“BUT HINDUISM IS NOT HINDUTVA”
after Dr. Payal Tadvi
—from Poets Respond
June 9, 2019
__________
Riddhi Dastidar: “On May 22, Dr. Payal Tadvi, a second year MD student at a Mumbai medical college died of suicide, the result of months of deep-seated casteist harassment. This was a case of institutional murder, one in a long line. I feel completely unequipped to talk about caste—an extremely complex subject—as a Savarna woman. I learn everyday from Ambedkarite feminists online (@DalitWomenFight), anticaste movements and thinkers (Ambedkar, Periyar), and come from a space of unpacking complicity and understanding how to support anti-caste movements to undo centuries of oppression that continue to be perpetuated today, whatever the government may claim. This poem was written from a space of trying to process the continuous grief that comes with protesting institutional murder and the scale of injustice and horror in the country. Dr. Payal Tadvi’s institutional murder hit the headlines a few days after the result of Indian elections where an anti-minority Hindutva government has just come to power. I’d just read an article about how Dr. Payal Tadvi wanted to return to Jalgaon and open up a hospital for her community—something most doctors, seeking upward mobility in cities wouldn’t do. If you are from an Adivasi (tribal) community—the situation is even worse, as government sanctioned corporate land-grabs snatch livelihoods and land without providing any scope for equity. At this very moment, as India goes through a scorching heatwave and people die, Adivasis in Chhattisgarh are protesting their forests being cut down. The government essentially practices genocide by diluting Forest Rights laws that protect them and contracting companies like Adani to build mines in their land. The poem’s title is in response to many who try to dissociate Hinduism from Hindutva—the fundamentalist ideology which has led to a dramatic increase in mob lynchings, cow vigilantism, and violence against minorities. In Hindutva ideology, India has always been a country that belongs to the Hindus—it demonises plurality and particularly the Muslim, as a hated other. However, as institutional murders like Dr. Payal’s show us, the rot is deep and systemic. And Hinduism is at its core just as culpable.” (web)
