Article Link: “Forgetting slaughter” by Harsh Mander
The Hindu has this brilliant article by Harsh Mander on the importance of continuing the struggle for getting justice for the atrocities committed in the Gujarat riots, even if it has been seven long years since it happened.
Here is the question that he tries to answer:
It is often suggested that there is a self-evident conflict or disconnect, some would suggest even a contradiction, between the goals of justice (particularly legal justice or justice delivered through the formal and impersonal instruments of the modern State), and reconciliation. In the aftermath of Gujarat 2002, there are many who argue that the efforts of human rights groups (including those that I am engaged with) which strive to secure justice for the survivors, are actually blocking efforts at reconciliation, or the spaces for forgiveness. Such enterprises are seen to be akin to scraping the scab off old wounds and not letting these heal naturally: they are seen as not letting the survivors forget their suffering. Those opposed to such efforts dispute: “What is achieved by reviving memories of what is done and over with? We should let the people affected by the admittedly unfortunate mass violence move on, without being constantly pulled into the quicksand of a painful past”.
He goes on to argue that reconciliation cannot be forced on people who have actually suffered in the pogrom.
Of course as a nation and as a people, we need to move on, pushing decisively behind us chapters of collective shame and tribulation, such as what unfolded in the killing fields of Gujarat in 2002. But the decision to impatiently surge ahead without looking back cannot justly be imposed on women and men, boys and girls who live with not only with the memories of the trauma of unspeakable loss and violence, but the daily lived realities of continued persecution, boycott, expulsion, fear and hate. They should not feel coerced into a spurious amnesia, imposed on them by those who did not suffer and by their absence of remorse and compassion. It is only when the survivors are able to deal voluntarily with this painful past, and when they are assisted to rebuild their homes, livelihoods and social relations, that they will be able to look to the future with optimism and confidence.
He makes a great analogy of this problem to the violence suffered by women.
Those who oppose post-violence human rights struggles also often suggest that efforts for legal justice undertaken long after visible violence has ceased on the streets, only revive enmities and cause further unrest and tensions rather than encourage peace. These threaten the fragile peace that is constructed with so much difficulty in post-conflict societies. This argument reminds me again and again of beliefs that a family in which a woman accepts repeated violence in the hands of her spouse without complaint or resistance is a peaceful one, and a household in which she is encouraged or supported (or instigated?) to be emboldened enough to speak out is one in which the peace and sanctity of family life is being imperilled and destroyed.
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In the painful stoic or muffled silences of the survivors, the questions still shout to be heard about whether there is an impossibility of reconciliation for survivors of rape, especially when the rapists and those who instigated them walk free? Who can speak to them of finding spaces in their hearts for forgiveness, and who indeed should? Do such paths exist at all for the women who carry burdens of the pain and humiliation such as of 2002? If such paths exist, they must I believe traverse also the daunting treacherous journey of justice.
Towards the end he also mentions a fact about Gujarat that not many young people might know.
In my interviews with hundreds of survivors of the Gujarat carnage of 2002, I learnt that the families of most had not suffered for the first time in the carnage of 2002. Each had many agonising tales of losing loved ones, and the looting and torching of their homes in several successive riots. In fact, the saga of their lives seemed like the spaces between various communal riots, often starting with the cataclysmic upheavals of 1947.
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This, to my understanding is crucial, that all notions of authentic reconciliation relate to a situation when the moment of atrocity can be relegated to a past. But for the Gujarat survivors, the persecution is repetitive: what can then be reconciliation in these situations of sustained boycott, segregation and hate?
I have heavily quoted from the article, but there is still a lot more to read from this amazing article. Read it to get the full picture.
