Haji Ashraf’s experience is a manifestation of what many Muslims who use public transport on a daily basis fear. (Illustration: Canva)
The video is difficult to watch. It took me multiple attempts to even play it fully, stopping and starting each time. As a young Muslim woman, I know how the script goes. It is enough to see the thumbnail of the frail old man. He is visibly Muslim, a strange term that we use to identify some markers of faith and belief. He is surrounded by men young enough to be his grandchildren heckling, screaming, intimidating and even slapping him. They hurl sexualised abuses at him, hit him on his head, record him, threaten him with police action, and no one intervenes. Every single person in the video is watching the scene or directly assaulting him. They take turns, as men often do in this country with violence against minorities or women. We saw it before when Junaid — all of 16 — was killed in 2017, stabbed and thrown off the train at Asaoti to die. This man, Haji Ashraf Munyar, from a village in Jalgaon, was visiting his daughter in Kalyan.
On August 31 — the day this video came out — a statement by the Prime Minister was shared on social media channels: “We will not stop until Indian Railways becomes a guarantee for comfortable travel for everyone.” He said this on the occasion of flagging off two more Vande Bharat trains, from Meerut to Lucknow and from Madurai to Bangalore Cantonment. Were this a film-script, the irony would be dismissed as too on-the-nose to be believable.
Many times, such videos are shared by young Muslims themselves, despite the traumatic experience of recording and sharing one’s own dehumanisation, in the hope that “exposure” or the act of seeing such inhumane acts of violence will sensitise others, shock them into action. However, as Moyukh Chatterjee wrote in Composing Violence: The Limits of Exposure and the Making of Minorities, his book on the Gujarat riots of 2002, there are limits to this approach: “The politics of exposure assumes that violence is hidden across cultural contexts and, once exposed, will invite predictable effects (justice) and positive affects (like condemnation and empathy)”.
Although there is a limited purpose and need for exposure — fact-finding missions, reports, exposes are necessary to uncover what is being deliberately hidden — an over-reliance on exposure elides over the fact that violence is embedded into the everyday, in more mundane forms, and has to be dealt with as such. Haji Ashraf’s experience is a manifestation of what many Muslims who use public transport on a daily basis fear. It is a spectrum of experience, not an isolated one. They self-censor, speak in hushed tones, try not to get into any arguments that are otherwise “normal” on shared transport — over seats, for instance — because they know that what may start as a squabble can turn quickly into a dangerous anti-minority expression of violence. They also know that out of fear or apathy, bystanders will remain bystanders. They tell their spouses to not get into conflict when driving on roads; or make careful decisions on what they take in their lunchboxes to school or workplaces.
None of this is new. Many scholars and activists have written about these phenomena and how they have become commonplace. Often, people write that they are conscious of the hijab they wear or avoid doing so altogether. But identity markers are not easy to hide, and in a constitutional democracy, there ought to be no need to hide them.
More practically, they cannot truly be hidden — and there are consequences to “hiding” or obscuring one’s identity as well, as we saw recently in the debate around how shopkeepers should identify their name in Uttar Pradesh. There are discussions in right-wing spaces about how delivery persons or service providers use ambiguous names. Additionally, in the case of millions like Haji Ashraf, such thoughts perhaps do not even enter the mind. They would not shave their beards or change their ways of dressing, which are often deeply connected to questions of piety and self that the secular understanding of religion does not fully grasp.
Such incidents are not a test of the survival skills of Indian Muslims — it is not a strategic race to see who can disguise themselves better, who can avoid taking meat on trains, who can dress in the most non-attention-seeking way possible. Because incidents in the recent past have shown that it is not so much about the piece of fabric on our heads or the actual food we eat, but that all of these are post-scripted excuses to dehumanise and complete the process of exclusion that has been ongoing. Such incidents are a test of the promises of Indian democracy and the citizens who claim to uphold them: Will they intervene? Will they respond to the insidious Islamophobic jokes in their family or RWA WhatsApp groups? Or will they allow the Haji Ashrafs of the world to continue this battle alone?
The writer is a final-year PhD scholar at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, JNU
