On 9th October, the special branch of Delhi police
brazenly attacked and vandalised the Delhi office of Forward Press
magazine, a Hindi-English bilingual monthly of Dalits and Bahujans,
and forcibly seized copies of their October special issue on Bahujan
Sramana Tradition along with arresting four employees.The consulting
editor of the magazine who is being maliciously targeted and
threatened with arrest has stated in a press release that the October
issue of the magazine has attempted a Bahujan reading of the story of
Mahishasur and Durga through the medium of pictures and essays. This
motivated act of police violence following the diktats of Brahmanical
forces, is because of the attempt by Forward Press to challenge the
dominant myths about Mahishasura. He also added that the police
forces were confiscating copies of the magazine from stalls in Delhi
without any order of any court or competent authority.On the same
night, rabid ABVP goons attacked and assaulted students attending a
programme conducted by AIBSF on Mahishashur in JNU. Hoodlums from
ABVP even filed an FIR against a student in the Vasant Kunj police
station for distributing copies of the article ‘Kiski Puja Kar Rahe
Hai Bahujan’ from the magazine.
This is only a flashpoint in a chain of instances
where writers, artists and scholars have faced a backlash from a
right-wing bolstered by a communal fascist state and its machinery.
When James Laine’s book on Shivaji, Paul Courtwright’s book on a
hindu deity, Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An alternative history or
AK Ramanujan’s essay Three Hundred Ramayanas (which was removed
from the history syllabus in Delhi University) allegedly ‘hurt the
sentiments of certain religious communities’, it was not only these
‘hurt’ jingoist guardians ‘from Hindu right-wing organisations,
but also the high court, universities and home ministry that issued
diktats that the books be removed from syllabus, or banned, and even
sanctioned arrest warrants and unleashed the police force upon them.
Agents of this state like the newly appointed ICHR
chairperson Yellapragada Sudershan Rao or the self appointed
custodian of preserving hindu myths, Dinanath Batra, however, are
free to make open and rabid casteist and communal statements and
celebrate their saffronized reinterpretation of history. At a time
when everyone is hysterically brandishing a preposterous peace prize
awarded to Kailash Satyarthi, at the same time, any other voice from
the marginalized which even remotely challenge the dominant notions
of history or even dare to present an alternative reading of the
myths face censorship, clamp down and state repression. The
incarceration of cultural activists like Sudhir Dhawale, Hem Mishra
and many others or clamp down on magazines like Peoples March only
reveals one half of the oppressive face of the juggernaut that is the
Indian State. The point is that it is not the adherence to a
particular ideology or the use of violence that this state
suppresses, it attacks and attempts to suppress all democratic voices
of dissent even when they follow the politics of parliamentary
democracy and Indian constitution. The attack on Forward Press
magazine only exposes the true character of the Indian State in
cahoots with the oppressive agenda of Hindutva. We condemn
the police crackdown on the staff of Forward Press in strongest
terms.
- See more at:
http://sanhati.com/excerpted/11542/#sthash.CIFEx8tu.dpuf
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