“MEOS DID NOT BECOME MUSLIMS BY THE SWORD. OUR ALLEGIANCES DO NOT CHANGE OVERNIGHT.”
RAISENA: NUH: of the team of Meos who killed a British bureaucrat in 1857 –– walks us to the mosque his ancestor built. He calls Arvind, a cook, who works at the adjoining temple, to make a point. “I give the mosque a sweep now and then. No problem between Meos and non-Meos here,” says Arvind.
Jan Mohammed, a villager at Nuh, also a descendant of a freedom fighter, Khairati – he was hung from a banyan tree in 1857 – however, has a grouse. “The administration should at least give us a Freedom Fighter certificate. How will the next generation know?” he asks. From which tree was Khairati hung, we ask. We could click its photograph. He was hung from a banyan tree, says Mohammed. Or maybe it was a tamarind tree.
The paucity of ‘proof,’ among families of freedom fighters of a distant resistance, is not an unintentional tragedy. It is a joke cracked on them by a post-colonial society. “Why is there no recorded history? If you’ve a history of being anti-establishment, then your memories are suppressed…had it not been so, history books would have been full of us,” says advocate Tahir Hussain, who belongs to the Meo ‘first family’ of Chaudhury Yasin. “If you go to Bharatpur or Jaipur, you will get to know their maharajas got these many medals. Medals for doing what? For being in Her Majesty’s Service!”
Does the larger Indian society know of the Meo sacrifice? Bhani Ram Mangla, chairman, Gau Sewa Ayog, under Haryana’s BJP government, says the community’s “bhaichara (brotherhood)” gets unnecessary play. About the Meo freedom history, he is non-committal. In 1947, GHASERA: PALWAL: HODAL: Mahatma Gandhi, at the behest of Chaudhury Yasin and other Meo leaders such as Abdul Hayie came to Ghasera village. Meos were stopped from going to Pakistan. Fifty per cent stayed back relying on Gandhi’s assurances. “Made a mistake, didn’t he?” responds Mangla.
Couldn’t Meos, too, reach the same conclusion? The exodus to Pakistan, post Partition made Mewat a sitting duck for a ‘Meoistan’ aka mini-Pakistan theory because of its still sizeable Muslim population. It is a false theory. Of a total of 90 assembly constituencies in Haryana, there are just four with a Muslim majority, points out Zakir Hussain, the Nuh MLA. In 1947, too, “certain Congress leaders like Sardar Patel,” says a Meo academic, “had been warned by Hindu Mahasabha leaders of the danger of having a large Muslim population so close to the national capital.” Shail Mayaram, author of Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity, who has studied the community for decades, says postcolonial states “seem to have internalised the historiographical fiction of Meo criminality and communal frenzy”. The attempt to pigeon-hole the community negatively stems from an unease about their unique religious composition. (Professor Hilal Ahmed, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, points out that in the first census by the British, in 1871, Meos were listed as Hindus; in the 1901 census, as Muslims.) “Till about 50 years ago, our ploughs would rest on Amavasya,” adds Hussain. “Our Hindu neighbours would do kuan pujan (well-worship). Our women did the same. They just called it ‘haqeeka.’” But can communal designs succeed in the face of such syncretism? The Nuh Bar Association has, in fact, proved that social cohesion is still alive in Mewat society. Prem Vir Singh, a Rajput lawyer in Nuh, says the
Nuh Bar Association has taken the stand of “not representing the culprits (three of the boys caught so far are Yadavs),” accused in the August rape case.
“The BJP feels, if they put turn up the heat on Meos, they will convert back. If the cow slaughter bogey does not work, a rape, they hope, will force out a Meo reaction,” says Salim, a villager in Palwal. “Meos did not become Muslims by the sword (see box). Our allegiances do not change overnight.”
Emperors or bullies have never impressed the Meos. Decisions to go to war (against Babur), to back (the last Mughal in 1857) or boycott (the British) were made by consulting the panchayat. Circumstantial rebels, they fought not to overturn a state, but to keep their distance from one. Meos have always been, in this sense, one of India’s first political romantics. Will the pressure to create fissures in this integrated Muslim society turn the clock back?