Fatal Accidents of Birth: Stories of Suffering, Oppression and Resistance

By Harsh Mander

This volume collects seventeen stories of women and men who, simply because they were born poor, or a particular gender, or into a certain caste or religion, fell prey to the many atrocities and indignities endemic to contemporary India. Some resisted, survived, and soldier on. Some did not. Lachmi Kaur lost almost all the male members of her fa

• Language: English
• Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books
• Release date: Nov 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9789386338198

Harsh Mander

'Harsh Mander', writer, human rights worker, columnist, researcher and teacher, works with survivors of mass violence and hunger as well as with homeless persons and street children. His books include 'Looking Away: Inequality, Prejudice and Indifference in New India', 'Unheard Voices: Stories of Forgotten Lives', 'The Ripped Chest: Public Policy and the Poor in India', 'Fear and Forgiveness: The Aftermath of Massacre', 'Fractured Freedom: Chronicles from India's Margins', 'Untouchability in Rural India' (coauthored), 'Living with Hunger and Ash in the Belly: India's Unfinished Battle against Hunger'. He regularly writes columns for 'The Hindu', 'Hindustan Times' and 'Mint', and contributes frequently to scholarly journals. His stories have been adapted for films, such as Shyam Benegal's 'Samar', and Mallika Sarabhai's dance drama 'Unsuni'.

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PREFACE

Other Lives, Other Worlds

Ihave never known the disdain of teachers who believe I am undeserving of a future because I was born to be without merit. I have never been beaten because I aspire to worship in a temple that people say will be defiled by my step or my touch or veneration. I have never been humiliated every day of my life because I was born into a caste other people regard unclean.

I have not known what it is to cower as mobs, armed with daggers and light bulbs full of acid, raise terrifying slogans calling for my head and the blood of my loved ones, for the ‘crime’ that I—and others like me—follow a faith different from theirs. To helplessly watch my children burn alive, the girls and women of my family raped, to see my family, my home, my work, my life’s savings, my entire world destroyed forever in a matter of hours, all for this one crime.

I have never been ostracized and abandoned because I unknowingly contracted an incurable ailment. I have never been shunned because I chose to sell my body to raise my children with dignity. I have never been banished from a world because I could not accept the gender into which my body was born. I have never been jailed, with my only little son left outside and no one in the world to care for him.

I have never slept hungry a single night because I did not have money or work. Far less have I known the desperation of not being able to feed my loved ones, of realizing that the only way I can ensure that my children live is to send them away to labour in fields, to wash utensils in an eatery, or to give them away to someone who may be able to raise them.

I cannot imagine the helplessness of a homeless woman who, for twenty years, has had to sleep night after night on pavements, unable to stop strange men from molesting and raping her. I cannot imagine being locked up for years in a beggars’ home only because my legs are malformed and I have no place to sleep other than on the streets.

I do not know what I would do if my daughter was killed by the police and, after her death, labelled by the country’s establishment as a terrorist, a suicide-bomber. Or if my husband was gunned down by militants and the army insisted that my thirteen-year-old son was an insurgent.

These are some of the stories I try to tell in this volume, stories which might seem unimaginable but are true. None of these stories are mine. They could never be my stories, and for only one reason. Because the accident of my birth was not fatal, as it was for Rohith Vemula, or tragic, as it was for all the others whose stories this book tries to tell.

These can never be my stories, or yours in all probability. But these are stories we must listen to, stories we must heed. For far too long have we looked away, and now we must answer the questions Bob Dylan posed when he sang: ‘How many times can a man turn his head, pretending he just doesn’t see?…/ Yes, ’n how many ears must one man have, before he can hear people cry?/ Yes, ’n how many deaths will it take till he knows, that too many people have died?’

These are bleak, harrowing stories, but also ones of resistance and dignity. Far better than my telling these tales would have been for you to have heard them directly from the people whose lives these are. I hope you will be able do that one day, not too distant. But for the present we still live in a world, one which we have ourselves created, where we can fly to other planets but light-years seem to separate us from those who live with and battle the worst oppressions and cruelties. However, the truth is that the distance between human beings is no greater than the elementary recognition of our equal human dignity.

I have tried to work as a peace- and justice-worker, and chronicler, for over fifteen years after I left the civil services in 2002. Over that decade and a half I have had the privilege to meet and know most of the people whose stories I gather here. I have tried to tell their stories as truthfully as I could, faithfully reflecting how the protagonists themselves saw their lives and worlds. I know I am an imperfect vessel to carry these stories to you as my earth has not been baked in the same harsh suns as those whose stories these are. The failures will be many, and I alone am responsible for them.

I have also told the more recent stories of people who found their way into the headlines, and into the public consciousness—for instance, of the ‘juvenile’ who participated in the horrendous gang-rape of 16 December 2012 in Delhi, who was spared the gallows, and became ‘India’s Most Hated’. I could not have known Ishrat Jahan, killed as a teenaged girl of nineteen in a police encounter. But I have met her mother and younger sister in the course of their dogged and brave battles for justice. And, of course, the doctoral scholar from University of Hyderabad, Rohith Vemula, whose passing tore open our hearts because it laid bare once again the truth of the cruelties and the consequences of our unjust world.

In his first and last letter to the world, Rohith Vemula wrote, ‘…some people, for them, life itself is curse. My birth is my fatal accident.’ His is one of the most damning and painful indictments of the India and the world which we have crafted together. A country and a world where the lives and destinies of millions of women and men, young people, boys and girls, still continue to be determined only by the fatal accident of their births. Not by the breadth of their hearts, the glint of their minds, the grit of their endeavours, the mettle of their characters and the flight of their dreams.

This book is dedicated, therefore, in atonement and in love to the memory of Rohith Vemula and to all the Rohith Vemulas whom we continue to fail with the world we do not build.

IN TIMES OF SLAUGHTER

Ihave engaged for many years with survivors of communal violence across India: in Nellie and Kokrajhar in Assam, Tilak Vihar in Delhi, Bhagalpur in Bihar, Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh, and Godhra in Gujarat, attempting to express some solidarity in their struggles for justice and healing. I have found that the most vulnerable among them are the widows. Their spouses, children and elders are killed and, almost overnight, their homes, their livelihoods and earnings are wiped out. They are uprooted from familiar environs into new ones and, all at once, they are saddled with the responsibilities of rebuilding their lives and caring for other survivors. And, like most other widows in India, they battle memory, loneliness, want, as well as the negligence and cruelty inflicted upon them by society.

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Despair constantly stalked the twenty one-room apartments allotted to widows and their children in a colony erected by relief-workers on the outskirts of the village Delol near Godhra for the survivors of the 2002 massacre in Gujarat. The spirit of the residents of these small homes and their sense of hope remained fragile even years after the carnage. A gust of memories, a boy’s quiet weeping, a girl’s terrified screams in her sleep, a widow’s unacknowledged loneliness, the barbed taunts of neighbours, worries about the future of children, the humiliation of continued dependence on charity—each was enough to obliterate hope.

Feisty, fierce, resilient, compassionate, impetuous and sometimes unwise, yet often defenceless in her loneliness, thirty-one-year-old Naseebbahen Mohammedbhai Sheikh emerged as a natural leader in the colony. She had lost an incomprehensible total of twenty-six members of her family in the massacre, including her husband, her twelve-year-old daughter, her parents, and almost every living relative in her parents’ and her husband’s home except one brother and a son. Yet hers was the steadiest voice in the colony, one offering comfort and strength. ‘You have to now make two hearts beat in your breasts,’ she never tired of telling the other widowed women, ‘one that of a mother, the other of a father.’ She would urge the women, ‘Live for your children but also for yourself. Make sure that your children study.’

Naseeb and her one son survived only because of a chance of fate. She had been admitted into a government hospital in Delol for a hysterectomy on 27 February 2002, just one day before the massacre engulfed her village and villages in twenty districts of Gujarat. She did not know, until much later, about the burning of the Sabarmati Express at Godhra railway station that same day, barely 20 kilometres from where she lay on the operation table, or that the horrific deaths in the train compartment had sparked such widespread and barbarous mass communal extermination.

Her husband, Mohammedbhai, visited her grim-faced in the evening after the operation. He did not tell her that their home had been plundered and burnt down by mobs, their television smashed, that everything they had lovingly accumulated over fifteen years of married life had been destroyed in minutes. Their locker had been broken into, too, and their life savings of seventy thousand rupees, with which they had hoped to buy agricultural land, had been looted. Mohammedbhai only gave her home-cooked food in a tiffin-carrier, asked after her health and held her hand. He then left. It was the last time that she saw him alive.

The following night, Koyobhai, an Adivasi worker from her village who had tended to their fields for many years, brought her ten-year-old son to the hospital. There had been some communal disturbances in the village, he told her briefly. Some Adivasi agricultural-workers had given her extended family shelter in their homes, he said, and they were all safe. Naseeb’s son had wept incessantly for her and he had therefore carried him to the hospital to leave him with her. Naseeb was very troubled, but Koyobhai reassured her that there was no cause for worry.

On the morning of 2 March 2002, Naseeb awoke to the roar of frenzied crowds milling around the hospital. She stumbled out of bed and ran to the gates. In the distance, she saw an overturned Tempo van being set on fire by a mob. Naseeb screamed when she thought she saw her own brother Yakubbhai among the passengers trying to escape the burning vehicle. Even as he struggled desperately, a horde of men overpowered Yakubbhai, poured petrol upon on his clothes and set him on fire. At this point, Naseeb fell unconscious. She was spared the sight of her sister-in-law being stripped naked and raped by the men even as she begged for mercy. She did not see her brother’s two terror-stricken children run screaming for safety towards the hospital and being overpowered and burnt alive.

When Naseeb regained consciousness, she found herself back in her hospital bed. To save her life, the nurses had dressed her in a sari, stuck a bindi on her forehead and spread vermilion in the parting of her hair. Her traumatized son sat frozen by her bedside. Mobs were scouring the hospital wards for Muslim patients. The doctor convinced them that she was a Hindu and they passed her by.

The doctor, Hasmukh Machi, was an elderly gynaecologist who had treated generations of women from Naseeb’s family. After the mob left the hospital, he reassured the shuddering and sobbing Naseeb that the man she had seen killed was not her brother, and that all her relatives were safe. But, as days passed and no one came to see her in the hospital, fear and panic mounted. However, the doctor told her that he had made enquiries. All the members of her family had taken shelter in relief camps. They were unable to visit her only because of the curfew and the unchecked violence.

After she was discharged, Dr Hasmukh took Naseeb to his own home where his wife and mother gently nursed her and restored her to health. It was the longest that Naseebbahen had lived in a Hindu household, she said. They treated her as one of their own. Finally one morning, twenty days after the violence first broke out, the doctor and his wife sat by Naseeb’s side and, in low, shaking voices, shared horrifying news, worse than the worst of her nightmares.

After their home was destroyed by the rioting mobs, the Adivasi workers—who had been employed for many years by Mohammedbhai’s family—sheltered her extended family in their huts, a total of eleven women, men and children, for three nights. But the bloodshed and butchery refused to die down. When others in the village discovered them, they advised the men that it would be safest for them to shift their families to the relief camp in Kalol, Gandhinagar. They assured them safe passage.

The entire family set out that evening in the fading twilight. They walked a short distance, then decided that it was too dangerous to continue and hid in a shallow pit on the bed of the Goma River until nightfall. Although the villagers had assured them that they would remain unharmed, they still trembled, clinging on to each other, hoping to see the dawn. But this was not to be.

A crowd of men armed with swords approached stealthily from the rear and surrounded the family. The attack was swift and surgical. They first cut off the head of Naseeb’s mother-in-law. They then attacked her husband Mohammedbhai. They hacked off his arms and, as he cried out to Allah, fatally stabbed him in the stomach. The death of their twelve-year-old daughter was even more merciless: They cut off her arms, feet, hair, and only then ended her life. In this way, one by one, nine of them fell to the mob’s swords as their blood collected and coagulated in the riverbed and their screams filled the stillness of the approaching night. They burned alive two small children.

The doctor’s account did not end there. Frequently breaking down, he told Naseeb that it was indeed her own brother whom she had seen from the hospital gates.

While their home was being looted and torched, her parents’ extended family of fifteen remained hidden in the fields. After cowering for two days among the standing crops, enduring hunger, thirst and fear, her brother had decided that they could not continue like this indefinitely. The storm showed no signs of passing and he felt that there was no option but to drive everyone to the relief camp in Kalol.

Somehow, their Tempo van had been left unharmed and they all piled into it and left. In Kalol, they found that the roads had been blocked with crude, hastily put up barriers made out of stones and mounds of sand. Naseeb’s brother tried to desperately drive over the barriers but, at one point near the hospital where Naseeb was recovering from her operation, the van swerved and overturned into a ditch. Naseeb was witness to some of what happened afterwards.

Naseeb, now utterly distraught and incredulous, begged the doctor that she be allowed to visit the relief camp and look for survivors from her family. The doctor drove her there himself. With her son clutching her shaking hand, she walked unsteadily through the camp. The only relative that Naseeb could find was her husband’s elder brother Abdul and his wife. They had survived only because they lived in another town, Dehasar, where their homes had been destroyed but their