By Harsh Mander / Scroll
A week after Nuh was badly singed with its first major communal clash in three decades, we found this homeland of the proud Meo people reduced to a wasteland.
What we – a team of the Karwan e Mohabbat – encountered as we made our way through this wounded terrain was not just skeletons of burnt vehicles and kilometres of ruins of shanties, street vending kiosks, medical stores, and tall buildings, all felled as though by a fearsome tempest. We found, even more tragically, the wreckage of the spirit of the residents, of their trust in their government, of hope and faith that a better future could ever now be built.
Nuh, with 79% Muslim residents, borders the glittering corporate, financial, and information technology hub of Gurugram, where half of the Fortune 500 companies in the country are located. Formerly known as Mewat, Nuh was identified by Niti Aayog in 2017 to be the district with the lowest development indices in the entire country. Gurugram, in dramatic contrast, that same year was rated by the United Nations Development Programme to have a very high Human Development Index of .889. The average per capita income of Gurugram residents is the third highest in India.
The Meo Muslims of Nuh have conserved tight bonds of goodwill and shared economic, social and cultural life with their Hindu neighbours for centuries. The Meos were part of Hindu Rajput clans four to five centuries back, before they embraced Islam. They retain many Hindu rituals, often tracing their ancestry to the Pandava prince Arjun, others to Krishna and Ram. Their social life and livelihood patterns have a great deal in common with other pastoral castes like the Jats and Gujjars. The Partition riots of 1947, when many thousands Meos were slaughtered in Bharatpur and Alwar, were a rare instance of communal strife.
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