Goondaism

Goondaism flourishes often taking shelter under political patronage. It was in its hay day in 1970s with the scion of a political party being widely recognized as an abettor of unorthodox ways of setting right some social evils. As usual, some fringe elements such as school dropouts, alcoholics, and rabble rousers took advantage of the situation and held the public to ransom.

One such incident in which a religious function was disrupted by a group of individuals claiming to belong to a youth wing of a political party is fresh in my memory as I had taken the lead to organize the religious function. It was Ramanavami celebrations. We had erected a bamboo shelter (pendal) and installed the idol of Ram and were conducting besides worship and bhajans, some music programs in the evenings. Permission to use an amplifier set had been obtained from the police with the condition that it should be switched off at 9.00 pm. Accordingly the program had been concluded before 9.00 pm on a certain day and I had come home and was having dinner. The watchman who had been posted to guard the make-shift platform came running and said some people were threatening to burn down the lot. I went to investigate and found some inebriated rowdy elements had seized the amplifiers and were playing some records loud enough to be heard nearly a mile away and that had brought the police to come and confiscate the set which had been hired by us.

The trouble mongers were at large and there was an uneasy lull in the air next day. The owner of the amplifiers wanted his set back and the police wanted us to identify the culprits who had caused the trouble. Nobody came forward to do that for fear of reprisal and it was left to me to deal with the situation. The police had been patrolling the area and assuring the public that they would ensure peace in the area. The atmosphere had become tense and vitiated. It was not conducive to peaceful assembly and all further programs had to be cancelled.

Many years had passed since then and I found in 2006 one of the trouble mongers of that day had been thrown out of his house by his brother. Drunk and dirty he was sleeping on the platform of a peepul tree near a temple and his tattered slipper was lying nearby.