A Congress leader Mukesh Sharma killed Safdar Hashmi (a highly respected writer and actor who has performed 4000 nukkad nataks) in broad day-light in front of entire crowd in 1989, but was punished for life sentence only in 2003
Courtesy : TOI News Article (Nov5, 2003)
January 1, 1989: Thirty-four-year-old poet and playwright Safdar Hashmi, also a Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader was in a labour colony — Jhandapur in Sahibabad — to stage a play. He was supporting Ramanand Jha, a CPM candidate for the post of councillor in the Ghaziabad City Board. Elections were on January 10.
Hashmi's Jan Natya Manch began its play at around 11 am near Ambedkar Park before a big crowd.
Minutes later, Mukesh Sharma, the Congress-backed candidate against Jha arrived with his aides and asked to be allowed across. Hashmi asked them to wait or take another route.
Sharma assaulted the troupe and the audience with iron rods and firearms. A resident of the area, Ram Bahadur was killed.
An injured Hashmi was taken to a CITU (Centre of Indian Trade Union) office, but Sharma and gang followed and beat him there. Hashmi was rushed to the Narendra Mohan Hospital and later to Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital in Delhi.
He died the next day at 10 am.
After 14 years, on November 3, 2003, a Ghaziabad court found Mukesh and 12 others guilty. Two of the guilty had already died.
Courtesy: TOI News Article (Nov5, 2003)
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| Safdar Hashmi - Acting at a nukkad play |
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| Moloyshree Hashmi defiantly finished the same nukkad after 3 days of Safdar Hashmi's murder |
awarded life sentences to Congress leader. Mukesh Sharma and nine others convicted in the Safdar Hashmi murder case.
All the 10 will also run concurrent sentences, of one to five years each, for rioting, criminal trespass and other charges. They have been ordered to pay fines of Rs 25,000, each.
Additional district judge C D Rai ordered that part of the fine be used for paying Rs 50,000 each to the next of kin of Hashmi and daily wage worker Ram Bahadur, as compensation.
Hashmi and Bahadur were murdered at Jhandapur near Sahibabad on January 1, 1989.
Hashmi was performing a streetplay in support of Ramanath Jha, the CPM candidate for the city board poll. Congress leader Mukesh Sharma was his rival candidate.
Besides Sharma, the others who have been sentenced are Yunus, Devi Sharan, Tahir, Vinod, Karan Singh, Jitendra, Suresh, Ram Avtar and Ramesh. Sharma is the only one also convicted for ''rioting with a dangerous weapon''. He had fired the shot that killed Ram Bahadur.
Earlier, the prosecution had argued that death penalty be awarded to the convicts. The defence claimed that Hashmi died during rioting and pelting of stones.
In his order, Rai held that ''extreme penalty'' was not fit in this case.
He, however, added that the ''court will be failing in its duty if appropriate punishment is not awarded for a crime which has been committed not only against an individual, but also against the society''.
Courtesy: TOI News Article (Feb26, 2008)
An MF Husain painting that was first sold at a Times of India-organised auction 19 years ago for a record-breaking Rs 10 lakh has made waves again. Tribute to Hashmi, a 10x5.5 feet work of art has sold for Rs 4.4 crore (including buyer's premium) - a record price for a Husain - at an auction held in Kolkata
In 1989, Tribute to Hashmi was the highest priced work at Timeless Art, an auction conducted by Sotheby's and organised by the TOI, on a ship off the Mumbai coast. On Saturday, the painting depicting the fatal attack on Safdar Hashmi, a CPM leader and theatre artiste, while he was performing the street play 'Halla Bol' created ripples at Emami Chisel Art's debut auction.
"There was much buzz around the painting," says Vikram Bachhawat, Director, Emami Chisel Art. "In fact, one floor bidder and two telephonic bidders fought over it till the hammer finally went down." The acrylic on canvas Husain has apparently been bought by a Bombay-based bidder.
'Tribute to Hashmi' is the first time a Husain crossed the $1 million mark, placing the master in the same class as S H Raza, F N Souza and Tyeb Mehta.
About Safdar Hashmi (Courtesy: Naked Punch)
Safdar
Habib Tanvir, the remarkable director and writer, remembers ten-year old Safdar Hashmi (this is one of the fine pieces in Deshpande's collection). It was in 1964, and Safdar's father Hanif Hashmi who worked in the Soviet Information Department, brought his son to work. Meeting Tanvir, Hanif Hashmi said of his son that not only was he a Communist but "his color is much deeper red" than the father, who was a member of the Communist Party of India. After which, Hanif Hashmi added, "he is trying to follow in your footsteps," by which he meant that Safdar had a deep interest in the theatre. The two pillars of Safdar Hashmi's life had already been erected: his politics and his art.
A decade later, in 1973, Safdar and his friends created Janam. He was not yet twenty. At first, Janam produced full-length proscenium productions, the first a translation of an Utpal Dutt play and then original work done by the many talented young playwrights who are to be found in Delhi. Janam did not come out of nothing. It grew on soil fertilized by an arts movement that incubated alongside the anti-imperialist movement. During the last legs of the freedom struggle, and into the new republic's first few years, cultural production from the left, including activist theatre, was commonplace. The Progressive Writers' Movement and the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA) are well known. In 1943, the IPTA's bulletin proposed that this cultural movement must delve deep into the lively traditions of folk culture and link them with the energetic freedom movement,
"It is not a movement which is imposed from above but one which has its roots deep down in the cultural awakening of the masses of India; nor is it a movement which discards our rich cultural heritage, but one which seeks to revive the lost in that heritage by re-interpreting, adopting and integrating it with the most significant facts of our peoples' lives and aspirations in the present epoch. It is a movement which seeks to make of our arts the expression and the organizer of our people's struggles for freedom, economic justice and a democratic culture."
Three decades later, IPTA had wilted (except in West Bengal), and its Delhi office had been usurped by a member for his import-export business. Safdar and other young people around IPTA seized the office and set to work to revive not only cultural production, but also this institution of the left. From this base, they took their plays to working-class neighborhoods, to colleges, and to parks where office workers gathered for lunch. They also went on the road, around Delhi, doing plays on behalf of trade unions and Communist Party candidates for local elections. Drawing from Nautanki (the folk theatre of the Hindustani speaking region) as much as from Brecht and Utpal Dutt, Janam experimented with songs, with the structure of a narrator and a counter-narrator, and with a democratic form of play making. The company would interact in the making of the play, as would the audience, whose input became important to the development of their repertoire. As Safdar told the theatre scholar Eugéne van Erven in an interview collected in Deshpande's book, "That was our real initiation to street theatre."
Janam's signature, street theatre, came to life after the Emergency (1975-77), when Safdar returned to Delhi from a teaching stint in Kashmir. The spur came in 1978, when a Communist leader told the group around Janam about a workers' struggle at a Harig-India factory (A U. S. tool and die maker, Harig moved to India in 1961 to become an industry leader in hydraulic machinery). The workers' demands were elementary: they wanted a parking space for their bicycles and a canteen to make tea. Harig refused, so the workers went on strike. Their demands were modest, but they struck just as the post-Emergency Janata government decided to introduce a draconian Industrial Relations Bill to the parliament. The Left poised to fight back, with an all-India united trade union delegate conference on 19 November, and a 200,000 person rally the following day. Janam prepared a play. It is called Machine, and it is perhaps Janam's most evocative and powerful product (Lalit Vachani's documentary uses a stripped down section of the play as a device to introduce Janam and its current members).
As soon as the 7,000 delegates ended their session and began to file out of the cavernous Talkatora Stadium in Delhi, a group of actors dressed in black ran into the center of the arena. They formed a machine that huffed and puffed along till they got the attention of the delegates. The machine eventually stops. The narrator asks, "What has happened? The machine has stopped. This is a first-rate crisis! Why has it stopped? Can someone tell me?" An actor steps forward and says that he or she has stopped the machine because he is on strike. When he finishes with his complaint, the owner steps out of the machine, then a factory guard, who "persuade" the workers to go back to work. Eventually, the workers refuse and they shout slogans, including Inquilab Zindabad (Long Live Revolution). The guard fires on the workers, and kills them. The narrator then steps in, "No matter how many bullets you pump into us, the workers are not going to be defeated. They will rise again." The workers rise, and gherao (surround) the owner. The play lasted for a quarter of an hour. As Safdar told van Erven, "After we sang the final song, the trade union delegates jumped over the rails. The leaders were like kids. They lifted us on their shoulders. We became heroes."
Janam repeated the play the next day, at the rally. People tape-recorded the performance, went back to their towns and cities, formed groups and performed the play in their own languages. The trade union movement adopted Janam, and it became a fixture at factory gates and in working-class neighborhoods. Sixty-eight original street plays and ten original proscenium plays followed in over the next three decades. The content ranges from women's rights to international solidarity, from the price of bus tickets to the police violence at a Honda factory, from the rise of Hindutva to the visit of American presidents to India. Not much happens in the Delhi region or in world affairs that misses Janam's dialectic of inspirational satire.
The murder of Safdar Hashmi marked Janam, and its reception. After 1989, Janam was identified with the assassination of its founder. Lalit Vachani's documentary is haunted by Safdar, as are most other such documents of Janam. Vachani, who made his name with a pair of sensitive films about the RSS (Boy in the Branch, 1993, and Men in the Tree, 2002), is led by Janam member Sudhanva Deshpande through the fateful day. They walk through Jhandapur, down the streets where the Janam and CITU members ran, to the CITU office and then finally to the street, where "in full public view," Safdar was beaten to unconsciousness. The film shifts focus, a brief archival sequence of Safdar in a relaxed mode at a workshop, a title "Safdar," and then an homage to Safdar and their relationship by Moloyashree. This part of the film is deeply moving, but at the same time it shows us how differently the filmmaker sees Safdar from the radical "friend, comrade, companion" (the phrase used by Moloyashree in an interview collected in Deshpande). For Vachani, and for much of the liberal arts establishment in India, Safdar's death has become a ritual occasion – to allows for an engagement with what is without a doubt one of the most innovative and dynamic sections of the Indian art's scene. Safdar alive was a man of politics, a communist who was moved to act and acted to move history. But Safdar-as-martyr allows the liberal establishment to "consume" Safdar as a dead hero, and to ritualize his practice.
Safdar deserved his memorial. When the Bengali writer Somen Chandra was killed in 1942, his comrades created the Anti-Fascist Writers' and Artists' Association. In Safdar's honor, and much the same as for Chandra, his comrades created the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT), which has since become the hub not only to remember Safdar's own legacy, but also for assembling the materials for an alternative, secular Indian culture. SAHMAT, of that period, was not simply a response to the barbarism of capitalism; it was occasioned by the death of a beloved person, and it used the basis of a memorial to galvanize a cultural movement. Janam had a different orientation.
For Janam, it is not Safdar's death that is as significant as it is his life, his commitments. His death is only the spur to continue the project to which they aspire collectively. Moloyashree's intimate portrait of Safdar is one space; but another is January 4, 1989, when she as part of Janam return to complete their interrupted play. Writing in 2003 after Safdar's killers were finally acquitted, Moloyashree wrote, "The grief and loss cannot be repaired. They remain. But what endures is Safdar's dreams, our dreams, our convictions. Safdar lives with us. He lives among the people…For Janam," Moloyashree wrote, Safdar "is no cult figure – a word with negative implications. He himself had no time for such concepts. He saw himself as the people's artiste whose creative energies were unleashed by the forces of society."
Safdar was a people's artist. But what is also remarkable about him is that he was a horizontal leader. A man of many talents (playwright and dramaturge, children's book author and illustrator), Safdar was also interested in people's abilities and problems. In that sense, he was democratic. Nothing went by without his active intervention: if someone needed medical attention, he would summon all his doctor friends, and on. His investment in democracy and socialism was a personal one, in that every person had to be embraced to create humanity. His was not only a socialism of theory or a socialism of aspirations, but it was a socialism of interactions as well. To take from one of Safdar's favorite theatre people, Brecht, Safdar's stance, his Haltung, ennobled him in the eyes of his contemporaries. He led. Without Safdar, it is unlikely that Janam would have moved so quickly from ideas and ambitions to having made an institution and a modern tradition. But he did not lead from above. He led with his stance.
Safdar's commitment drives Janam. That much is clear. It is not as clear in Vachani's movie or in the morose way he is often talked about by the liberal intelligentsia; this is partly because Safdar's commitment is to a Communism that is not as easy to digest as the good humored man who was killed by a foot-soldier of tyranny.
Safdar's mother got it. In 1995, Qamar Azad Hashmi wrote a tribute to her son which ends with this, "Comrade, your name, your actions, your commitment will never be forgotten. Your courage brings strength to my arms today. Your love will envelop us, today and in the future. We will not give up hope. Though you no longer walk beside us, your laughter and your songs will rise again from our throats, and when we advance to new revolutionary goals, your example will be there before us, encouraging us to forge further ahead. Comrade, farewell."
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