ONE compelling but rather undiscussed view about the demolished Babri mosque is that the controversial site where it had once stood should be handed over to the people who drew a charcoal sketch of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru on its southern wall, inside the sanctum sanctorum. I too had occasion to see the life- size neatly done sketches of the three martyrs from the anti- colonial struggle, during a visit to the mosque less than a year before its destruction in Dec 1992.

We do not know when precisely these sketches were made, but the people who drew them obviously idolized the three young friends who were hanged by the British government even as the Indian nationalist leadership looked on by and large as silent spectators. That Mohammad Ali Jinnah was among the few who spoke up for Bhagat Singh and this cause is also well documented.

There are a couple of other reasons why Bhagat Singh’s name looms large in my thoughts these days, and these seem to have little to do with the two films that are being screened on the life and times of the legendary freedom-fighter. I am told that one if not both of the films are replete with anti-Pakistan myth-making even though Bhagat Singh was hanged several years before independence and Jinnah was his admirer.

I think one good reason to remember Bhagat Singh today stems from the fact that his memory is being usurped by Hindu communalists, people he mistrusted and warned against. Another provocation to think of this most fascinating character who inspired the quest for freedom in the subcontinent is the suffocating discourse around religion and ethnicity that has come to dog even the so- called free societies such as the United States.

My hunch is that if Bhagat Singh had survived the hangman’s noose, he would have suffocated to death in today’s world, a world going through such vicious convulsions of hate and systemic degradation of its human values.

According to the US human rights report on India of 2001, in Ahmedabad, some time before the recent massacres, a few Muslim men were roughed up by Hindu neo-Nazis and forced to recite Vande Matram, if they wanted to be left alive.

I would have passed this for periodic social atavism that engulfs our still semi-mediaeval polity. But just then this quaint controversy over the God-infused Pledge of Allegiance cropped up of all the places in the United States. Few bothered to check out that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision in June ruling the pledge unconstitutional was built on a brick wall of Supreme Court precedent.

In 1962, the court struck down officially organized prayer in public schools. In 1980, it forced the removal of Ten Commandments displays from public school classrooms. In 1992, it rejected religious invocations and benedictions at school graduation ceremonies. In 2000, it invalidated the practice of electing students to perform “solemnizing” statements at high school football games.

It is plain on hindsight that when the US Congress inserted God in the Pledge in 1955, it intended to infuse the morning classroom ritual with an explicitly religious content. The whole point was to distinguish God-fearing America from godless atheistic communism. The people who now comically deny that “God” has a religious meaning manage to be simultaneously disingenuous, blasphemous and contemptuous of the separation of church and state. As the reviled Judge Goodwin suggested, if the state can put “under God” in the Pledge, then why not “under Allah,” “under Krishna,” or “under Confucius”?

Any symbolic “endorsement” of religion by government, as Justice O’Connor has argued, violates the Establishment Clause. This rather banal decision provoked a hysterical reaction among politicians. A bipartisan stampede of members of the House of Representatives took to the steps of the Capitol to recite the Pledge, giving clench-fisted emphasis to the deity’s name, and then spent the rest of the day blasting the federal appeals court in San Francisco and its deciding judge, Alfred T. Goodwin, who was appointed to the bench by the arch- Republican president Richard Nixon.

Earlier in a surreal 295-125 vote on March 5, 1997, the House of Representatives endorsed the Ten Commandments and their “display in government offices and courthouses.” Unfortunately, the members wrapping themselves in the Decalogue refused to vote on each commandment separately so we may never know how they really feel about taking the Lord’s name in vain, bearing false witness, and coveting their neighbours’ wives.

Just as it is suspected that the current hullabaloo over Judge Goodwin’s verdict reflects a perfectly predictable Republican strategy to change the subject away from Enron, WorldCom and the colossal ethical and business collapse of corporate America, there are good reasons to suspect that the religious upsurge that masks every political move in India is also similarly cynically driven. Submerged in the cacophony of Hindu nation on the march are myriad scandals, grave financial bunglings, political subterfuge and subversion of human rights in the name of religious unitarianism.

Habib Jalib, one of my favourite Urdu poets, had chided this self-righteous tendency when Pakistan was being readied for Nizam-i-Mustafa. Jalib had taunted Gen Ziaul Haq thus:

Jahaan Islam khathrey mein hai us maidan mein jao!

Hamari jaan ke dar pe ho qyoon Lebanon mein jao!!

(If you must do something to salve your own soul, why don’t you tackle the enemies of Islam in Lebanon or some such place, instead of haranguing us daily with your exorcist-like battle-cry)

Nida Fazli, a courageous poet who lives in Mumbai, once a thriving metropolis but now a lair of mediaeval mindsets, recently described Lal Krishan Advani’s violent “chariot-march” of 1990 with its implications for today’s Gujarat, thus:

Mujhe maloom hai tumharey naam sey mansoob hain tootey huey

sooraj

Shikasta chand, kala aasmaan, curfew-zada rahein

Sulagtey khel ke maidan, roti cheekhti maae’n

Mujhe maaloom hai charo taraf jo ye tabahi hai

Hukumat mein siyasat ke tamashe ki gawahi hai

Tumhein Hindu ki chaahat hai na Muslim se adaavat hai

Tumhara dharm sadiyon se tijarat tha tijarat hai

Mujhe maloom hai lekin tumhe mujrim kahoon kaisey

Adaalat mein tumharey jurm ko sabit karoon kaisey

Tumhari jeib mein khanjar na haaton mein koi bum tha

Tumharey rath pe to Mariyada Purshottam ka parcham tha!!

(I know, and we all know, that this bleakness, this all-round destruction is your handiwork. You have no love for the Hindu nor enmity with the Muslim. Religion is merely your merchandise which you have used to fill your brimming coffers. But I can’t prove you guilty before a magistrate since I did not actually see you plunge a knife or hurl a bomb at anyone. In fact, I know, we all know, that you were carrying aloft that fateful day not an ordinary weapon of death, but the flag proclaiming your affinity with the pious Lord Ram himself.)

Both Jalib and Nida Fazli must have admired Bhagat Singh. That’s evident from their poetry. But would Bhagat Singh have endorsed the religious madness that is being whipped up by jingoism- spewing people who claim to be his heirs?

One or two excerpts from a devastating testament by Bhagat Singh would be enough to nail this nefarious lie. Shortly before he was to be executed, Bhagat Singh wrote a monograph titled Why I am An Atheist.

“After great consideration I decided that I could not lead myself to believe in and pray to God. No, I never did. That was the real test and I came out successful. Never for a moment did I desire to save my neck at the cost of certain other things. So I was a staunch disbeliever and have ever since been so. It was not an easy job to stand that test. ‘Belief’ softens the hardships. It can even make them pleasant. In God man can find very strong consolation and support. Without Him, man has to depend upon himself. To stand up on one’s own legs amid storms and hurricanes is not a child’s play. At such testing moments, vanity if any evaporates and man cannot dare to defy the general beliefs. If he does, then we must conclude that he has got certain other strength than mere vanity. This is exactly the situation now. Judgment is already too well-known. Within a week it is to be pronounced. What is the consolation with the exception of the idea that I am going to sacrifice my life for a cause?

“A God-believing Hindu might be expecting to be reborn as a king, a Muslim or a Christian might dream of the luxuries to be enjoyed in paradise and the reward he is to get for his sufferings and sacrifices. But what am I to expect? I know the moment the rope is fitted round my neck and rafters removed, from under my feet, that will be the final moment, that will be the last moment. I, or to be more precise, my soul, as interpreted in the metaphysical terminology, shall all be finished there. Nothing further. A short life of struggle, with no such magnificent end, shall in itself be the reward if I have the courage to take it in that light. That is all. With no selfish motive, or desire to be awarded here or hereafter, quite disinterestedly have I devoted my life to the cause of independence, because I could not do otherwise. The day we find a great number of men and women with this psychology who cannot devote themselves to anything else than the service of mankind and emancipation of the suffering humanity; that day shall inaugurate the era of liberty.”

SINDHU writes that the federal revenue department has ordered allotment of lands in Sindh to the people affected by the construction of the Kalabagh dam. These people are going to be allotted 300 acres in the Rajar village, Jati taluka, 250 acres in Jhim deh and 240 acres in Wadherio deh of the Thatta district.

The practice of allotting Sindh lands to the people of Punjab dates from the colonial era when the British gave away big chunks of Sindh lands to the people of Punjab on construction of various barrages in the two provinces. Even the supporters of the colonialist regime from Punjab were given almost the entire district of Sanghar which was the centre of the Hur Movement’s armed revolt against the British rule. Now Punjab claims that Pakistan was founded by none but itself and keeps on usurping the lands of Sindh in the name of national fraternity.

Sindh will suffer most from the construction of the Kalabagh dam, yet its lands are being allotted to those who would be displaced by the mega project. Maybe tomorrow those affected by the greater Thal canal scheme are compensated when they are endowed with lands in Sindh again. On the other hand, the principle of national fraternity is not applied to the Sindh landholders who have been affected by various projects. If the principle is applied justly, the farmers displaced by the Chotiaryoon dam should get lands in the Lahore area and those affected by various drainage schemes in Sindh should be given lands in the Faisalabad area, so to say.

In this context it is futile to expect any resistance on the part of the Sindh government which has always maintained a criminal silence over the usurpation of the resources of Sindh. The same is the case with the district government of Thatta which has failed to represent its electorate in this regard. However, Islamabad should realize that pushing Sindh to the wall on the pretext of the so-called national fraternity will increase alienation in the province, which is not a good sign for the solidarity of the country.

According to Kawish, the State Bank has raised the ceiling of agricultural loans by 10 per cent. The agriculture sector has lately received a couple of financial setbacks because of the water crisis, lower rates of crops at the local markets and the rise and fall in the rates due to factors working in the international market. Facts and figures show that little finance has been made available to the agriculture sector which, because of the various unavoidable reasons, has not been financially self-sufficient. Last year the sector needed Rs155 billion but received Rs45 billion. According to a study, there are 10 million growers in the country, of which only 900,000 receive government loans and the rest are compelled to take loans on higher interest from money-lenders. Moreover, amounts earmarked for agriculture loans are diverted to other sectors. A report of the Agriculture Development Bank of Pakistan shows that Rs9 billion was transferred from the agriculture to the industrial sector between 1982 and 1999.

In the prevailing conditions, it is impossible for the agriculture sector to generate financial resources for itself because farming has become a less-paying-and-more-demanding activity due to the water shortage, rising prices of seeds and pesticides and market mechanism. However, it is the backbone of our economy and the absence of adequate investment in it affects our economy, market and pace of industrial development adversely. In order to salvage our economy from the recent crisis and to eliminate poverty from rural areas, the government should rescue agriculture by providing enough financial support to it.

Tameer-i-Sindh writes that with the induction of new ministers in the Sindh cabinet, a cold war between them and district Nazims has erupted in different parts of the province. Particularly a tug-of-war between the Badin district Nazim and the provincial local bodies minister has assumed the form of a personal animosity. The Nazims allege that the ministers are transferring the government officers to strengthen their positions. The ministers tend to ignore the fact that they have been “selected” by the government for 81 days only while the Nazims have been elected by the people for a longer term. If the government wants the devolution plan to succeed, it should, once for all, determine how much powers the ministers and the Nazims must enjoy between themselves.

Sach deplores that the incidence of gang-rape, with other crimes, has also become the order of the day in Sindh. It is imperative for the government to evolve a long-term strategy to curb the crime and press the police to change their attitude towards the powerless victims and the influential culprits so that justice is delivered in such cases.