The chronicle of an arson foreseen
by Abhimanyu Kumar 

“They make a desolation and call it peace
When you left, even the stones were buried
The defenceless would have no weapons”

Farewell, Agha Shahid Ali

What is the colour of utter despair? Perhaps grey, like ash. In a handful of ash, or dust, you can see fear – like a palpitating heart, fluttering like a small bird, trying to stay alive, to be brave, as the poet Agha Shahid Ali exhorted it to be, in another poem. More often than not, fear’s chief power over us lies in the possibility that it will pass us by altogether, writes Martin Heidegger in his opus, Being and Time.

But when the object of our fear comes true, reality becomes a thick wall of steel surrounding us from all sides, like a futuristic prison-cell. Or like the ocean for a drowning person.

Some months ago, I received a Whatsapp message from a reporter friend of mine, concerning a colony in Delhi’s Okhla, which houses a substantial population of Muslims. Shaheen Bagh is nearby, the site of massive protests starting 2019 against the Modi’s government’s attempts to change India’s citizenship laws.

It was a short report in a major Indian Hindi newspaper about a small Rohingya settlement in Madanpur Khadar, which is close to the Kalindi Kunj metro station. The Kalindi Kunj flyover connects Delhi to NOIDA, and was shut during the entire duration of the Shaheen Bagh protests. The Yamuna is close too, and on its other side one can see the high-rise towers of NOIDA, housing the swanky offices of TV channels and corporate firms.

There is nothing swanky about the colonies settled on this side of the Yamuna. They are an amalgamation of non-descript concrete structures made with an intent to maximise space, around a rapidly shrinking Yamuna. Alongside the houses are shanties. The population is mostly working-class – shopkeepers, lower-level office workers, factory workers, e-rickshaw drivers, shop-assistants, salesmen and others.  

The report my friend sent me was about Madanpur Khadar. It referred to a Home Ministry circular which said that the ministry was “keeping an eye” on the settlement, since ‘illegal’ Rohingyas were living there. It stated that the land belonged to the irrigation department of the UP government which the Rohingyas had ‘illegally occupied’.  NOIDA comes under UP.

The report also stated that the Home Ministry was concerned about the issue as the Rohingyas were a ‘security risk’. This is of course part of the Nationalist discourse currently prevalent in India. Rohingyas are a security risk in the same way Bengali-speaking Muslims are a security risk, or any Muslim for that matter. In fact, the report clubbed both communities together – Bengali-speaking Muslims and Rohingyas.

Meanwhile, a campaign against the Rohingyas was conducted by certain TV channels, like News Nation, Sudarshan TV and Capital TV. One anchor claimed that Rohingyas picked up spots close to security installations in India, or near Army camps and this made them a ‘security risk.’ The anchor also claimed that Rohingyas were involved in drug-trafficking and prostitution, making his allegations without even an iota of proof.  

I reached out to someone I know, a garbage collector called Noor, a young man of around 19, who used to collect the garbage from our old house in Jangpura in South Delhi.

Noor is the eldest son of the family. His father, Maidul Islam, a gentle, soft-spoken man of around 50 was the one who first came to Delhi from Assam, leaving behind his original profession of masonry as there was little money in it. Initially, he found the job – garbage collection – distasteful and undignified but soon, he realised that it afforded him a semblance of decent living as the wages were good.

Noor did not study much as he started helping his father out from an early age. When I first met him, he was already picking garbage from all the homes in certain blocks of the colony, carrying the piles of rubbish in a hand-drawn cart, taking it all to the Bhatta or the garbage dump of the colony, segregating the waste with the help of his brothers and cousins into dry and wet, till afternoon when he would go back home riding the same cart, with his younger brothers sitting behind him on the cart.

Two years ago, he married a girl whom he loved. She was being married off to someone much elder to her and her family had to be persuaded to reverse their decision and to let her marry Noor. Now, they have a young daughter. Noor’s father is now retired and stays at home. He has stones in his gallbladder but cannot bring himself to get operated upon.

When I visited Noor and his father after the report in the Hindi newspaper came out, as they too live in Khadar and which has a substantial population of Bengali-speaking Muslims from Assam, his father showed me a jar of herbal medicine he was trying out for his gallbladder problem, which he had bought after watching an ad for it on the TV. It was a sprawling settlement in which they lived in hastily constructed shanties, and occasional concrete structures, with rubbish piled all over the ground in huge quantities, and flies hovering over every inch of the space.

Hanging over him with a sense of unease, the news worried Noor’s father. He knew what it could lead to. “The land here belongs to the government which the Gurjars (a local community with numbers and political clout) have occupied. We pay them rent,” he told me.

He was well-aware of their place in the Hindutva scheme of things. As Bengali-speaking Muslims from Assam, they had to submit documents to the relevant authorities in their district in Assam about the origins. It took them several trips to Assam to have their claims verified. What stumped them in particular was the State’s assertion that Noor’s mother could not be said to belong to Assam merely due to her ties to Noor’s father and had to prove her claims separately. But in the end, with the help of lawyers they engaged there, they got over this conundrum that had the potential of tearing the family apart forever.

Ironically, their family has started a new business: collecting rotis from the pile of garbage and selling it to gaushalas. “Every morning, people from gaushalas come to collect the rotis which is fed to cows,” Noor told me, as his daughter played in the room we were sitting in, preening in the mirror, and fingering the necklace she was wearing.

When the Burmese Junta dissolved Aung San Suu Kyi’s democratic government a couple of months back, reports began appearing in India media about dissenters crossing over to India, including policemen, especially to India’s north-east states. This brought the focus back on the Rohingyas too.

The current Indian government has consistently maintained that giving shelter to the Rohingya community is not their job.

My wife, Aletta Andre, works as a journalist for the Dutch Public Broadcaster NOS, and for prestigious dailies such as Trouw and FD. The Junta’s actions in Burma, and its ramifications reaching up to India, was noticed by the foreign media and its editors.

My wife’s editors at NOS were also keen to have the development covered, especially how it would affect the status of the Rohingyas living in India.

When she told me, she was covering it and was speaking to one of the community leaders of the Rohingyas who also acted as the head of an organisation in Delhi for their welfare, I asked her to check the situation in Khadar as well. When I had visited, I had not been able to interact or check on them as I did not know anyone from the community then. I had read the report in the Hindi daily as an attempt to slur the Bengali-speaking Muslim community living there as ‘illegal’ Rohingyas since the Rohingyas are also originally from Bangladesh and speak Bengali, aside from being Muslims, making the two communities ethnically similar.

Subsequently, I learned from my wife that there was indeed a separate settlement of Rohingyas in Khadar, near the Kalindi Kunj Metro station, which I had missed out on my first visit. When she visited them for her reporting work, I drove her there.

It was while trying to find the exact location of the settlement that I first spoke to Md. Salimullah, a community leader, for directions.

When my wife returned from her visit, she told me that in the last week itself, there had been cases of arson in the colony, according to Salimullah or Salim, and that a family had been picked up by the Delhi police for living in India without valid papers.

Alarmed, I checked with the editors of a couple of international publications if they were interested in covering the issue but the response was hardly encouraging. Nevertheless, I visited the settlement.

The colony where I first met Salim, is close to the Kalindi Kunj Metro station, but off the main street. A narrow road goes towards it, curling away from the main road. As it approaches the colony, the road become elevated since the land is undulating. That, and the concrete houses adjacent to it almost hide the colony if you arrive there for the first time.

In a small expanse of land there, not bigger than the lawns of any MP bungalow in Lutyen’s Delhi, lived 50 families with almost 270 people. “Some people got married here and had children so we have more people than before,” Salim told me when we met, dressed in a lungi, and a shirt – the typical attire of both Rohingyas and Bengali-speaking Muslims. 

Salim told me that day that everyone, including children and elderly, had cards confirming their refugee status from the United Nations High Commissioner (UNHRC) for Refugees. “We got the cards issued in 2013, for the first time for four years. Once they expired, we had another extension till 18. And in 18, we got cards renewed till 2020. Then the lockdown happened so we could not visit the office anymore.”

I asked him if the family that had been picked up from the camp had valid papers. Salim said that they did have them. The police must have given some reason, I quizzed him further. “They said they have orders from above and asked us to check at the FRRO (Foreigners Regional Registration Office). Some journalists did check at the FRRO but the officials there said ask the Home Minister.” 

To his credit, the Home Minister makes no bones about his views on the issue. Speaking in Parliament during a debate in December 2019, he made it clear that Rohingyas will “never be accepted as citizens” of India, as they had ‘infiltrated’ the country through Bangladesh, technically making them akin to Bengali-speaking Muslims of Assam and West Bengal, often called ‘Bangladeshi infiltrators.’

Salim told me that after the first family was picked up from there settlement, others were picked up from Khadar and other settlements of Rohingyas all over Delhi. “They have picked up around ten family from here and 14 families from Shram Vihar.” The Rohingyas in Delhi live in two camps – Shram Vihar and Khadar and also at Khaujri Khas in Northeast Delhi and Vikaspuri, he told me.

Another 88 people had been picked up even before when they were protesting the detention of Rohingyas in Jammu, at Vikaspuri. “The cops picked them at 2 in the night,” said Salim.

Over all, more than hundred people had already been picked up and kept at a facility in Inderlok in Delhi.

The families at Khadar were given land to stay at, by Zakat Foundation, a charity organisation, when they first arrived in 2013. “There was a fire there in 2018 and so we shifted here.”

I asked Salim what he did for a living. “I had a grocery store,” he said. “But they broke it down, along with four shanties.”

“Who broke your shop?” I asked him. “The local Patwari. This land belongs to the UP government. They broke my shop, my house and two-three other shanties. For last two weeks or so, I am living like this…We are speaking to the Patwari also. He has said clearly, he wants us out. He is bringing the media too and telling them the same thing, calling us terrorist and infiltrators.” In particular, Salim mentioned Sudarshan TV journalists visiting the camp. Sudarshan TV is known to be rabidly anti-Muslim and has faced legal censure for some of its reports on the issue of Muslims ‘infiltrating’ the bureaucracy. 

He added that petrol was poured on his makeshift office made of wooden planks hastily put together, like other houses in the colony and fire was set at night. But Salim and other residents managed to spot the fire in time and douse it, saving the office from being destroyed. “This also happened around two weeks ago. Since then, we keep a watch over the office at night, taking turns.”

According to Salim, the situation started to take a turn for the worse for the Rohingyas after the Jammu High Court questioned the state government over their continued stay in India.  “On March 6, Jammu and Kashmir administration detained several Rohingya people and lodged them in the Hira Nagar detention centre, which earlier served as a sub-jail, after the Jammu and Kashmir high court directed it to spell out what measures it is taking to identify and act on “illegal immigrants.”

The court passed the directive on a petition filed by Hunar Gupta, who is affiliated with the Bharatiya Janata Party. The BJP and other right-wing groups in Jammu have been campaigning for ouster of Rohingya peoples from the city.

Following the High Court’s directive, Salim filed a PIL in the Supreme Court, represented by noted lawyer Prashant Bhushan. But the Supreme Court refused to stay the process of arrests and deportations, noting only that due process must be followed.

When I spoke to Salim after the judgement, he said his lawyers had suggested they do nothing more till the results of the Assam elections were declared. I had suggested to Salim earlier to file a PIL again seeking the safety of the colony in Khadar but his lawyers had some other plans, he said.

Perhaps they thought that if the BJP lost in Assam, it will take the steam off its efforts to get Rohingyas and so-called Bangaldeshi Muslims of Assam and Bengal deported.

But the BJP won a thumping majority in Assam when results came in early May. Around the same time, the second wave of Covid in India intensified. “Situation is calm now as everyone is suffering,” Salim told me then. But he expressed his worry about the future when the lockdown would be over.

Almost as soon as the lockdown ended, the threat became real again but there was no recourse available anymore.

On Saturday night, the entire colony was razed by a mysterious fire. Newspaper and TV reports say the fire was ‘accidental’ but knowing how events had transpired earlier, I find it hard to believe. When I met Salim after the gutting down of the entire colony, he said he did not want to name anyone as he feared further retribution, which is a perfectly valid decision from his point-of-view. In fact, a report by Al-Jazeera after the fire now says masked men visited the colony before the fire started. But even if this fire is investigated ultimately, which seems highly unlikely, the system that has now been put in place in India is working actively against minorities and the Rohingyas are only one of the victims, now and later.

It is hard to ignore the atmosphere of terror and propaganda, the classic tools of a totalitarian regime, as Hannah Arendt wrote in her Origins of Totalitarianism, that was created before this ‘accidental’ fire. While the central government refused to abide by its Constitutional and humanitarian responsibility to protect a vulnerable minority, the court orders and the relentless media campaign added fuel to the fire. At the ground level, threats and intimidation were used to soften any opposition. The cops arrested Rohingyas indiscriminately, without any regard for the papers issued by the UN. Even the UNHRC could do nothing but be a mute spectator, although considering the open disregard for human rights organisations, especially foreign, that the government has, perhaps there was little it could or can do.  

Where do we go from here, as the Hindutva juggernaut flattens everything in its way to submission and subjugation? Standing at the edge of the precipice, with no return possible anymore, we have very few options left, I feel. Perhaps, the least we can do is to remember Arendt’s warning about the tendency of certain sections of society to downplay mob violence, referring to anti-Semitism that gripped France before the Second World War (the word ‘Jew’ can be replaced with ‘Muslim’ and it would describe the present situation in India perfectly). “High society and politicians of the Third Republic had produced the French mob in a series of scandals and public frauds. They now felt a tender sentiment of parental familiarity with their offspring, a feeling mixed with admiration and fear. The least society could do for its offspring was to protect it verbally. While the mob actually stormed Jewish shops and assailed Jews in the streets, the language of high society made real, passionate violence look like harmless child's play…There can be no doubt that in the eyes of the mob the Jews came to serve as an object lesson for all the things they detested. If they hated society they could point to the way in which the Jews were tolerated within it; and if they hated the government they could point to the way in which the Jews had been protected by or were identifiable with the state. While it is a mistake to assume that the mob preys only on Jews, the Jews must be accorded first place among its favorite victims. Excluded as it is from society and political representation, the mob turns of necessity to extraparliamentary action. Moreover, it is inclined to seek the real forces of political life in those movements and influences which are hidden from view and work behind the scenes.”  

Abhimanyu Kumar is a journalist based out of Delhi. His first book of poems Milan and the Sea was published in 2017. His poems have been published in several Indian and international journals such as Cafe Dissensus, Underground Books, Riot Feliceand others. Being an admirer of the works of Beat writers, in particular Allen Ginsberg, Abhimanyu likes to explore political themes in his work and to focus on the personal. He also edits the online magazine Sunflower Collective, which promotes the work of Beat and Hungry Generation writers, the latter being a group of persecuted radical writers based in the east of India in the 1960s.