How does one keep hope alive?    

In Ode to a Nightingale, John Keats wrote


My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense
As though of hemlock I have drunk


When as an undergraduate at DU I first read the poem, its intense romanticism sent me into a trance. Five decades later its words have become my mental refrain every morning but it leaves me in a different kind of trance.

I no longer recognise this land where I was born, lived and where I will die. It has all changed so drastically. For me being Muslim has become- stamp stamp stamp!
In English news the expression used is ‘beaten to death’. In Hindi/Urdu media, it is ‘peet peet kar maar daala’. These expressions refer to the poorest Muslims who are these days caught and killed for cattle related crimes. Another crime for which killing is fair game is ‘daring to love’.

Killing is fair retribution, killing anyone who comes within the shooting range.
The other dark, sinister news is about terror, which is the larger shadow under which all Muslims find themselves. Whether it is mutilation of bodies of jawans at the Pakistan border, the ISIS terror modules which keep cropping up every few days, the violence in Islamic countries, its guilt covers me and millions like me with shame. I am pinned on the wall for all other ills such as aberrations pertaining to Triple Talaq.
I have become the living example of the lines of Faiz Ahmed Faiz:

Nisaar mein teri galiyon pe ai watan ke jahan
Chali hai rasm ke koi ne sar uttha ke chaley
Jo koi chahney wala tawaaf ko nikley
Nazar jhuka ke chaley jism o jaan bacha ke chaley


(My land! My adored land
A new ritual has come into force
That no one will walk with head held high.
If a devotee comes for Parikrama
His eye should be glued to ground
His body and soul held furtive.)


Today the news was from Bulandshaher. Urdu media: ‘Maummar aadmi ko peet peet kar maut ke ghaat utaar diya’.

English media: ‘Elderly man beaten to death in Bulanshaher.’
Two days ago in the same order it was ‘Assam mein mavaishi chori ke ilzaam mein do Muslim naujawanon ko peet peet kar qatl.’
‘Two ‘cattle thieves’ lynched in Assam’.
Today’s story was from Pahasu Tehsil where a Hindu girl and Muslim boy eloped.
Members of Hindu Yuva Vahini took away the boy’s uncle Ghulam Mohammad in a wooded area and beat him to death.

In Assam’s Naugaon two young men were accused of stealing cattle. Abu Hanifa and Riyazuddin Ali were chased and severely beaten up with lathis by villagers. By the time the police rushed them to hospital they were dead.

Already the Assam news is fading. By tomorrow Bulandshahar would be forgotten.
Do we remember, for example, the lynching of a ‘cattle stealer; in Assam’s Golaghat’ last year? Or do we recall the lacerations on the face of the Muslim youth beaten up by PFA activists in Kalkaji last week?

In 1947, when most of my family were loaded in trucks and forcibly sent to Pakistan albeit for they own safety, my immediate family decided to stay back. We were in
Pune, therefore relatively insulated from the killings in Punjab and Delhi. My family became role models for Muslims, who were left behind to pick up broken lives in their ravaged hometowns.

With Nehru, Azad and other intellectual giants at the political helm, the communal chatter remained subdued. Dr Abid Husain, one of the triumvirate who established Jamia Millia Islamia, started a weekly journal Nai Roshini to encourage Muslims to become partners in building a new India. He happened to be my uncle.

Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, journalist and film maker, made his films the medium of social reform. His subjects ranged from food security (Dharti ke Lal) Water (Do Boond Pain) Left Wing Extremism (The Naxalites) Labour (Raahi) Displacement (Sheher aur Sapna). He was my uncle and mentor.

In the school I attended I had a principal MN Kapur, who had studied in Government College Lahore and believed in India as a beautiful mosaic. My ‘Muslimness’ never came in the way of singing ‘Hindu’ prayers during Assembly with the same fervour as Allama Iqbal’s Lab pe aati hai dua banke tamanna meri . My Muslimness never came in the way of attending the iconic Narendra Sharma’s dance classes and suffering rejection not because I was Muslim but because I had no talent. Enriched with education of the finest grain from people like the artists Kanwal and Devyani Krishna, and poetry and theatre from superb educator, Ved Vyas, who had a heart into which
all communities found their place, I went into the world armed with confidence
and humility.

While the externals remain the same, more or less, the roads, parks, monuments, with exceptions such as Aurangzeb Road, everything else in my surrounding has changed into something unrecognisable. It began in 1992 with demolition of Babri Masjid, peaked in 2002 Gujarat carnage and has been bubbling and frothing ever since. There is one difference. Earlier we could protest, sit on dharnas, create Aman Ekta Manchs etc. Now there is no space left for protest or resistance.

Today my day began with a full page advertisement on the front page of the newspaper promising a ‘divine and wholistic India’ presided over by ‘Saint dedicated to the country, a sage and boon to the nation’.

I don’t see this as language of a secular and democratic polity. Is this the land of my ancestors? Has it changed beyond recall or have I?

Syeda Hameed is a writer, former Member Planning Commission, and Founder of Muslim Womens Forum and Khwaja Ahmed Abbad Trust