A few years ago, my family and I were returning home after a visit somewhere. During the journey, I noticed that our driver kept looking at his watch again and again. He seemed anxious and distracted.
After watching him for some time, I asked him if something was wrong.
He explained that he was observing the Islamic fast during Ramadan. The time for breaking the fast was approaching, and he was worried that he might miss the evening prayer and the moment when the fast could be ended.
He politely asked me if he could take the car slightly off our route to reach a nearby mosque. There, he could offer his prayer and eat something to break the fast.
To me, this seemed a very reasonable request. The man had been driving all day without food or water. Allowing him a few minutes to fulfil his religious duty was the least I could do. I told him to take the detour and complete his prayer peacefully.
That small incident stayed in my mind because it showed a simple truth about India. People of different religions often respect each other’s beliefs in quiet ways. No speeches are needed. A small act of understanding is enough.
Last week, I was reminded of that spirit again.
I was invited to an Iftar gathering by my journalist friend Pradeep Mathur at the Press Club of India in New Delhi. Some of my journalist friends were also present. Among them were Syed Nooruzzaman, Avinash Singh and Satish Mishra. The gathering became even more interesting because Anil Shastri, the son of former Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, also joined us.
Before the main meal was served, we sat together and ate fruits, dates, salads and germinated pulses. As journalists usually do, we began talking about politics.
Unfortunately, I had to leave early for another meeting before the main course was served. Missing the biriyani was entirely my loss.
All this came to my mind when I read about the arrest and remand of 14 Muslim youths in Varanasi. Did they commit a violent assault like the gang rape reported a few years ago from Katra in the Jammu region? Did they burn people alive, like what happened during the Best Bakery tragedy in Gujarat? Nothing like that.
Their crime, according to the police complaint, was that they had polluted the Ganga.
Their “mistake” was that they had organised an Iftar party on a boat on the river.
According to a complaint filed by a member of an organisation claiming to protect “Sanatana Dharma”, they were seen from another boat eating chicken biriyani after breaking their fast.
Fortunately for them, it was chicken biriyani and not beef biriyani. Otherwise, the case might have become even more serious. The complainant also said that another person saw the youths throwing chicken bones into the river.
One must admire the eyesight of these witnesses. From one moving boat to another, they were able to see bones being thrown and even identify that they were chicken bones, not drumstick pieces.
But the real “hero” of this story is the magistrate who accepted the complaint and sent the youths to jail for 14 days so that the police could investigate the matter.
Perhaps, the police will now try to find out where the chicken came from, who cooked the biriyani and who brought it to the boat.
Meanwhile, the young men spent their time in jail instead of celebrating Eid with their families.
There is nothing more unfortunate than stopping a person from performing his religious duty.
This incident becomes even more strange when we remember that India is supposed to be a secular country.
If the concern is about polluting the Ganga, then some important questions need to be asked. During the second wave of Covid, a widely circulated Hindi newspaper reported with pictures that hundreds of human bodies were floating in the Ganga.
So many people had died that some families found it easier to put the bodies into the river, instead of performing cremation on the riverbank, which requires wood and rituals costing money.
Instead of accepting the truth, the authorities harassed the newspaper for reporting the incident.
Many years ago, when I was working for the Hindustan Times in Patna, we reported another disturbing practice at the cremation ghats.
Sometimes, after the families of the dead had left, the workers at the cremation grounds would put out the funeral fire in order to save wood. They would then throw the partly burnt body into the river.
The Ganga is considered sacred. Yet it is one of the most polluted rivers in the country.
Thousands of crores of rupees have been spent to clean it. But the river continues to receive untreated sewage and industrial waste.
Every day, people immerse urns containing ashes and small pieces of bones of their relatives in the river as part of religious rituals. Nobody objects to this because it is considered a sacred practice.
Even Jawaharlal Nehru, an agnostic, wanted his ashes to be immersed in the Ganga. In his will, he described the river as “the river of India, beloved of her people, round which are intertwined her memories, her hopes and fears, her songs of triumph and her victories and defeats.”
But the question remains: how do a few chicken bones pollute the river while human bones do not?
Millions of people bathe in the Ganga every day. Many wash their clothes in the same water.
During the Kumbh Mela, when huge crowds gather and toilet facilities are not enough, many people relieve themselves near the river. Sometimes human waste can even be seen floating in the water.
Devotees throw puja materials into the river. During festivals like Navratri, thousands of statues of gods and goddesses are immersed in the water. These statues are often painted with chemical colours that can harm the river. None of these actions leads to arrests. But organising an Iftar on a boat apparently does.
At the same time, new restrictions are being introduced on food habits.
In Uttar Pradesh, the sale and consumption of non-vegetarian food within 15 kilometres of the Ram temple in Ayodhya has been banned. This will render thousands of people jobless.
Similar restrictions already exist in places like Haridwar, Ujjain, Kurukshetra and Palitana to name a few.
Now there are suggestions that such rules should be applied near all other temples as well.
India has about 6.5 lakh temples. If a 15-kilometre vegetarian zone is created around all of them, large parts of the country will become areas where non-vegetarian food cannot be eaten.
The irony is that most Hindus themselves eat non-vegetarian food. Only a small number of Brahmins are strict vegetarians, and even that is not true in states like West Bengal and Bihar.
Former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee himself enjoyed chicken and trout from Himachal Pradesh.
Yet a small group seems determined to turn India into a nation of vegetarians. And this is happening in a country that is one of the world’s largest exporters of beef. What an irony!