Rape has been on our mind since December 2012. We've discussed it, protested against it, demanded more stringent laws and even got them. But the focus, the discourse and the concern has been restricted to rape by strangers. We don't take to the streets when a girl accuses her own father of rape over several years because this threatens to shake the very foundation of our society, the unit held most sacred — the family.

Tithi Bhattacharya teaches in the History department of Purdue University. Like many other women around the world Tithi also observed the protests against rape and sexism that shook India recently. In her analysis in Socialistworker.org Tithi asserts that the Left should participate and intervene in such movements. In the light of the recent hangings and our growing acceptance of Capital Punishment it becomes imperative for the Left to re-consider its interventions and engagements. Hille Le presents Tithi Bhattacharya's article from socialistworker.org

January 10, 2013
Protesters march in Delhi after the death of a 23-year-old victim of gang rape

In a crime that sparked sustained and angry protests in several cities in India and around the world, a 23-year-old student was gang raped and beaten in Delhi, India, on December 16. She died from her injuries 13 days later.

The outrage caused by the case has helped to spark a larger discussion about rape, sexism and women's rights–in India and elsewhere.

Even how to refer to the slain woman has become a subject of vigorous debate. Since the media, under Indian law, cannot reveal the name of a rape victim, she has been given a variety of pseudonyms–including "Jagruti" (Awakening), "Amanat" (Entrusted), "Nirbhaya" (Fearless) and "Damini" (Lightning)–by the media and protesters alike. People have come out in the thousands to rally in her defense and against sexual assault more broadly.

Recently, for the first time, the victim's family released the young woman's real name to the public. In an interview with a British newspaper, her father defiantly asserted that he was "proud" of his deceased daughter and that "[r]evealing her name will give courage to other women who have survived these attacks."

"They" he said, "will find strength from my daughter."

These are powerful and important words to start any discussion of this terrible event. After all, rapes are not uncommon in India. In 2010 alone, there were 22,000 cases of rape recorded nationally. In Delhi, the national capital, 660 cases were reported in 2012. It is also widely acknowledged that the ratio of the actual number of rapes to reported cases is at least 5 to 1 and probably often higher, thus making the above figures far more alarming.

So did the recent protests erupt because this was an unusually violent case of rape? Were the demonstrations, as some leading activists, including Arundhati Roy, have claimed, largely composed of middle-class men and women who had come out to rally for one of their own? Lastly, as some Western journalists argued, is this brutal sexual violence an indication of the particular backwardness of India as a country?

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Sexual violence in India

"In India, there is a woman raped every 20 minutes," a young female student at Delhi University told me at the massive protest near India Gate in New Delhi on New Year's Day.

"This was the last straw," said Kavita Krishnan, the secretary of All India Progressive Women's Association, who has been leading various sections of the protests in the weeks following the attack. "We must understand that there has been a long build up to this moment."

According to Krishnan, women from Adivasi (indigenous people) and Dalit (lower caste) communities, women working in non-unionized workplaces, sex workers and transgendered people have been particular targets of such violence.

Rape in such cases is used as a terrifying method of social control, and the authorities frequently turn a blind eye to it. In 2006, for instance, a Dalit mother and her daughter were brutally raped and then lynched to death over a land dispute in Kherlanji–a village in the state of Maharashtra. The rapists were powerful local men from a socially dominant caste. The police, in league with the rapists, denied any incidence of rape, and the men were never tried.

Similarly in 2010, Delhi police refused to respond to a phone call from an eyewitness who saw her friend being kidnapped and gang raped on their way back from their night jobs at the local call center in Dhaula Kuan.

The rot goes deeper than the police. It is a long tradition of the Indian ruling class to both support rapists and use rape as a disciplinary tool against politically vulnerable communities.

In 2009, Indian army personnel in Shopian, Kashmir, allegedly raped and murdered two Muslim women, Neelofar and Asiya. While this particular case became well known mainly due to what many believe to be a cover-up by the Indian state, Neelofar and Asiya remain two among several women who have been raped and killed by the Indian army in Kashmir.

In these matters, British colonial history has proved to be a great teacher for the postcolonial Indian ruling class. Draconian laws that the British crafted to target freedom fighters have now been revamped to attack dissidents. One such law, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (1958), modeled after an old British law, allows non-commissioned army officers to search and arrest citizens without a warrant and even shoot to kill.

In 2004, in one of the worst cases of extrajudicial killings, army officers stationed in the North Eastern state of Manipur raped and killed the 32-year-old Thangjam Manorama Devi for her alleged involvement with the Peoples Liberation Army. Her killers remain free since the law gives the armed forces virtual impunity.

Riots and pogroms against minorities serve as virtual laboratories of misogyny. In the now-infamous anti-Muslim pogrom by Hindu nationalists in Gujrat in 2002, rape and sexual violence were routinely used against Muslim women as a way to "dishonor" the community. Further, in a sickening institutionalization of rape culture by the state, several men who have rape charges pending against them remain important public figures and leaders of right-wing parties, while some even serve in the Indian parliament.

While these horrors of recent memory may serve as the immediate background from which these most recent protests sprang, the global context is just as important. People who gathered in various Indian cities to protest over the past several weeks could not but be influenced by the rise in gender violence on an international scale. From the defense of rape by Republican senators in the U.S. to the attack on reproductive rights by the Tory government in Britain, women's bodies are increasingly becoming a global battlefield.

It is precisely the international scale of these attacks that explains the international scope of these protests–from Delhi to Dhaka and from Chennai to Chicago.

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The origin of the protests

One only needs to look at some of the contours of neoliberal India to understand the deep structural connection between the crisis of capitalism and the assault on women's rights. Rape apologists in India have repeatedly blamed women for being out "late at night," claiming that they deserved their violent fate.

In court, a defense attorney for three of the five men accused in the case of the women raped and beaten on December 16 stated that "respectable" women are not raped. "I have not seen a single incident or example of rape with a respected lady," Manohar Lal Sharma told the court, instead blaming the victim for being out at night with a male friend to whom she was not married.

The woman attacked in Dhaula Kuan and the woman attacked on December 16 both worked at call centers providing cheap labor for Western outsourcing firms. The integrated nature of the market meant that the women's working hours had to keep pace with business hours in the West, thus imposing a regimen of very late night shifts for them and forcing them to navigate nighttime streets and cafes with minimal support from their employer or the government. To then blame them for being out late is viciously hypocritical from a system that provides so little support for women.

At the other end of the spectrum, the opening up of the Indian market for global capitalism has meant a glutting of public imagination by the worst kinds of sexist representations of women from leading capitalist brand names, where female sexuality is used to sell everything from saris to cell phones. Hence, when we look for the origin of the recent protests, we need to look wider than just within India.

While it is true that we have not seen protests of such ferocity and scope in recent times in India, it would be wrong to call them entirely new and without any legacy. That would be discounting several decades of political activism by Indian women's groups and the Indian left.

Protests led by women have a long and proud history in the subcontinent. According Kunal Chattopadhyay, a leading historian and activist from Kolkata, the massive public protests led by women's groups in the 1970s against the case of custodial rape of a 16-year-old girl named Mathura by two police officers inspired and "heightened" for the first time "the political consciousness of many of us male activists."

The sheer size of the protests in the Mathura rape case forced the Indian Supreme Court to overturn its initial decision that found the police not guilty and instead convict them. Since then, there have been similar examples of robust organizing by women's groups for demands such as changes in rape laws, against dowry deaths and for more representation in local and national government, to name a few.

The recent protests are tied to the wave of fightbacks against the system on an international scale. The women and men who have been filling the streets of various Indian cities have seen, in the last few years, dictators fall and public spaces be occupied. We need to see these protests as not just standing in the tradition of past women's movements in India, but also as echoes of Tahrir, Tunisia and Zuccotti Park–and inspiring, in their turn, a new cycle of protests for women's rights.

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Is India backward?

Despite the tremendous display of solidarity and strength by Indian women and men in these protests, the tragedy of December 16 has created a disgusting response from the mainstream Western press.

A New York Times editorial singled out India as a country that "must work on changing a culture in which women are routinely devalued." Similarly, London Times columnist Libby Purves demanded that India change itself forthwith if it wanted to be "allowed to hold its head up in the civilized world."

It is particularly ironic that such imperial dictums are coming from the U.S. and Britain, two countries that, despite their vast material resources, have an abysmal record of gender injustices and victim-blaming within their own national borders.

This racist rhetoric, thinly cloaked in the discourse of "women's rights," has not gone unchallenged. In a letter published in the London Times, several academics and activists called Purves' essay an exercise in "chauvinist finger-wagging" that presented "the West as an advanced culture in relation to a backward and savage India."

Such selective feminism of the global ruling class–which allows them to bomb Afghanistan for the "sake" of Afghan women or institute Islamophobic laws in France in the name of "freedom" for Muslim women–should be resisted in all its forms.

Any real change in gender justice in India can only come from a strong popular movement from below. For that movement to be able to sustain itself long enough to withstand state repression and wrest change will require intense international solidarity, not racist moralism.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Who is protesting?

For the above reasons, it should be clear that the protests in India against rape and sexism are about rejecting the culture of misogyny and moralism imposed by the Indian state and the global free market alike. They are not about the narrow interests of any particular class of women.

It would be wrong to condemn these protests as "middle class." Unfortunately, that is what Indian author and radical activist Arundhuti Roy recently did, stating that the outrage and protests in India were a result, in large part, because the victim in the December 16 case belonged to the affluent "middle class."

First, Roy is factually wrong about the victim who, according to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, was the daughter of an airport worker on a monthly salary of 7,000 rupees (about $130). She was also "the first from her family, which hails from a caste of agricultural workers, to have a professional career. She was on the cusp of achieving it. She had enrolled in a year-long physiotherapy course in a city in the foothills of the Himalayas. To afford it, she worked nights at an outsourcing firm, helping Canadians with their mortgage issues."

Roy would be wrong, however, even if the woman did come from an affluent family. Mass movements need to be seen in their full course of development, in which numerous factors come together to produce confidence and mobilization. It is not a matter of checking whether these protesters were there to stand in support of Neelofar, Manorama or any other individual rape victim, but to see how these past cases were part of a slow build-up of anger that finally came to a head in the aftermath of December 16 in Delhi.

According to Kavita Krishnan, women at the protests were very open to arguments about the state and army in holding up structures of violence. "People here are not just talking about the rights of middle-class women," said Krishnan. Indeed, she said that "loads of young women spoke to me about the complicity of the police in cases of rape of Dalit and Muslim women."

Some activists have been horrified by the efforts of the Hindu right to co-opt the protests, others by the demands for death penalty made by some protesters. As with any movement rooted in largely spontaneous mobilizations, there will be different views on these and other questions, such as whether different laws would benefit the victims of sexual assault. While it is important to debate these issues within the struggle, we cannot afford to stand aside from it.

Soma Marik, a historian and long-time activist in the women's movement in Kolkata, put it excellently:

[The term] "middle class" and its association with "Westernized," dress-code-violating, "permissive" women has been part of the stock imagery used by right-wing forces in their attempt to trivialize and dilute rape cases. There is no reason for anyone on the left to join that chorus. What has been significant is the scale of protests, and their persistence. Lacking, in many cases, political experience, anger and emotion has led to demands for hanging…That has to be discussed, but only by participating in the struggles.

This is why it is an urgent task for the left to actively intervene and try to shape the movement–and the broader struggles for a future society free of rape and women's oppression.

Tithi Bhattacharya

By-India United Against Fascism
The systematic use of gang-rape as a weapon occurred in the Surat riots after the Babri Masjid demolition, and an ugly innovation was the videotaping of the gang-rapes. This was not a case of some random bystander filming the attacks, but a meticulously-planned spectacle with the venues flood-lit despite the fact that electric wires to the rest of the neighbourhood had been cut . According to Praful Bidwai, Modi was the mastermind of the unspeakable atrocities against women in the 1992 Surat riots Modi is pictured there with Advani in their wake .

A decade later, the Gujarat pogroms of 2002 continued the grisly tale of gang-rape, sexual torture and mass murder; fake reports of sexual assaults on Hindu women were used to justify gruesome crimes against Muslim women and girls . In some places, the rapists were actively supported or even instigated by Hindu women . On this occasion, Modi presided over the sexual assaults as Chief Minister and Home Minister. His administration allowed the police to participate in sexual assaults, and made it impossible for survivors to get justice. A court in Gujarat closed the case of Bilkis Bano's gang-rape and the massacre of 14 family members. She was able to get justice only because the Supreme Court directed the CBI to take over her case, and the case itself to be shifted out of Gujarat .

Sexual violence was also evident in the anti-Christian pogroms in Kandhamal (Odisha) in 2007-2008, including the gang-rape of a nun, Sister Meena. Harsh Mander notes the striking similarities to the Gujarat pogroms, including 'the stunning brutality of the violence, often targeting women and girls,' the inhuman conditions suffered by the survivors, and the complicity of the state government with the perpetrators.

The September 2013 anti-Muslim pogroms in Muzaffarnagar (UP), where Modi's trusted Home Secretary Amit Shah had been sent six months earlier, also bore a striking resemblance to the Gujarat carnage. Once again, the violence included 'using women's body to inflict all kinds of violence, attack on children, rape of young girls and women and subsequent killings' . As in Gujarat, a fabricated incident of sexual assault on a Hindu girl was the pretext for carrying out a hideous 'revenge' on the bodies of helpless Muslim women and girls .

The pattern, over a period of more than two decades, is unmistakeable. Women and girls are seen, and treated, not as persons in their own right but as sexualized embodiments of their community's honour, and consequently deliberate, systematic sexual assaults are carried out against them as a way of destroying their community. In each case, the attacks are accompanied by arson, looting, massacres and ethnic cleansing, the refusal to let survivors from the minority community return to their homes, or allowing them to return only on condition that they convert to Hinduism.

This reading of the BJP's attitude to women is confirmed in a very different context: the Delhi gang-rape in December 2012. BJP leader Sushma Swaraj referred to the victim while she was still battling for her life as a 'zinda laash' (living corpse) and demanded the death penalty for the rapists, with feminist activists objecting to both. Swaraj repeated her demand for the death penalty in the aftermath of the Shakti Mills gang-rape in Bombay (August 2013), when the survivor was very much alive and had expressed her determination to continue working as a photo-journalist . Since in India the death penalty is supposed to be reserved for the rarest of rare crimes, what qualifies the crime of rape to belong to this category? Since not all murders attract the death penalty, it is clearly the belief that not only is the life of the survivor over once she has been raped, but that the honour of her family and community have been assaulted.

However, in other rape cases there is no such demand. Dalit women and girls are raped every day; most of these attacks are never reported, but in the wake of the Delhi gang-rape, when the issue was in the news, we heard about some of them (for example see and . Yet there was no demand from BJP leaders that the perpetrators be punished at all, much less hanged; indeed, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat claimed these rapes never happened at all. There was no protest from them when Adivasi teacher and activist Soni Sori was subjected to sexual torture in Chhattisgarh under the supervision of SP Ankit Garg, not even when he was given a presidential award. No call for the hanging of an uncle whose two-year-old niece died after he raped her. And instead of protesting against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which provides impunity for armed forces personnel accused of rape, BJP leader Arun Jaitley strongly opposes even a dilution of the act to allow for prosecution in cases of sexual assault .

The most glaring case is the sexual assault of a minor girl by self-styled 'godman' Asaram Bapu. Far from calling for him to be hanged, BJP leaders like Uma Bharati, Kailash Vijayvargiya and Prabhat Jha leapt to his defence . Even when Asaram's wife and daughter admitted supplying him with girls [19] and it became evident that the man was a serial rapist, Subramaniam Swamy of the BJP appeared on posters in trains plying from Gujarat alleging that the case against Asaram was 'bogus' . Are these people really so naïve as to believe that he is innocent of all charges of sexual assault? Surely not. In his case, as in all the other cases where the BJP does not call for punishing rapists, the implicit assumption is that dominant men of the majority community are entitled to use the bodies of subordinate women and girls as they wish.

If women have no right to say 'no' to unwanted sex with dominant men, they have no right to say 'yes' to a man of their choice either. The whole BJP campaign against so-called 'love jihad' targets cross-community friendships and romances. After being used to beat up young men and women in Karnataka , it was a potent weapon in Muzaffarnagar, where they used a 'bahu beti izzat bachao mahapanchayat' to launch a massive pogrom . In Maharashtra too, Hindutva vigilantes target Hindu women in consensual relationships with Muslim men [23]. In the Gujarat pogroms, Geetaben was sexually assaulted and brutally killed by the Sangh Parivar because she tried to save her Muslim husband [24], and she was not the only Hindu woman attacked. If women are not acknowledged as persons, then their will and consent are not recognised either.

It is undeniable that some of these reactionary attitudes to women and girls can be found among members of all parties. But it is only the RSS, which appointed Modi as the prime ministerial candidate of the BJP, that has the distinction of seeking to replace the legal and constitutional rights of women in India with the law of Manu (Manusmriti), which dictates that women shall be subordinate to men from the cradle to the grave .

[1] http://babrimasjid.tripod.com/aftermath.htm
[2] http://www.tni.org/archives/archives_bidwai_modi
[3] http://www.indianexpress.com/news/enter-narendra-modi-exit-l-k-advani/1127356/
[4] http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?215433
[5] http://www.onlinevolunteers.org/gujarat/reports/iijg/2003/chapter3.pdf
[6] http://archive.tehelka.com/story_main37.asp?filename=Ne020208bilkis.asp
[7]http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/Harsh_Mander/article2801082.ece
[8] http://www.indiaresists.com/muzaffarnagar-return-of-gujarat-memories/
[9] http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-chilling-familiarity-of-muzaffarnagar/article5138832.ece
[10] http://feministsindia.com/activists-condemn-sexual-violence-oppose-death-penalty/
[11] http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-sushma-swaraj-demands-death-sentence-for-mumbai-rapists-1879441
[12] http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/dalit-girl-raped-by-known-persons-no-arrest-yet-in-haryana/article5161361.ece
[13] http://idsn.org/caste-discrimination/key-issues/dalit-women/india/the-haryana-rapes-2012/
[14] http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/rapes-occur-in-india-not-bharat-says-rss-chief-mohan-bhagwat-313361
[15] http://feministsindia.com/tag/ankit-garg/
[16] http://www.ndtv.com/article/cities/two-year-old-who-was-allegedly-raped-by-her-uncle-dies-in-gujarat-hospital-309801
[17] http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-10-29/india/30336028_1_afspa-paramilitary-forces-armed-forces
[18] http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?287676
[19] http://www.newsx.com/national/top-stories/item/12306-asarams-daughter-bharti-and-wife-admit-supplying-girls-to-asaram-bapu
[20] http://www.sacw.net/index.php?page=imprimir_articulo&id_article=6022
[21] http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/nation/love-jihad
[22] http://www.one.in/hindustantimes/muzaffarnagar-love-jihad-beef-bogey-sparked-riot-flames-451311.html
[23] http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/hindutva-vigilantes-target-hindumuslim-couples/article5232505.ece
[24] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/I-salute-you-Geetaben-from-the-bottom-of-my-heart/articleshow/7296104.cms
[25] http://nirmukta.com/2011/08/27/the-status-of-women-as-depicted-by-manu-in-the-manusmriti/

Courtesy- South Asia Citizens Web
http://www.sacw.net/article6049.html

हिंदी में प्रेमचंद हुए, इसलिए हम गोदान के होरी महतो से परिचित हुए और कफन को पढ़ सके…बूढ़ी काकी से लेकर राष्ट्र के सेवक तक से रूबरू हो सके। आज प्रेमचंद की 135वीं सालगिरह है, आइए समाज के बारे में उनकी कहानियों, उनकी समझ पर बात करते हैं…समाज पर उनके असर की बात करते हैं…

हिल्ले ले, प्रेमचंद की 135वीं सालगिरह पर उनको श्रद्धांजलि देता है और उनको याद करता है…अपने ही अंदाज़ में…आइए प्रेमचंद का जन्मदिन मनाते हैं…हल्कू, होरी, हामिद, धनिया और बूढ़ी काकी के साथ…

(राष्ट्र का सेवक, प्रेमचंद की एक लघुकथा है…जो सिर्फ उनके ही नहीं, आज के समय की भी कहानी साफ कह देती है कि दरअसल किस तरह से जातिवाद, छुआछूत का नेताओं और सुधारकों का विरोध दरअसल एक दिखावा है।)

राष्ट्र के सेवक ने कहा—देश की मुक्ति का एक ही उपाय है और वह है नीचों के साथ भाईचारे का सुलूक, पतितों के साथ बराबरी को बर्ताव। दुनिया में सभी भाई हैं, कोई नीचा नहीं, कोई ऊंचा नहीं।

दुनिया ने जयजयकार की—कितनी विशाल दृष्टि है, कितना भावुक हृदय !

उसकी सुन्दर लड़की इन्दिरा ने सुना और चिन्ता के सागर में डूब गयी।

राष्ट्र के सेवक ने नीची जात के नौजवान को गले लगाया।

दुनिया ने कहा—यह फ़रिश्ता है, पैग़म्बर है, राष्ट्र की नैया का खेवैया है।

इन्दिरा ने देखा और उसका चेहरा चमकने लगा।

राष्ट्र का सेवक नीची जात के नौजवान को मंदिर में ले गया, देवता के दर्शन कराये और कहा—हमारा देवता ग़रीबी में है, जिल्लत में है ; पस्ती में हैं।

दुनिया ने कहा—कैसे शुद्ध अन्त:करण का आदमी है ! कैसा ज्ञानी !

इन्दिरा ने देखा और मुस्करायी।

इन्दिरा राष्ट्र के सेवक के पास जाकर बोली— श्रद्धेय पिता जी, मैं मोहन से ब्याह करना चाहती हूँ।

राष्ट्र के सेवक ने प्यार की नजरों से देखकर पूछा—मोहन कौन हैं?

इन्दिरा ने उत्साह-भरे स्वर में कहा—मोहन वही नौजवान है, जिसे आपने गले लगाया, जिसे आप मंदिर में ले गये, जो सच्चा, बहादुर और नेक है।

राष्ट्र के सेवक ने प्रलय की आंखों से उसकी ओर देखा और मुँह फेर लिया।

विसगतियां इतिहास को रेखांकित भी करती हैं, उसे गढ़ती भी हैं और उसकी अहमियत को भी समझाती हैं। विसंगतियां समझाती हैं कि जो हमारे पास बचा है, उसमें इतिहास का क्या योगदान है, उसको इतिहास ने कैसे बनाया और बिगाड़ा है, उसको कितना और कैसे सही करना है…विसंगतियां बताती हैं कि इतिहास ने जितना अन्याय हमारे साथ किया है, हमने भी उसके साथ उतना ही अन्याय किया है और कई बार उससे भी ज़्यादा…
ये 29 अप्रैल 2014 को एनडीटीवी इंडिया पर रवीश कुमार की प्राइम टाइम रिपोर्ट का एपीसोड है, जिसमें वह लोकसभा चुनाव के दौरान मुंशी प्रेमचंद के गांव का दौरा कर रहे हैं, और देश-काल-परिस्थिति के अलग-अलग कालखंडों के साथ प्रेमचंद के एक ऐसे दीवाने को भी देख रहे हैं…जो उनकी बात करता है…निर्मला की बात करता है…गोदान की बात करता है…नमक का दारोगा की बात करता है…हामिद की बात करता है…और फिर हमारे समय में चारों ओर घूम रहे, इन कहानियों के असली किरदारों को देख कर रो पड़ता है…मिलिए प्रेमचंद से…उनके गांव लमही से…आंसू पोंछते दुबे जी से…और शुक्रिया कहिए हमारे समय की रोशनियों में से एक रवीश कुमार को…

 

स्रोत – साभार एनडीटीवी इंडिया का यूट्यूब चैनल और वेबसाइट –

http://khabar.ndtv.com/video/show/prime-time/319251

प्रेमचंद जिस समय लिख रहे थे वह औपनिवेशिक शासन का समय था. वह शासन जो अपने व्यापारिक हितों की पूर्ति के लिए ही स्थापित हुआ था और जिसे इस देश को कच्चे माल का आपूर्तिकर्ता बनाना था. कृषि व्यवस्था को छिन्न भिन्न किया गया और अठारहवीं सदी राजकीय संरक्षण में ज़मीन की लूट खसोट की सबसे भयानक घटनाओं की प्रत्यक्षदर्शी बनी.

लेकिन इसी के बरअक्स आज़ादी की लड़ाई के साथ पलता वह स्वप्न भी था कि अपना राज जब आयेगा तो यह दुःख दूर होगा, आखिरी आदमी तक पहुंचेगी मुस्कान और एक बराबरी वाले सर्वकल्याणकारी समाज की स्थापना होगी. उनका किसान इसी अत्याचार की मार झेलता और इस स्वप्न को जीता किसान था. एक तरफ अत्याचारी शासन तो दूसरी तरफ अपने ही समाज का वह बर्बर ढाँचा जो उसे जाति की अमानवीय श्रेणियों में बांटकर निष्ठुर कर्मकांडों और क्रूर परम्पराओं की जंज़ीरों में ऐसा कसे हुए था कि एक एक साँस लेनी मुश्किल थी. इन हालात कि एक पैदाइश था हल्कू जो पूस की रात किसानी से जान छूटने से संतोष पाता है और मज़दूरी करने का तय करता है तो एक पैदाइश वे घीसू माधव भी थे जिन्होंने हाड़ तोड़ मेहनत के फल के बारे में ठीक ठीक जान लिया था और उन परम्पराओं के मासूम फ़ायदे उठाना सीख लिया था.

तो प्रेमचंद ने लिखते हुए एक तरफ इस किसान के दुःख दर्द और सामजिक-आर्थिक विडम्बनाओं को एकदम सीधे सीधे दर्ज किया तो दूसरी तरफ उस समय की राजनीतिक सामजिक जीवन की साम्प्रदायिकता, जाति प्रथा, आर्थिक विषमता आदि को भी कहानियों में ही नहीं बल्कि अपने लेखों में भी दर्ज किया और साथ ही अपनी प्रतिबद्धता भी साफ़ की. यह उनकी सफलता है कि वे आज भी प्रासंगिक हैं, लेकिन हमारे समाज और राजनीति की विफलता है.

आज अगर वह होते तो ज़ाहिर तौर पर उस समय से अधिक उद्विग्न होते कि मुसीबतें तो नए नए रूपों में सामने उपस्थित हैं लेकिन स्वप्न सारे खंडित. दूर तक निगाह में कोई नवनिर्माण का दृश्य नहीं दीखता. आजादी के बाद जो उम्मीद थी "अपने"शासकों से उसका शतांश भी पूरा नहीं हुआ. नब्बे का दशक शासकीय नीतियों के लगातार पूंजीपतियों के पक्ष में झुकते जाने और इसके साथ साथ साम्प्रदायिकता के उभार का दशक था और यह प्रक्रिया सत्ताओं के परिवर्तनों के बावजूद अब तक ज़ारी है. वह होते तो खिन्न होते पर संघर्षरत होते. आज भी बिगाड़ के डर से ईमान की बात कहने से नहीं रुकते.

वह नहीं हैं..और हम हैं. खुद को उनकी परम्परा का कहने वाले. ज़रा झाँक ले अपने मन में और पूछें कहीं सच में बिगाड़ के डर बेईमानी तो नहीं करने लगे हैं हम?

अशोक कुमार पांडेय

इस टिप्पणी के लेखक, दखल प्रकाशन के ज़रिए जनवादी और चेतनामूलक साहित्य का प्रचार-प्रसार करने में लगे हैं। अशोक कुमार पांडेय के दो कविता संकलन प्रलय में लय कितना समेत, मार्क्स पर एक सामयिक दृष्टि की किताब और निबंधों का संकलन प्रकाशित हो चुका है। विभिन्न पत्रिकाओं का सम्पादन और अतिथि सम्पादन किया है।