HUMAN rights lawyer Teesta Setalvad rang up the other day to follow up on her proposal to convert one of the sites of Gujarat’s most terrifying massacres of Muslims into a memorial for peace. Many leading peace activists have joined the campaign. I too endorsed it but asked her to include in the proposed museum memories from the Godhra train tragedy in which a group of 52 Hindus were burnt alive. There is a dispute about the cause of the train fire on February 27, 2002, which is cited as a trigger to the wider orgy of state-sponsored violence against fellow Gujaratis. She said the memorial would represent struggle for communal harmony and against fascist violence regardless of who causes it – Hindu, Muslim or Sikh doesn’t matter.

Was the Godhra tragedy an accident or was the coach set on fire by a Muslim mob as alleged mostly by Hindutva supporters? There are fewer if any doubts about the culpability of those involved in the “revenge” massacre of Muslims. In any case, regardless of who raped and killedMuslims and who burnt Hindu passengers alive, the idea of a memorial to jointly overcome their trauma with a lasting symbol for communal harmony is an excellent one. I am sure Ms Setalvad would make it as inclusive as India itself desperately needs to be.

She has chosen Ahmedabad’s devastated and now abandoned Gulberg Colony as the site of her proposed symbol. It requires dollops of money to fructify. There is at least one similar memorial in South Asia, the one that came up in Bangladesh after its liberation movement, which took a heavy toll of the nation’s youth. A memorial has also come up in Rwanda to the 1994 massacre victims. Much like India, where communalism is not a straight fight between Hindus and Muslims but rather a struggle between liberal and rightwing citizens, the massacres in Rwanda were carried out by fanatical Hutus against liberal Hutus and their allies the minority Tutsis. Were it a straight Hindu-Muslim fight, India would have become a fascist state long ago.

There was another doubt I raised with Ms Setalvad. In the case of Auschwitz in post-war Poland and in Bangladesh, the victors erected these memorials. What were the chances of such a thing being allowed in Gujarat by a hostile BJP government under whose watch the genocide was allowed to happen? She said there was no legal basis for the memorial to be prevented because the residents of the charred colony, nearly all being victims of the religious frenzy of 2002, had joined hands and would be accommodated elsewhere.

I looked up an article by Faizul Khan Tamim on the Bangladesh memorial at Mirpur Jalladkhana. He movingly described his visit there. “A group of street children, ranging from four to six years olds, lined up in front of the memorial gate, and singing patriotic songs like Mora ekti phool ke bachabo bole judhho kori and the national anthem Amar shonar Bangla ami tomai bhalobashi. They sung with so much passion and devotion that even commuters on the street took a break and stood for some time to see that emotional scene.”

On the left of the memorial gate in Bangladesh, a mural, made of burnt bricks, stands boldly, according Tamim. When eminent national artist Rafiqun Nabi entered the site for the first time he was pain-stricken trying to visualise the mass murders. It was then the idea of a mural struck him. Later, Nabi and colleague Muniruzzaman created the mural titled ‘Jibon Abinashwar’ (Life Immortal). “The mural depicts the mutilated bodies of numerous martyrs on the grave while the sun of liberation is shining on them. And Life Immortal means that the spirits of those dead bodies are still with us and they will never die,” Tamim quotes Nabi as explaining. To the right, where the two ends of the triangular walkways meet, stands the infamous pump house which served as the torture chamber. And inside is the 20-foot-deep water tank, now enclosed around the border with black tiles where the butchered body parts of men, women and children were dumped.

All over the world, Auschwitz has become a symbol of terror, genocide, and the Holocaust. Set up in 1940 by the Nazis, at first, Poles were imprisoned and died in the camp. Afterwards, Soviet prisoners of war, gypsies, and prisoners of other nationalities were also incarcerated there. Beginning in 1942, the camp became the site of the greatest mass murder in the history of humanity, which was committed against the European Jews as part of Hitler’s plan for the complete destruction of that people. The majority of the Jewish men, women and children deported to Auschwitz were sent to their deaths in the Birkenau gas chambers immediately after arrival. At the end of the war, in an effort to remove the traces of the crimes they had committed, the SS began dismantling and razing the gas chambers, crematoria, and other buildings, as well as burning documents. The founders of the party in power in Gujarat had glorified anti-Semitism as the way forward for India. Mercifully the Indian genius thwarted their attempts to seize power. But now the picture looks a lot more problematic.

Wouldn’t the proposed memorial become a divisive issue in the fractured polity of India, I asked Teesta? Or could her shrine to communal peace bring about a change of heart where it matters most: among the most vulnerable sections of the people who are most likely to and often do fall prey to fascist ideologies?

Teesta Setalvad is clear that there is no constituency for hate in her scheme of things. In fact the motto of her organisation and publication Communalism Combat is “Hate hurts, harmony works”.

Ms Setalvad’s appeal issued worldwide to Indians is direct and unambiguous. “We urge you to become part of this movement to create a memorial of resistance: a resistance to the politics of hatred and division, communal violence. Over two decades of involvement in the anti-communal struggle, the resistance of a system to give justice and reparation to victim survivors, the loss of their narratives and stories, the dissipated energies of the human rights defenders who work by their side,” says Teesta. All these factors have inspired this idea to develop a space that energises the victim survivors and the human rights defenders who stand with them. “A space for narratives. To develop the discourse of reparation. To create spaces for rehabilitation. To be a stark resistance to the politics of communal violence. India and the subcontinent need to look at this dark underbelly of past and present, in the eye. We invite you to be part of this endeavour and contribute towards making this memorial possible,” she says in the appeal on her website named after Sabrang Trust. Among the names of those seeking this help is that of Tanvir Jafri. He is the son of Ahsan Jafri, the former Member of Parliament and a leftist poet whose thin body of work is almost entirely dedicated to praise of secularism in India. He was cut to pieces and burnt by the fascist mob that attacked the Gulberg Colony.

I gave a photocopy of the small collection of the poems to a famous film lyricist and a few other friends to be translated for a wider audience to savour Jafri’s cultured Indianess. There is no news from any of them so far. If ever a translation does materialise, the book should be made a centrepiece at the memorial, if and when that becomes a reality. There’s not too much time though.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com