accused policemen asking them to appear before the court. When the accused did not appear before the court, bailable warrants were issued six times between January 1997 and February 1998. Later non-bailable warrants were issued 17 times between April 1998 and April 2000. But the accused evaded the summons.
The Minorities Council of India, an Aligarh-based organisation, then stepped in and made a representation to the National Commission for Minorities. Finally, as a consequence of public pressure, 16 of the 19 accused surrendered in groups in May 2000, 13 years after the incident. Although their bail applications were initially rejected by the CJM, the accused managed to obtain bail from the court of the District Judge, Ghaziabad. While granting bail, the Judge said that since the accused were members of the PAC, there was no chance of them absconding. Since then, the case has been repeatedly delayed. The case was committed for trial to the District and Sessions Judge, who transferred the case to the Additional District Sessions Judge-IV, Ghaziabad. In 2001, the victims filed a petition before the Supreme Court asking for the case to be transferred from Ghaziabad to New Delhi as the conditions there would be more conducive to the trial. The Supreme Court transferred the case to Tis Hazari in New Delhi. But the case was still to be argued by a Special Public Prosecutor (SPP) appointed by the U.P. government.
When the case was finally fixed for arguments on charge, there was no such SPP. In February 2004, the court issued notice to the Director-General of Police (DGP) and the Chief Secretary of Uttar Pradesh to appear in person. When the government did appoint an SPP, the victims were not happy because they felt he was not qualified enough. He was removed after they complained. In November 2004, the government appointed Surinder Adlakha SPP, but he is yet to start the arguments on charge. Said Mohammad Yamin, ex-counsellor and social worker: "This case is about the first instance in which those who were appointed to keep the peace carried out attacks in cold blood. Yet, the Uttar Pradesh government has delayed the matter." One of the lawyers representing the Hashimpura complainants, Vrinda Grover, feels that the victims have the right to be consulted before the SPP is appointed.
Meanwhile, one of the accused has died and the case before R.K. Jain, Additional District and Sessions Judge, Tis Hazari, was delayed because another accused was in jail in Varanasi for allegedly murdering four persons, including three PAC personnel, in Azamgarh. The lawyers appointed by the court to assist the SPP feel that the State police did not investigate the case properly and that the Sub-Inspector in charge of the Link Road Police Station should have collected more evidence from the scene of the incident. Said Rebecca John, a counsel for the Hashimpura complainants: "We are looking at the possibility of arguing that the deaths amounted to custodial deaths since they occurred when the victims were in the custody of the PAC. If the court accepts the argument that these were custody deaths, the onus will shift to the accused to prove that they are not guilty."
The Hashimpura massacre proves how difficult it is to prosecute police personnel accused of communal crimes. According to Vibhuti Narain Rai, who was the Superintendent of Police, Ghaziabad, when the massacre took place, most of the police personnel posted in Meerut thought the riots were a result of Muslim mischief. They believed that Meerut had become a "mini-Pakistan" because of "Muslim intransigence" and that it was necessary to teach the community a lesson. This bias is only exacerbated by the State's reluctance to prosecute police personnel as seen in the Hashimpura trial.
Vibhuti Narain Rai, who is currently the Additional Director-General of Police (Railways), Allahabad, said: "The fight against communalisation requires drastic changes in the policy of recruitment, training and syllabi of the police. The percentage of minorities, especially Muslims, is only 5 to 6 per cent in most States. I can say from 30 years of experience in the Police Department that this is the result of a deep and inherent communal bias in the leadership of the police. There are hundreds of government directives to recruit minorities into the department, but these are often flouted. Unless we reserve some seats for minorities, their quota will never be filled."
The Hashimpura massacre also highlights the need to scrutinise the role of public prosecutors who, in many trials related to communal crimes, including the Gujarat anti-minority pogrom, have helped the State to protect the accused.

Introduction to Curfew in the City by C.M. Naim

During 1947, as the independent nations of Pakistan and India appeared on the political map of the world, violence in the name of religion reached unprecedented magnitude in South Asia. It abated considerably in the Fifties, but since then has steadily grown worse. In Pakistan, where non-Muslims were too few to matter much, Muslim communal passion was first directed against the Ahmadi Muslims, but gradually took on more varied ethnic and sectarian dimensions, pitting the Deobandis against the Barelavis, the Sunnis against the Shi’ahs, the Sindhis against the Muhajirs, and so on. More recently, however, even the minuscule Christian and Hindu populations in Punjab and Sindh have become its victims. In Bangladesh, with its still substantial non-Muslim population, anti-Hindu and anti-Chakma actions by the Muslim majority and by the state itself, have continued without much relief. And in India, where the Muslim minority is large enough to account for almost twelve percent of the population, the phrase “communal riots” has come to be an euphemism for anti-Muslim pogroms directed by certain elements in the majority Hindu community—with the encouragement, even active participation, of those very agencies of the state that are expected to protect the victims. Jabalpur, Jamshedpur, Muradabad, Bhiwandi, Hashimpura and Maliana, Bhagalpur, Baroda and Ahmedabad, and most recently Surat and Bombay of 1993—these are only the most haunting signposts on India’s path of steady decline as a civil polity. To which list we should also add Delhi and Kanpur in the dark days of 1984, when similar pogroms were directed against the Sikhs.
In response to the communal violence at the time of the Partition, a massive body of literature was produced in Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi and—what I directly know—Urdu. Urdu writers on both sides of the new international border produced countless short stories and several novels about those times. One critical issue they faced was: how does one create a piece of fiction about a reality so horrible? Some responded by doing a ‘balancing act’—if five victims of one religious persuasion were mentioned in the beginning, they were matched by five victims belonging to the other religion at the end. Some also felt that to bring the warring communities together they must put the final blame on a common enemy: the erstwhile colonial rulers. Other writers wrote as partisans; they saw their own community as being only a victim, and blamed the other community for being the exclusive perpetrator of violence. Most of these writings emphasized the ‘magnitude’ of the violence—the killings, the rapes, the destruction of property, the uprooting of populations. Only a small corpus explored the truly horrific—the casual betrayals, the meanness and cruelty in seemingly ordinary acts, the human capacity to routinize inhumanity—the evil in the ‘banal’. Sa’adat Hasan Manto in his stories of the Partition riots neither blamed any one group nor tried to distribute the blame equally. His significance and the lasting power of his stories lie in his focusing on those moments when a man, despite having done horrible things, could be shown as being still capable of doing ordinary little things. This strategy did not lessen the horror of the man’s actions; in fact, it enhanced it by making them the acts of someone not unlike us. At the same time, it made it possible to envision some hope, some capacity in mankind that could be harnessed to fight against such horrors.
The hatred and violence of 1947 was blamed by most writers at the time on the machinations of our erstwhile colonial rulers. Almost all of them felt that to bring the Hindus and Muslims together they had to find a common enemy in the English. But the events in the 70s and the 80s are different. We must face the fact that ‘the enemy is us’. To my knowledge, literary responses to contemporary communal violence in the sub-continent have not been extensive in any of the three countries and their many languages. For example, in Urdu in India, there are any number of short stories and poems about the present plight of the Muslims, but there are no major novels, anthologies or special issues of magazines. Likewise, I know of no work of imagination in Urdu from Pakistan that tries to explore the trajectory that communal violence has taken there.
In fact, in the sub-continental perspective, one can cite only two books that have made significant impact in this area: Lajja (“Shame”) in Bengali, by the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin, and Shahar Mein Karfiyu (“Curfew in the City”) in Hindi, by Vibhuti Narain Rai. Nasrin’s book gained immediate notice in South Asia and abroad due to the fatwa issued against the author. Rai’s book has remained much less known even in India, though it did generate the wrath of some votaries of Hindutva, who successfully prevented it from being made into a film. Both Nasrin and Rai have written about the persecution of minority communities by the majority communities to which they themselves belong in their respective countries. Otherwise, the two books are very different.
Nasrin’s linear narrative covers thirteen days in the life a Hindu family in Dhaka in 1992 with considerable speed and passion; it also contains lengthy segments of a purely documentary nature. The latter generally dismayed the reviewers in Bangladesh and India. But the novelist Amitav Ghosh more accurately understood the aims of Nasrin’s narrative when he wrote in The Telegraph of 24 June 1994: “...taken on its own terms, the book’s strength can be seen to lie precisely in what appear to be its formal weakness. In its breakneck urgency, its direct and unembellished Bengali prose, in the narrative inseparability of its fictional and documentary material, in its polemical repetitiveness and its undisguised emotional immediacy.” He then went on to compare Nasrin with the Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawy, and argued that the two “have pioneered one of the most powerful forms of our times. The polemiction—polemical fictions that are perhaps the most appropriate possible literary response to the oppressive banality of contemporary religious extremism.” In another way too, these documentary sections are exactly what makes Lajja so significant. They give names and professions and homes of those who otherwise get mentioned only as anonymous statistics. Nasrin wishes us not to forget those ordinary details that make these victims of communal fanaticism not unlike their enemies—in the end, so like us.
Rai’s novella is not ‘polemiction’. It is, in fact, quite modest in ambition and execution. Though begun in 1980, in reposnse to a riot in Allahabad that he personally observed as the Senior Superintendent of Police there, the book came out only in 1988. Its episodic narrative covers three days in the life of a small neighborhood in Allahabad under the grip of a curfew during the riot. Divided into nine short chapters, it alternates between the story of Sayeeda, the wife of a bidi-maker, and her family, claustrophobic in effect in being confined to their one-room house; and other simultaneous events that take place elsewhere. That ‘elsewhere’ is spatially more open and varied, but—affected by the curfew—equally distorted and horrifying. The two progressions meet in the penultimate chapter, where a police party conducts ‘searches’ in Muslim homes—the home of a nationalist lawyer, Sayeeda’s home, and the palatial compound of the Haji. At the end of the book, the curfew continues. Despite a few instances of authorial interventions, Rai seems to strive for a cool, sometimes ironic and detached voice. Nevertheless, he too wants us to come close to the victims of violence and persecution through our knowledge of their ordinariness. Thus Sayeeda, perhaps the central character in his novella, is not just a grief-stricken mother whose baby daughter dies during the curfew but also a rural person who hates using the latrine in her new home in the city.
Rai’s narrative is not about the ‘riot’ itself, or rather it is not about the killing and pillaging and raping, the events that were very much the focus of the narratives of the stories that were written about the riots of 1946 and 1947. It is not a story of people gone barbaric in the heat of a moment of passion or revenge. It is about cold, calculated greed and blind, senseless hatred. Consider the chapter of ‘rape’. One may say that Rai is being too artful. The girl remains without a name, so do her assailants. But consider what has been told implicitly. Her family has the values that encourage education for girls, but not the resources to maintain those values safely. Her mother sews clothes for a dealer; she has to look after her younger siblings and do all the housework. She has an ‘affair’ with a young man from her neighborhood, but we are told what inevitably happened in such ‘affairs’. She is knitting a sweater for the boy from some worn and discarded wool. He hopes to buy her a shawl by taking out some money from the little he earns and —according to his values—must put in his mother’s hands. Theirs is not a romance that would shake the world, not something that bards will sing about. The girls goes to school on the fateful day, against the wishes of her mother; the boy does not stir out, obedient to his mother’s command. The girl is also abandoned by the school authorities who make no effort to send the girls home in safety. (But did they have the needed resources?) Running in panic, the girl finds herself in a lane that—in her panic—looks strange to her but is in fact not far from her own alley. There, three men, themselves hiding for safety in their milling shop, drag her inside and rape her. She calls them bhaiya (“brothers”), they call themselves “sister-fuckers.” The incident is seen by others, but no one comes to the girl’s help. Fearful, they are themselves cowering in their meager homes. In a milieu where a name indicates the person’s religion and much more, Rai has a clear purpose in keeping the victim and the assailants nameless.
More complex but similar in intentions is the chapter with Devi Lal, the neighborhood drunk. Here we are told that the lane is ‘Hindu’. Of course, its physical condition turns out to be not much different from the neighboring ‘Muslim’ lane—they perhaps share the same filthy, open sewer. But in the ‘Hindu’ lane, the residents are free to move. Stragglers come home, bringing incredible tales of Muslim atrocities. Gossip flows. The local drunk gains a respectability that he had not known before. Then a police party arrives; it demands and receives hospitality from the residents. The children who had earlier shouted a comic doggerel about Devi Lal, now run around shouting a slogan declaring solidarity between the police and the Hindus, making the Muslims their common enemy. Meanwhile, a different, more ordinary drama has been going on at one end of the lane, where some of the local Lotharios are waiting to flirt with the daughters of the only local Muslim resident, a tailor. Their impatience makes them throw a rock at the tailor’s door. The noise causes a general panic. When the truth dawns on the elders of the lane they suddenly become aware of the tailor’s presence in their midst. They want to reassure him but he never opens his door. Then they recall that he always did that in every previous riot. Now the children take up another slogan, left over from the elections held not too long ago, and turn it into a declaration of solidarity with the tailor, Yusuf.
Most of the narrative is about the death and burial of Sayeeda’s daughter. The little girl dies of cholera, but she also dies because she couldn’t get proper medicine, because she lived in terrible conditions where survival was almost impossible. She died, as had so many other children in that family and in that neighborhood. But the curfew that deprived her of better medical treatment, now almost deprives her of a proper burial. Her grandfather has to risk his body, even life, to go and get curfew passes to take the dead body to the graveyard in the morning. Her grandmother has to take similar risks to bring water from the public tap in order to wash the corpse. In fact, the tiny corpse barely escapes being crushed under the boots of a police party that is going around ‘doing searches’ for weapons.
The riot itself is not mentioned at all. There is only the briefest mention of some small explosive device being thrown against a temple wall that causes no damage. But immediately the existing fears and suspicions take over, a curfew is imposed by the authorities, and the city becomes divided into ‘Muslim’ and ‘Hindu’ neighborhoods.
The narrative focuses on how the curfew affects the simple, mundane matters in the lives of ordinary people: a sick child cannot get medicine; a family cannot get drinking water; a girl cannot walk down the street in safety; people cannot even stay indoor in security; a dead child cannot easily be given a decent burial. But political and civic leaders and journalists and authorities go on living their lives of privilege. They do not lose their privileges. The under-privileged are denied even the little they had. There is a nexus of interests between the leaders, the journalists, and authorities.
The role of the police and the PAC is separated from that of the BSF and the army, as has often been mentioned in the narratives of the victims of riots in the past. The police is shown to contain blatantly communal personnel, both in high and low positions. There seems to be no Muslim in the bureaucracy, civil or police. Also missing are ideologues and rabble rousers of the type often mentioned with reference to communalistic political parties. But their presence is felt in the background. We see the authorities in action as they conduct searches and hold a peace committee meeting. The flagrant criminality of the searches is in marked contrast to the utter hypocrisy and self-serving of the peace committee proceedings. We know that both activities will be reported in the official record as well as in the journalists’ accounts, but not the way the author has shown them. It is not an ambitious book. One may even call it slight. Hindi literary critic pointed out its journalistic quality. The author himself was not unaware of it. In an interview in 1991, he remarked, “I concede that it appears to be more a piece of reportage than fiction proper—reflective and contemplative. In part this is a consequence of haste, but it was also deliberate. I wanted it to assume a certain form. I should like to think, however, that given more time and effort [it] would have become a better work of art.”
What, nevertheless, makes it deserving of our fullest attention is one simple fact: in this novel, the author and the citizen have become one. Also, it is, after all, an insider’s narrative. This is not a left-handed compliment. In a society where literacy is not so common, where citizens of India have fought in two world wars and at least three other wars but have yet to produce one novel, one poem written by someone who actually went through those wars, where hardly any bureaucrat or academician or doctor has produced a book of imaginative literature dealing with his particular profession or milieu, we should be grateful that now a police officer has written a novel about something which involved him professionally. He remembered what he saw. That is the main thing. Forgetfulness is the worst crime in these times when history and memory are both being suppressed or distorted for instant gratification of the worst kind—and at a cost to those who have remained unmentioned in conventional chronicles, or mentioned only as statistics, nameless, even bodiless.
The book went through two editions in three years, and in March 1991 a journalist in Allahabad announced his plans to make a feature film based on it. It was this announcement that brought forth a “fatwa” from Shri Ashok Singhal, the Secretary-General of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. Not surprisingly, he had not even bothered to read the book, for he advised Mr. Rai to resign from the government service before publishing his book. More effectively, he threatened to burn down any cinema house that would dare to show the proposed film. Though Hindi literati came out in full force to denounce the threat, the film was never made.
In conclusion, it is worth noting that Rai, after finishing the novel, did not complacently sit back. Instead, he took time out from his professional work to do research on the violent behavior of the police in Indian civil life as a whole. It should also be noted with some satisfaction that his research was supported by the National Police Academy. Some of his findings and reflections are included in the afterword he specially wrote for this book.

Announcement of Award Winners for 2004Katha U.K.

Katha (UK) awards for Vibhuti Narain Rai and Achala Sharma
The Secretary of Katha (UK) and a well-known writer himself Tejinder Sharma released the information that this year the TENTH INTERNATIONAL INDU SHARMA KATHA SAMMAAN will be awarded to noted writer VIBHUTI NARAIN RAI for his novel TABAADALA. The award consists of a return air-ticket India-London-India (Sponsored by Air India) Visa Fees for the United Kingdom, a shield, a shawl, one week's stay in London and visit to important tourist sites in and around London. The award will be presented in a tasteful function to be held at the Nehru Centre London on 26th June 2004.
Indu Sharma Katha Sammaan was instituted in the memory of promising writer Indu Sharma who succumbed to cancer at a young age. The past recipients of the Indu Sharma Katha Sammaan have been Geetanjlishri (1995), Dhirendra Asthana (1996), Akhilesh (1997), Devendra (1998) Manoj Rupra (1999), Chitra Mudgal (2000), Sanjiv (2001), Gyan Chaturvedi (2002) and S.R. Harnot (2003). Mr. Vibhuti Narain Rai is presently posted at Lucknow as the Inspector General of Police. Besides Tabaadala, Mr. Rai is well known for his novels Ghar, Shehar mein Curfew, Kissa Loktantra. While his collection of satires EK Chhaatra Neta ka Roznaamacha was noticed by critics, his research work Saampradaayik Dangey aur Bharatiya Police stirred a hornet's nest in the police and political circles.

Vibhuti Narain Rai

Saturday, November 21, 2009

representation of communal violence

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Vibhuti Narain Rai- A profile

Vibhuti Narain Rai addressing a gathering in the library established by him in his village

Letter addressed to all IPS officers of the country during Gujrat riots of 2002

Vibhuti Narain Rai in SRSP

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Dark Facts Behind The Men In Khaki- August 24, 1998

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Justice out of sight-Siddharth Narrain

Introduction to Curfew in the City by C.M. Naim

Announcement of Award Winners for 2004Katha U.K.

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