CHENNAI: The Kanwar Yatra, an annual pilgrimage performed by Shiva devotees, has turned controversial this year due to the Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh governments’ directives that all eateries along the route, from restaurants to hawker stalls, be labelled with the owners’ names, evidently so that non-Hindu owned establishments will be obvious to all. Fortunately, the Supreme Court has responded to petitions by Opposition parties calling out these directives as identity-based exclusionary tactics and placed a stay order on them.
This news comes barely weeks after it was announced that the city of Palitana, Gujarat, has declared that the sale of meat within its jurisdiction will be punishable by law. The Palitana decision was spearheaded by Jain monks under the ruse that the city, famous for its temples, has an intrinsically vegetarian nature — resulting in loss of livelihood for hundreds and impacting the basic rights of all. The directives related to the Kanwar Yatra seem to offer pilgrims a choice about whose eateries to patronise based on their names — which will reveal religion or caste.
The Kanwar Yatra directive in particular carries obvious echoes of how Jewish establishments in Nazi Germany were clearly marked, which then led to the requirement that Jewish people themselves be distinguished through a yellow badge. These were official laws that paved the way for genocide, as we all already know — because history books have recorded this well and have not so far been expunged of these facts, even though other genocides, serious conflicts and human rights violations have not necessarily been as thoroughly memorialised or even acknowledged. Then or today. Today, of course, one of the ways in which it is most pertinent to apply what we collectively know of genocide is to look at what Israel — established to rehome Jews affected in World War II — is doing to Palestinians, who are native to that colonised land.
Genocide expert Professor Gregory Stanton’s “Ten Stages of Genocide” is a useful list to consider, in numerous scenarios. In ascending order, the stages are: classification, symbolisation, discrimination, dehumanisation, organisation, polarisation, preparation, persecution, extermination and denial. It is clear that, similar to the Kubler-Ross model of the “Five Stages of Grief”, while these stages are supposed to be a kind of crescendo, in actuality, there is an interplay between them. Hatred is sowed insidiously as well as explicitly. Any event that corresponds to any item on this list is alarming, and indicative of hatred of a greater span, beyond headlines, sometimes beyond our immediate lines of vision.
The Kanwar Yatra is believed to have existed in some form since at least the early 1800s, if not before. It has been widely popular since at least the 1980s. Year after year, millions of pilgrims have made this journey and nourished themselves from all kinds of eateries along the way, with no need to know the owners’ religions. This is not to say that the pilgrimage is without problems; pilgrims have sometimes been known for violent behaviour, including towards police personnel. But the subject of what they eat and from where has not been contentious. These new measures are aimed at creating disharmony, or at least deepening it.