by Editor | May 25, 2021 | Entrepreneurship, News, Social Entrepreneur
In the small Maholi town in Sitapur district, people of different faith have come together for a common cause — to clean the polluted Kathina river.
By Kushagra Dixit,
Maholi (Uttar Pradesh) : With inter-community violence reported from many parts of India in a society increasingly polarised on religious and caste lines, a small town in Uttar Pradesh is setting an extraordinary example where a temple, a mosque, and even a gurdwara, have joined hands to clean a polluted river while bringing their communities together.
About 100 km from the state capital Lucknow is the town named Maholi in district Sitapur. Here lies an old Shiva and a Radha-Krishna temple along with Pragyana Satsang Ashram and a mosque, all at a stone’s throw of each other.
Along the periphery of this amalgamated religious campus, passes a polluted river called Kathina, that merges into the highly polluted Gomti River, a tributary of the mighty but polluted Ganga.
Often used as dumping site by dozens of villages and devotees, the stink from Kathina was increasing daily. The solution — Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb (a term used for a fusion of Hindu and Muslim elements) – of Awadh.
“The river belongs to everyone. Hindus use it for ‘aachman’ (a Hindu ritual for spiritual purification), Muslims use it for ‘wazu’ or ablution. Due to lack of awareness, people had been dumping solid and bio waste here, and also doing open defecation. The situation was worsening. Only solution was to start cleaning it ourselves,” said Swami Vigyananad Saraswati, head of the Pragyana Satsang Ashram, as he inspects the river stretch along with Muhammad Haneef, head of the mosque’s managing committee.
Swami said that once the ashram and temple administration began rallying volunteers for the cleaning drive, the mosque also came around to help. Even Maholi’s Sikh gurudwara committee came forward and brought along many volunteers from the Sikh community.
“Once the communities came together, number of volunteers multiplied. The initiative has now become a kind of an environment-movement which is being driven by religious fervor and bonding. Watching our efforts, the local administration also offered help, and other unions like traders and Sikh gurudwara committee also joined hand for cleaning the river,” Swami told IANS pointing out the potential of possibilities when different communities join hands for good.
Ujagar Singh, a member of the Sikh gurdwara committee, equated the effort in cleaning the river with ‘sewa’, an important aspect of Sikhism to provide a service to the community.
“Keeping our rivers clean is our duty and we will continue sewa whenever required,” he said.
The temple and mosque, near the town’s police station, were both built in 1962 by then Inspector Jaikaran Singh. The communal fervor is shared since years. During ‘namaaz’, the ashram switches off its loudspeakers and on Hindu festivals and special occasions, the mosque committee helps the temple with arrangements.
Still underway, the joint Hindu-Muslim team began cleaning the river from March 14. According to the volunteers, it took three days alone to get the river front cleaned of defecation.
“Many villages do not have toilets and volunteers had to stay here round the clock to stop people from defecating or throwing waste. The work was divided. Muslims volunteers would take over the Muslim majority areas and Hindus would tackle other areas, convincing people to stop pollution further while we clean,” Muhammad Haneef told IANS.
The actual cleaning of the river began from March 17, when about 400 volunteers got into the waters, while about 700 of them cleaned the shores.
“Several trolleys of garbage — that included plastic, polythene, shoes, rubber, animal carcasses, human waste, glass and ceramic waste, and even some old boat wreck — were taken out of the river.
“Apart from that, several trolleys of water hyacinth, an invasive species of water plant, was removed. It obstructs the flow of the river,” Sarvesh Shukla, executive officer of Maholi town told IANS.
Stating that such drive is not possible unless people come together, Shukla said that since ‘mandir-masjid’ joined hand, it was very easy to convince people to cooperate.
However, with poor garbage management system of small town, Swami and Haneef looked up to the administration for help.
“Few days back, some butchers were taking waste towards the river. We stopped them and there was a heated debate. Soon other elders of the community joined and we did not let them dump the waste into the river,” said Haneef, pointing out that stopping people without proper management could be daunting in future.
Swami said that they would need disilting machines to clean the river towards the second phase.
According to Abdul Rauf from the mosque committee, the work is only half done.
“The challenge is to maintain the cleanliness. We could clean only a small stretch of the river. We will rally again and take movement to second phase once we get directions from our elder brother Swami ji,” says Rauf.
Nearly one kilometer of the stretch has been cleaned. The volunteers are aiming to clean another kilometer of it.
However, be it river or communal fervor, the challenge, as residents of Maholi find, is consistency of the good.
“There are bad elements everywhere. Few weeks back, a fringe group named Vishwa Hindu Jagran Parishad entered a Muslim-majority area and started hurling abuses. Before they would do more damage, the Hindus of that area came forward and retaliated. The group never returned since,” said Shailendra Mishra, a local resident and member of temple committee.
In another incidents, last year in September, when dates of Durgapuja and Muharram clashed, Mishra and Muhammad Rizwan, Haneef’s son, took charge.
“All we had to do was keep a few notorious people from both communities at bay. About 5,000 strong Hindu’s Devi Shakti procession and about 2,000 strong Muslim Tazia procession of Muharram used the same road at the same time. Not a single untoward incident happened,” Haneef said.
(The weekly feature series is part of a positive-journalism project of IANS and the Frank Islam Foundation. Kushagra Dixit can be reached at kushagra.d@ians.in)
—IANS
by Editor | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
By Amulya Ganguli,
There will probably be a mixed reaction in the secular camp to Rahul Gandhi’s temple-hopping in Gujarat.
To some, it may seem to be a negation of the Congress’s vaunted secular credentials and that, too, by the great grandson of the man who championed the concept of keeping the state separate from religion in independent India.
To others, it was probably a tactical move to deprive the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of an opportunity to project the Nehru-Gandhis, and their party, as anti-Hindu, a propaganda ploy which the saffron brotherhood has been using for many years along with the depiction of “Raul Maino” as someone who is not an Indian at all.
If BJP MP Subramanian Swamy is to be believed, Rahul is a Catholic and a UK citizen. It was perhaps necessary, therefore, for the Congress president to counter such charges from a party which can apparently go to any lengths to tarnish an opponent. Hence Rahul’s assertion that he is a devotee of Lord Shiva and does not need anyone’s permission to visit temples.
That may not have stopped one BJP Chief Minister, Gujarat’s Vijay Rupani, from asking why doesn’t Rahul go to the Akshardham temple in Delhi which is not far from his house and another, Uttar Pradesh’s Yogi Adityanath, to say that his posture in the temple precincts was like someone offering namaz, the Muslim form of prayer.
However, whatever his tireless critics may say, the BJP may be compelled to be somewhat more careful in future in its endeavours at character assassination.
It is possible that Rahul’s temple visits, along with his silence on the condition of the Muslims in Gujarat, have been in response to senior Congress leader A.K. Antony’s observation in his report on the 2014 election results that the perception of minority appeasement continues to hobble the Congress.
At the same time, Rahul has to realise that his visits to temples cannot be a one-time affair. He will have to continue with these excursions irrespective of whether elections are being held or not. Otherwise, he will expose himself to the politically damaging conclusion that his visits were indeed no more than tactical manoeuvres intended to rob the BJP of a political point during a crucial battle.
Rahul’s trips to temples cannot be like his earlier practice of slumming when he used to spend a night in a Dalit hut with a bottle of mineral water.
Arguably, it may be advisable for him to change tack by visiting the places of worship of other religions as well. That will be in sync with Mahatma Gandhi’s preference for readings from the scriptures of all religions at his prayer meetings to underline India’s composite culture.
Visits to mosques, churches, gurdwaras and synagogues, along with going to temples, may be interpreted as too palpably showy and pretentious, especially by a person who has not been noticeably religious-minded till the Gujarat elections.
But it has to be remembered that the Congress is up against a party which regards itself as a monopolistic wholesaler in the business of projecting Hinduism and, therefore, the latter’s ploys can only be countered by taking the matter of flaunting faith to a different and higher level.
It is possible that the BJP will be flummoxed by its adversary visiting the shrines of all religions because it is something which the party of cultural nationalism — one nation, one people, one culture — will never be able to do lest it should undermine its Hindu supremacist agenda.
However, demonstrating devotion to all religions will be widely recognised as typical of non-communal Hindus who have always regarded secularism as a celebration of all faiths, attending midnight mass on Christmas eve and visiting dargahs as that of Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti in Ajmer in large numbers.
As the Antony report pointed out, the Congress’s mistake was that it deviated from the country’s long-standing syncretism and focussed on pandering to Muslim sentiments. This approach may have been understandable in the aftermath of partition when the Muslims felt lost because of the departure for Pakistan of the community’s tall leaders like Mohammed Ali Jinnah and the collapse of organisations like the Unionist Party in Punjab and Krishak Praja Party in Bengal which were based on Hindu-Muslim amity.
Since the Muslims consequently turned to the Congress as their only hope, the party apparently decided to treat them as its special responsibility. That this policy worked satisfactorily is evident from the BJP remaining in the margins of national politics till the early 1990s.
However, it was the Congress’s inability to counter the whipping up of communal sentiments by the Hindutva lobby over the Ram temple issue from the 1990s which helped the BJP to make political gains.
Arguably, Rahul’s temple trips are a belated exercise to blunt the BJP’s tactic of pretending to be the sole custodian of Hinduism. But this opportunistic “soft” Hindutva line doesn’t seem to have worked in Gujarat if the exit polls are to be believed. It is time, therefore, for him to change tack and embrace other religions as well.
(Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached at amulyaganguli@gmail.com)
—IANS
by Editor | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
Asaduddin Owaisi
Hyderabad : MIM president Asaduddin Owaisi on Tuesday said the Sangh Parivar wants to use Ram temple issue to save Narendra Modi in the 2019 general elections as he has failed on all fronts.
He said the RSS, VHP and BJP should not be allowed to polarize the voters on temple issue and justified the stand taken by Sunni Wakf Board’s lawyer Kapil Sibal in Supreme Court that the hearing of the title suit be deferred till the elections.
Talking to reporters here, he said a leader of VHP has announced that the temple construction will begin in October 2018 while RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat has stated that only a temple can come up in Ayodhya.
“These statements are all aimed at influencing and threatening Muslims and raking up the issue before the elections to save Mr Modi, who has failed to provide jobs, check farmers’ suicides and his actions like demonetization and GST have destroyed business in the informal sector. The elections should be held on these real issues,” he said.
“When you don’t allow release of a film in Gujarat on the ground that it will influence the elections, how can you ignore the impact the temple issue may have?” he asked.
The MP also dismissed criticism of Sibal in a section of media and said he was representing Sunni Wakf Board in the apex court and not the Congress.
He reiterated that Sunni Wakf Board need at least six months to present its arguments before the court as a voluminous record of 17,000 documents need to be translated.
Replying to a query, the Hyderabad MP sad Parliament can’t legislate on the temple till the matter is in the Supreme Court.
“We have separation of powers. The judiciary, executive and legislature are independent. If somebody wants to become a dictator, then people will decide,” he said.
Owaisi said the issue of Babri Masjid was not an issue of Muslims but a matter of justice.
“Even after 25 years of the demolition of Babri Masjid, the case against the accused who instigated people through their provocative speeches and which led to the demolition has not been heard,” he said.
He reiterated his support to the suggestion by Justice M.S. Liberhan (retd.), who had headed the commission probing the conspiracy behind the razing of the disputed structure, that the hearing of title suit be deferred till the criminal case was disposed of.
—IANS
