પ્રગતિશીલતાનું લેબલ : યુરોપની નકલ કરતા પહેલાં આપણી સામાજિક સ્થિતિ અને માનસિકતાનો ઊંડો અભ્યાસ કરવો જરૂરી

યુરોપનાં કેટલાક પ્રગતિશીલ દેશોમાં વેશ્યાવૃત્તિને ગુનાખોરી ગણવાનાં કાયદાઓ નાબૂદ કરવામાં આવ્યા છે. કોઈ સ્ત્રી દેહવિક્રયનાં ધંધા દ્વારા પોતાની આજીવિકા રળવા માગતી હોય તો તે માટેની પરવાનગી આપવામાં આવી છે. આવો કાયદો ભારતમાં પણ થવો જોઈએ અને વેશ્યાવૃત્તિ કરવા ઈચ્છતી સ્ત્રીઓનાં વ્યવસાય પરનાં તમામ પ્રતિબંધો રદ થવા જોઈએ તેવી માગણી સ્ત્રી-સેવામાં જોડાયેલી કેટલીક સંસ્થાઓ તરફથી કરવામાં આવી, ત્યારે ભારતનાં રાષ્ટ્રીય મહિલા આયોગે (National Women Commission) તે માગણીને ટેકો આપ્યો છે અને ભારત સરકારમાં પણ આ બાબતમાં ગંભીર વિચારણા ચાલી રહી હોવાનું કહેવાય છે. વેશ્યાઓ અધમ અને પાપી સ્ત્રીઓ છે. તેમનાં સહવાસનાં કારણે પુરુષો વ્યસની, જુગારી અને ગુનાખોર બને છે. સમાજમાં તેમનાં કારણે જીવલેણ જાતિય સંસર્ગ રોગો ફેલાય છે. કુટુંબજીવનની પવિત્રતા ખંડિત થાય છે. આવા બધા પૂર્વગ્રહો આપણાં સમાજમાં એટલા વ્યાપક અને દૃઢ છે કે વેશ્યા વ્યવસાય પરનો પ્રતિબંધ ઉઠાવી લેવાનું ભારત સરકાર માટે કદાચ શક્ય નહીં બને, પણ આ વ્યવસાય અંગે અને સમાજે અપનાવેલા અભિગમ અંગે નવેસરથી ફેરવિચારણા કરવાનો સમય પાકી ગયો છે. તે માટે આપણા દૃષ્ટા પુરુષોએ તૈયારી રાખવી પડશે.

વેશ્યાઓ અધમ નથી, લાચાર છે. નાણા ફગાવનાર કોઈ પણ પુરુષને પોતાનું શરીર સોંપી દેનાર સ્ત્રીઓએ પોતાનાં જીવનનો સર્વોત્તમ અને સૌથી વધારે નાજુક સંવેદનશીલ આનંદ માત્ર પેટ ભરવા માટે જતો કરવો પડે છે, તે વેશ્યા વ્યવસાયની સૌથી મોટી કરુણતા છે. હજારો-લાખો સ્ત્રીઓ અને તેમનાં બાળકોએ ટુકડા રોટલા માટે ટળવળવું પડતું હોય તેવી પરિસ્થિતિમાં વેશ્યાવૃત્તિ નાબૂદ થવાની આશા રાખવી વ્યર્થ છે. માત્ર ગાળો ભાંડવાથી, તિરસ્કાર કરવાથી, વેશ્યાઓ કે તેમનાં સહવાસીઓને કારાવાસમાં ધકેલી દેવાથી આ સમસ્યાનો અંત આવવાનો નથી. આદિ-અનાદિ કાળથી ચાલ્યો આવતો વેશ્યા વ્યવસાય નેસ્તનાબૂદ કરવાનાં તમામ પ્રયાસો નિષ્ફળ ગયા છે. યુરોપીય સમાજમાં ચાલતી વેશ્યાવૃત્તિ અને આપણા દેશનાં વેશ્યા-વ્યવસાય વચ્ચે આસમાન જમીનનો તફાવત છે. યુરોપમાં પેટ ભરવા માટે, મોજ શોખ માટે, ધંધાદારી કમાણી માટે મોટા ભાગની સ્ત્રીઓ સ્વૈચ્છાએ આ વ્યવસાયમાં જોડાય છે. સામૂહિક વેશ્યા ગૃહો(Brothels)ની સંચાલિકા (Madam) વ્યવસ્થા ગોઠવે છે અને સુવિધાઓ પૂરી પાડે છે. ગ્રાહકો જોડે વાટાઘાટો કરીને ભાવતાલ અને શરતો ઠરાવી આપે છે.

ભારતમાં આ વ્યવસાય અંગેનાં છૂટાછવાયા ગ્રંથો અને અન્ય સામગ્રીનાં આધારે ચાલીએ તો મોટા ભાગની વેશ્યાઓને બહુ નાની ઉંમરે ફસામણી, ધાકધમકી અને ક્યારેક તો નરી જોરતલબીથી ઉઠાવીને આ ધંધો કરનાર કોઠાવાળીઓને વેચી મારવામાં આવે છે. મારપીટ, કનડગત અને બળાત્કારનો ભોગ બનેલી આ બાળાઓને આ વ્યવસાયમાં પરાણે જોતરી દેવામાં આવે છે. ગ્રાહકોએ ચૂકવેલા નાણામાંથી મોટાભાગની રકમ માલકણ બાઈનાં હાથમાં જાય છે. આપણા દેશમાં વેશ્યા વ્યવસાયની પરવાનગી આપવામાં આવે તો એક નવા પ્રકારની ગુલામગીરીને પરવાનગી આપવા જેવું થાય. સ્વૈચ્છિક વેશ્યાવૃત્તિ અને જોરતલબીથી ચલાવાતા વેશ્યા વ્યવસાય વચ્ચે આસમાન જમીનનો તફાવત છે. કોલગર્લનાં આધુનિક નામે ઓળખાતી થોડી સ્ત્રીઓને બાદ કરીએ તો મોાટા ભાગની વેશ્યાઓ અતિશય ગરીબ અને મોટા ભાગે અભણ હોય છે. પોતાનાં વ્યવસાયનાં પરિણામે અનિવાર્યપણે આવનાર રોગ અને તેનાં પ્રતિકારનું જ્ઞાન તેમને હોતું નથી. સરકારી પરવાનગીનાં પરિણામે આ વ્યવસાય પરનાં રહ્યાં સહ્યાં બંધનો કાઢી નાખવામાં આવે તો આ સ્ત્રીઓની તંદુરસ્તી, વૃદ્ધાવસ્થા દરમિયાનની દેખભાળ અને તેમનાં બાળકોની સારસંભાળ અને વિકાસ માટેની સગવડો પણ ઊભી કરવી પડશે.

વેશ્યા વ્યવસાય ધંધો હોવા છતાં અન્ય સર્વ સામાન્ય ધંધા રોજગાર કરતાં અનેક રીતે અલગ પડી જાય છે. યોગ્ય ઉંમર, બાંધો અને દેખાવ ધરાવનાર સ્ત્રીઓ આ ધંધામાંથી મબલખ કમાણી કરી શકે છે, પણ એકલવાયા જીવતર અને માનસિક પરિતાપનાં પરિણામે તેમનું જીવન સુખમય હોતું નથી. પોતાની બુદ્ધિશક્તિનો ઉપયોગ કરવાની સગવડ તેમને કદી મળતી નથી. તેમનાં પ્રત્યે સદીઓથી સેવાઈ રહેલી હીણપતની ભાવના સમાજમાંથી દૂર થવામાં અનેક સદીઓ નહીં તો દાયકાઓ લાગી જશે. સમાજની ઉપેક્ષા અને તિરસ્કાર જીરવવા માટે અને પોતાનાં વ્યવસાયની કરુણતા ભૂલવા માટે મોટા ભાગની વેશ્યાઓ વ્યસનોનો ભોગ બનીને નશાખોર બની જાય છે અને તેમની જિંદગીને વધારે રોગીષ્ટ, કષ્ટાળુ અને દુ:ખમય બનાવી મૂકે છે. પ્રગતિશીલ હોવાનું લેબલ મેળવવા માટે અને યુરોપની નકલ કરીને વાહ વાહ મેળવી લેવા પરદેશી અભિગમને અપનાવતા અગાઉ આપણે આપણી સામાજિક સ્થિતિ અને માનસિકતાનો વધારે ઊંડાણથી અભ્યાસ કરવો જરૂરી છે.

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લેખક વરિષ્ઠ રાજકીય સમીક્ષક છે.

સૌજન્ય : “દિવ્ય ભાસ્કર”, Nov 10, 2014

In the 1967 election, the first without Nehru, the Congress tally plummeted

On Jawaharlal Nehru’s 125th birth anniversary, rather than write a comprehensive article on the life and leadership of independent India’s first and incomparable prime minister yet again, I intend to give readers, especially the young ones, some glimpses of the personality of the second greatest Indian of our times, after the Mahatma. So here goes the first of the series, focused on Nehru’s phenomenal and matchless popularity with the masses.

In November 1937, in the Calcutta-based and highly respected magazine Modern Review, appeared an anonymous article on Nehru, arguing that men like him were “dangerous” and potential “dictators”. “From the North to Cape Comorin,” said the article, “he has gone like some triumphant Caesar, leaving a trail of glory and a legend behind him. Is it just a passing fancy or is it his will to power that is driving him from crowd to crowd… He calls himself a democrat and a socialist and no doubt he does so in all seriousness… but a little twist and he might turn into a dictator… His conceit is already formidable. It must be checked. We want no Caesars”. It soon became known that the author of this denunciatory article was none other than Jawaharlal, and the matter was laughed out. Indeed, he was soon re-elected Congress president for the third time.

Even as a schoolboy then I used to hear my father and his friends discuss “Panditji’s astonishing popularity”. By the time I joined college, I also joined all those who would travel scores of miles to hear Nehru if he was speaking or simply to catch a glimpse of him, if he was merely passing through. After a long but unsuccessful search for a job in journalism barely two years after Independence and Partition, I had a stroke of luck. A rather impecunious news agency, the United Press of India, gave me a job after making sure that I could report not only Nehru’s speeches in Hindi but also those of Maulana Azad in Urdu. No break could have been better than this because, for over five years, I travelled with or ahead of the prime minister across the country and watched the magical mutual relationship between him and the large crowds that waited for him patiently for hours, regardless of how inclement the weather was.

Often I wondered why he chose to speak on subjects that were way above the heads of his huge and adoring audiences: the need for planning; the newly built dams being the temples of the new age; his reasons for pleading for China’s admission to the UN and so on.

Perhaps he believed that, in a largely illiterate country, the spoken word was the best medium to convey his message to his people.

However, only during the last decade, when no one in the UPA government thought it necessary to explain anything to the people at large, did I realise how right Nehru was.

By the time the Constitution came into force on January 26, 1950, Nehru had totally disproved his self-analysis in Modern Review. Far from becoming a dictator — which he could have done easily, like his two contemporary leaders of freedom movements, Sukarno in Indonesia and Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana — he built India up as the world’s largest democracy. This process took a huge leap forward with the first general elections in this country in 1952, when his contact with and appeal to his people also took a big stride. He won the first three general elections hands down, almost single-handedly, as a famous cartoon by the country’s premier cartoonist, R.K. Laxman, depicted at the height of the campaign for the first poll. In the 1967 election, the first without Nehru, the Congress tally plummeted.

Interestingly, in his book India After Gandhi, published in 2007, Ramachandra Guha wrote that the “extraordinary popular appeal of the prime minister” could be best captured “in the testimony of the confirmed Nehru-baiter D.F. Karaka, editor of a popular Bombay weekly, the Current”. Guha has then quoted at some length how Karaka had reported Nehru’s first election speech in Bombay at Chowpatty beach to an enormous and enthusiastic crowd. Karaka first noted — “no doubt to his regret” — the “instant affinity between the speaker and his audience” and then went on calculating how many votes had been swung to Nehru’s favour by his every sentence. The climax was reached, in Karaka’s view, at the twilight hour, when Nehru told the gathering that he had taken upon himself the “role of a mendicant beggar”. Amidst wild cheers he added, “If at all I am a beggar, I am begging for your love, your affection and your enlightened cooperation in solving the problems facing the country.” The crowds were deeply moved and he, in turn, was moved by them. For Karaka, however, the election was over.

At an elite meeting in the national capital, Nehru had once said: “Delhi is a static city with a dead atmosphere. I therefore go out and see masses of people, my people, your people and derive inspiration from them. There is something dynamic and growing with them and I grow with them. I also enthuse with them.” What he wrote to Lady Edwina Mountbatten after the meeting in Bombay is even more eloquent: “Wherever I have been, vast multitudes gather at my meetings and I love to compare them, their faces, their dress, their reactions to me and what I say… I rather enjoy these fresh contacts with the Indian people… The effort to explain to them in simple language our problems and our difficulties, and to reach the minds of these simple folk, is both exhausting and exhilarating. As I wander about, the past and the present merge into one another, and this merger leads me to think of the future.”

The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator.

courtesy : http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/a-most-wanted-man/#sthash.mB7xvpiU.dpuf

“The Indian Express”, November 10, 2014

The debates about India’s partition, Gandhi murder and policies of Nehru have been a matter of ceaseless debates. Each political tendency has their own interpretation of these events, which in a way are landmarks of sorts in modern Indian History. As such the phenomenon of Partition of India and assassination of Gandhi are interwoven in the sense that Godse held Gandhi responsible for appeasement of Muslims. Godse constructed his story around warped understandings of the events of the time to create the ground for murder of the Mahatma. These views are shared by many Hindu nationalists, who are in and around RSS-BJP. Now with the ascendance of BJP to the seat of power many of its leaders are coming out more boldly with Hindu nationalist interpretation of the events, but a twist is being added. This twist is apparent in the article by a BJP leader from Kerala in the RSS mouth piece Kesari.  This article indirectly suggests that Nathuram Godse should have killed Jawaharlal Nehru instead of Mahatma Gandhi, as according to him the real culprit was Nehru and not Gandhi.

The BJP leader who wrote this is B Gopalkrishnan. He says "If history students feel Godse aimed at the wrong target, they cannot be blamed. Nehru was solely responsible for the partition of the country.” What does one make of it? Is it the official RSS line? To be on the safe side RSS spokesperson Manmohan Vaidya has distanced the RSS from the statement of its leader. Still it is not difficult to guess that there may be prevalence of such thinking within the RSS circles on the lines of the author of RSS mouthpiece article. This Kesari article is significant as it is trying to shift the blame from Gandhi to Nehru. It may not be too difficult to understand the reason for the same. Before we have a look at who was responsible for partition, let’s try to understand why the blame is being shifted from the Mahatma to Nehru. Recently Narendra Modi launched Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India campaign) on 2nd October as a tribute to the father of the nation, Gandhi. This move has two shrewd aims. One is to appropriate Gandhi for the politics of Hindu nationalism; two is to reduce Gandhi’s contribution to mere cleanliness and hygiene. This over projection of cleanliness associated with Gandhi as such dwarfs the major contribution of Gandhi, Hindu Muslim unity and national integration in the deepest possible sense.

Nehru’s staunch and principled commitment to Indian nationalism, pluralism, secularism and scientific temper make him a figure totally unacceptable to Hindu nationalists, as Hindu nationalism stands for the values totally opposed to these. So the attempts like this article are planned attempts for tasting of waters by throwing up Nehru’s name as the culprit for the partition tragedy.

As such Gandhi, Nehru and Patel were the most prominent leaders of the anti colonial freedom movement. Gandhi was the central pillar, who built up the anti-British-Indian nationalist mass movement, gave it solid foundations and then gradually became the moral guide for the same. He passed the major mantle of his responsibilities to Nehru and Patel. Most of the times Hindu nationalists, Hindu Mahasabha-RSS, were critical of Gandhi’s efforts for Hindu Muslim unity. The Muslim communal stream, Muslim League looked at Congress as a party representing Hindus alone. The truth is that majority of people from all religions were with the Gandhi led movement for Indian nationalism. It is only after 1940s that more Muslims started shifting to Muslim League due to the rise of communalism.

Gandhi was criticized by both communal streams, Hindu communal stream criticized him for appeasing Muslims, and Muslim communalists called him a Hindu representative. Partition was due to multiple factors. The first and foremost of these was the machination of British policy of ‘divide and rule’ which strengthened the communal streams-Muslim and Hindu both. Secondly British had an agenda of colonial masters. They perceived that a united India will be a power in its own right, more likely to ally with Soviet Union in global bipolar world. Their perception was due to the presence of a significant Left wing in the Indian National Congress led by Nehru himself.

Partition tragedy was multi layered phenomenon, which cannot be reduced to a single incident. Many such incidents had their own impact on the totality of the phenomenon of course. We need to see the deeper differences between the Indian nationalists on one hand and Religious nationalists (Muslim League-Hindu Mahasabha) on the other and the clever role of British in partitioning the nation. That should be central to understanding the process, rather than putting the blame on any single individual.

As per the perception of Hindu communal stream so far it was supposed to be Gandhi who was responsible for partition and for appeasement of Muslims, now this stream is trying to shift the blame on to Nehru as they need Gandhi as an icon, though freed from his core virtues of truth and non violence, reduced to mere ‘cleanliness man’. In no way they can appropriate Nehru, as Nehru lived after Independence to nurture the values of Indian nationalism, pluralism, liberalism and diversity, the principles which were the cementing factors of Indian national movement, the biggest ever mass movement in the World. So this Keasri, RSS mouthpiece article and the façade of its being disowned!