Widening Faultlines

What happened in Nuh was not an aberration. There is a history to it

- Swati Shikha

ON either side of a pond in Ghasera village in Haryana’s Nuh— home to a large population of Meo Mus­lims—rest a Shiva temple and a mosque. A stone’s throw away from here, in 1947, Mahatma Gandhi addressed thousands of Meo refugees from Alwar and Bharatpur in Rajasthan who were on their way to Pakistan and were staying at a camp in Ghasera. Calling them “India’s backbone”, Gandhi appealed to the Meos to not leave India. Weeks later, he was assassinated.

Decades have passed. The ground where Gandhi addressed Meos stands a govern­ ment school—the only one in the village, unofficially named Gandhi Gram Ghasera. The village falls in the Mewat region—loca­ ted about 64 km southwest of Delhi in the Alwar and Bharatpur districts of Rajasthan, and Nuh in Haryana. A NITI Aayog report identifies the region as the most backward in the country. Nuh, of course, made na­ tional headlines recently after episodes of communal clashes widened the divide bet­ ween the Hindu and Muslim communities.

Weeks after the violence, there is an une asy calm in Nuh. A frail Mohammd Shahdab Alam (name changed), 91, greets us with a salaam at his family home in Ghasera. When asked how old he was when Gandhi visited Ghasera in 1947, the old ‘master saab’ points at his teenage grandsons, Waseem and Suhail, and says that he had a similar build. The family has lived here for generations, but some members went to Pakistan during the partition. “We didn’t want to go, but we had properties in Lyallpur and my uncles left reluctantly. Baba (Gandhi) called us the backbone of India.”