Yesterday Prime Minister Modi was thankful to the people of
India for choosing the BJP in Assam and helping to make a ‘Congress Free’
India. Amit Shah, the President of the BJP exuded confidence that the Hindu
consolidation was already happening for the general elections slated to take
place in 2019. Prime Minister reiterated that the ‘ideology’ of the present
government has gone down well with the people of this country. Definitely, the
mandate of yesterday was not for the BJP though the vote share has increased
and there are reasons for both Mr.Modi and Mr.Shah to imagine this increase in
vote share is for their developmental agenda. Despite this optimism and public
posture of goodness of the top leaders, the fringe elements of the Hindutva
party seem to have not got the ‘right’ message. They are still on a rampage to
iron out cultural and aesthetical differences by intimidating and threatening
artists. The latest incident has just taken place a few hours back in East
Delhi’s Shahdra area.
(The vandalized street art in Shahdra)
Two Spanish artists and an Indian artist were painting a
wall that belonged to the Delhi Jal Board (Delhi Water Authority) in Shahdra as
a part of the much talked about ‘Dilli I love You’ project by the French
Television journalist and film maker, Thomas Ellis. While at it, they were
stopped and abused by a mob of around hundred people who claimed themselves as
the protectors of Hindu religion. The artists were taken to the police station
and were released once the Aam Aadmi Party leader and Law Minister in the Delhi
Cabinet, Kapil Misra intervened on their behalf. According to one of the
artists, Akhlaq Ahmed, the ‘incident was shocking’ because the intention of the
artists was to spread the message of love. What provoked the crowd, which was
deliberately gathered through phone calls and whatsapp messages, was the
language in which the artists were trying to put the message across. The
language that they chose to write was ‘Urdu’.
(One could see the Urdu line over painted)
‘Delhi had fallen down once but it got up and regained its
dignity. This city is unparalleled’ is the rough translation of the Urdu ‘tweet’
that the artists painted against the backdrop of Delhi’s Lotus Temple. “What
provoked them was the language,” says Akhlaq. They were demanding to change it
into Hindi. “They were just abusing the foreign artists and I requested them to
abuse me and spare them as they don’t understand Hindi expletives,” says a soft
spoken Akhlaq. “They turned to me and started patronizing me. They said that I
was an Indian and I should have stopped them from using Urdu,” Akhlaq says. The
crowd grew within minutes and they forcefully over painted the Urdu writing and
literally white washed the tweet. “They were liberally throwing colors on the
wall and spoiling what we had done.” In the meanwhile someone dialed 100 and
Police came and took the artists to the station.
(permission granted certificate by the Delhi Jal Board for the street art project)
A lover of Delhi, Ellis initiated this project earlier this
year and his idea is to capture the lives and times of Delhi, its people’s
narratives, faces, life styles through various mediums including street art. Forty
walls were chosen and Akhlaq Ahmed, celebrated young street artist was selected
to lead the team of artists including the visiting foreign artists. Their idea
is to paint forty ‘tweet messages’ on Delhi’s prominent walls. “The permission
was already given in official writing. We showed it to the mob. But they were
determined to spoil our work,” says Akhlaq. The police were however polite to
the artists, perhaps because of the political intervention by the Minister
himself. “The policemen offered us cold drinks and insisted that we should lunch
with them, which we refused,” Akhlaq smiles. May be in the larger scheme of
things, this incident is a passable one, but the implications are too strong to
neglect. Monopolizing and steamrolling of culture starts with censorship by the
violent mobs unchecked by the law and order systems. Systemic ruining of
culture takes place first in streets and it may not take much time to reach the
gates of our Museums and other cultural establishments. We need to be aware and
alert on this.
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