By: Ganesh Saili
‘Like Saturn,’ rued a French revolutionary being dragged to the guillotine, ‘Revolutions devour their own children.’
The fact came home to roost last week when a fellow fighter, a brave foot soldier of the Uttarakhand Movement, Padma Bhushan Victor Banerjee, the actor’s actor, had a stroke. Today, he is perhaps the only Indian to have worked with many cinema greats, including directors like Satyajit Ray, Sir David Lean, and Roman Polanski. Responding well to treatment in a private hospital in the Doon, he has just come home.
I was shabbier, poorer, and sad when I arrived at Maya and Victor’s home to join the few folks gathered there. There was a time, some thirty years ago, during the struggle for statehood, that you would have been hard-pressed to find even standing space.
It started on August 14, 1994, when an anti-reservation stir, without warning, changed track and turned into a whirlwind that gripped these mountains. Pure state ineptitude followed, and things spun disastrously out of control. From this maelstrom was born Uttarakhand.
On September 2, 1994, police opened fire on peaceful activists at Children’s Park. Seven lay dead; dozens were maimed and wounded; many were jailed. It made Mussoorie the fountainhead of the Uttarakhand movement. We were swept away by a tsunami of rallies, processions, dharnas, and bandhs that blurred all political lines.
As I write, those long-forgotten slogans still resound in my ears:
Jai Uttarakhand! Aaj Doh! Abhi Doh! Uttarakhand Rajya Doh!
Jai Badri-Jai Kedar Uttarakhand ki ho Sarkar!
September 2, 1994, etched itself into collective memory. Evil plans were afoot. While paying homage to those martyred a day earlier in Khatima, a peaceful gathering suddenly found itself surrounded by menacing troopers of the U.P. Armed Constabulary, armed to the teeth, bristling with bayonets and rifles. Without warning, the unarmed protestors were fired upon. When the cordite fumes cleared, seven lay dead, including the soft-spoken Uma Kant Tripathi, Circle Officer of Police. Eighteen had gunshot injuries and were taken to the local mission hospital. Miraculously, they all survived and lived to tell the tale.
Earlier in the morning, our frontline leadership had been rounded up, and forty-seven people were shoved into trucks that trundled off to the police lines in Race Course, Dehradun, where these ‘special guests of the state’—both young and old—were mercilessly beaten by trainee police recruits in the police lines. At midnight, herded into buses, they were taken in the dark on a horrendous journey that ended up in Bareilly Jail.
From the hospital, I called Victor on the landline. In the blink of an eye, he was with us, looking for action. After that, we plunged into the murky waters.
Around that time, my childhood friend John Das was visiting from Boston. He had a laptop with a typing program called ‘sidekick’; the three of us huddled over it and punched together a news report. With Victor’s name, we were guaranteed front-page exposure in a national newspaper.
For us, that, more than anything else, was the tipping point; the die had been cast. We had crossed the point of no return. Mussoorie had become the movement’s epicentre, and these hills were never the same again. On the second day of every subsequent month, we marched the length of the town, along with our families, including women and children, shouting slogans. In March 1995, while Victor was travelling in North America, he read a paper entitled ‘Uttarakhand: A People Denied’ in Toronto and at the University of Columbia.
After statehood came the clamour for state assistance for the bereaved and injured. One can understand that because many suffered during the agitation. The rest of us did not even look that way—to us, the cause was an end in itself.
Often, lives lived in the crucibles of small towns tell tales of lives well lived. As the poet reminds us, ‘Another, step-by-step, will follow the living imprint of your feet, but you yourself must not distinguish your victory from your defeat.’
I am happy to report that Victor is back recuperating at the Parsonage. May God, give him strength!
Ganesh Saili, born and home-grown in the hills, belongs to those select few whose words are illustrated by their pictures. As the author of two dozen books, some translated into twenty languages, his work has found recognition worldwide.
