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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | The life and death of Shehla Masood by Vandita Mishra

The life and death of Shehla Masood by Vandita Mishra

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published Published on Sep 18, 2011   modified Modified on Sep 18, 2011

Stories abound in Bhopal of the life and death of Shehla Masood. But among those who knew her, there appears agreement on one point: something was so uncharacteristically passive, so un-Shehla-like, they say, about the dead body slumped in the driving seat of the silver-grey Santro on the morning of August 16, with no evident signs of struggle and a bullet hole in the neck.

Some crude clues to the extraordinary splash the August 16 murder of the 38-year-old activist-and-businesswoman has made in this city of unhurried rhythms, where batolebaazi or the leisurely gossip is elevated to the status of art, may be picked, perhaps, from the several descriptions of Shehla on her busy visiting card.

Secretary, Shahnaz Foundation. President, Madhya Pradesh Progressive Muslim Women Forum. Convenor, I will make sure Madhya Pradesh will remain a Tiger State. Secretary, Udai—Society for Automobile Sports & Adventure, Good Governance & RTI, Environment and Culture. The keywords: RTI…Woman… Muslim.

Or, in the name she gave her blog, printed at the bottom: “Letz change d rulz”.

Let’s change the rules.

The single woman from a middle class home in old Bhopal who became problem solver-in-chief for her family. The librarian’s go-getter daughter, who launched herself as entrepreneur by setting up an event management company when the very idea was unfamiliar to Bhopal. The Muslim businesswoman who installed herself in an office in the typically male-dominated, overwhelmingly Hindu commercial bastion of MP Nagar in new Bhopal.

The entrepreneur-cum-activist, who feverishly filed RTIs, across issues and against several government departments, even against the department her event management company was doing business with. The activist who aspired to make it big in the political party whose government she was calling to account.

As Shehla fought and simultaneously courted Madhya Pradesh’s ruling party, BJP, she was demanding attention and getting it from the power corridors, it seems, in life as in death. On only the third day after her murder, the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government announced that the Shehla murder case would be referred to the CBI.

“In the last two years, barely 1-2 murder cases have been handed to the CBI in Madhya Pradesh”, says DIG CBI in Bhopal, Hemant Priyadarshy.

From new Bhopal, in 1997, Shehla’s family came to old Bhopal to settle in the small, double storeyed house with the canopied verandah filled with plants, in a locality called Koh-e-Fiza.

Koh-e-Fiza is a posh extension of old Bhopal, but it is still far away from new Bhopal which is the place of opportunity and meritocracy, the seat of government and business, adopted home of many artists and activists who came from outside and found they couldn’t leave the city of gentle hills and gleaming lakes.

In Koh-e-Fiza, middle class, upwardly mobile Muslims have built their houses. Many families also relocated here from new Bhopal after the 1992 communal disturbances, but it is no ghetto. It borrows its un-self conscious mix of communities, missing in the new city, from the more spacious culture of the erstwhile princely state. Uniquely, in Bhopal, from 1819 to 1926, a majority Hindu population was ruled by a succession of Begums.

Shehla’s home nestles, quite literally, in the backyard of the erstwhile palaces of the four Begums who rewrote the rules of the power game—from the formidable Qudsia who seized Bhopal for her infant daughter, to the last Begum, Sultan Jahan, who publicly abandoned the purdah two years before her death.

Novelist Manzoor Ahtesham, a friend of Shehla’s father, frames the ambivalence. “It is very romantic to say that the rule of the Begums made a difference in attitudes at ground level,” he says. Shaharyar M Khan’s book, The Begums of Bhopal (2004), set off a little storm, he points out, for suggesting that the third begum, Shah Jehan, “probably took to drinking wine”.

“In our middle class families, we still haven’t been able to decide on how much freedom…I was always uneasy about Shehla,” he says. “I thought this place was too small for her”.

Nearly forty years ago, Shehla’s father and mother had a Sunni-Shia marriage. Her eldest maternal aunt, Rubab Zaidi or “Bajjo” as she is called, recalls she was one of “only two young women in Bhopal to drive a two-wheeler”, a luna, “when petrol was Rs 2 a litre”.

Even in such a family, “Shallu appi” as Shehla came to be called being the eldest child in the extended family, was different. She was scared of no one, they called her “dabang”.

She never stepped back from a fight. As a baby, remembers Bajjo, “she would wrinkle her nose and turn away if she was fed something she disliked”. Recently, when Shehla sat on a fast in Bhopal in April, in sympathy with Anna’s at Jantar Mantar, and Bajjo got up to make a speech, Shehla ticked off the announcer for introducing Bajjo as “is ladki ki maasi”. I am not “is ladki”, she said, “I am Shehla Masood”.

In middle school, Shehla wanted to be an air hostess, remembers Ayesha, Shehla’s sister and only sibling, who now lives in New Jersey. Both girls studied in St Joseph’s Convent, considered the best girls’ school in Bhopal of the time. A career in the skies seemed the natural choice for her sister, says Ayesha.

“No one taught her, but she could ride a motorbike,” she says. “We both learnt swimming together, but she was diving while I was still learning to swim.” After the death of their mother four years ago, Shehla had stepped into the role of a parent, says Ayesha.

For college-going Arsh, Shehla was the cousin he could call each time he got into trouble in school. “I was naughty. Every year, I was thrown out of Campion (school). Shallu appi would go, fight it out with the authorities. My parents wouldn’t even come to know,” he says. Another cousin, Rajil, remembers, “If any of us suddenly wanted a loan at night, we asked her.” When a long lost school batchmate’s mother died this year in January, it was Shehla who organised the entire paperwork and arrangements for the grieving family. A class-fellow from school recalls that it was Shehla’s idea for the ’91 batch to organise a car rally on Women’s Day under the banner of ACES (Association of Convent Ex Students) in 2009.

“She was equal to 4-5 sons,” says father Sultan Masood, as he gently runs his fingers over her books on the shelves in the small ante room in which she would work late into the night on her laptop. In her tiny bedroom, on the other side of the open kitchen she had herself designed, Shehla’s clothes lie folded in neat stacks in her three almirahs. But her coats, many decorated with fur, spill into other cupboards in the house.

“She knew it would take her many years if she took the middle path…She found a way. She jumped,” says Sultan Masood, gravely, as if reciting an epitaph.

Shehla didn’t talk about her work, to family or friends. “It seems to me that I knew only 10 per cent of her circumstances, about what she was doing,” says father Sultan Masood. “We are coming to know many things now, through the media,” says Ayesha.

“We never discussed her work,” recalls childhood friend Ranjay Dawar, who runs a travel agency in Bhopal. But “we would tease her and ask, mantri kab ban rahi hai, when are you becoming a minister?”

Especially in the last few years, the girl who liked the good life, who hoarded fine crockery, expensive perfumes, high heels and hats, had started causing ripples in the capital city’s power circles.

After coming back to Bhopal with a degree from the South Delhi Polytechnic for Women, where she had studied after she graduated from the Bhopal School of Social Sciences, Shehla started her event management company, ‘Miracles’, in the latter half of 1999. Miracles organised beauty contests, ‘mud challenge’ rallies, corporate promotions, social events. It sought and got government contracts. In 2004, she became secretary of ‘Udai’, whose patron, Dhruv Narayan Singh, is a prominent BJP MLA and vice-president of the party’s state unit. In the last assembly election, Shehla and her father campaigned for Singh in the Muslim-dominated constituency he won.

Shehla turned to RTI activism in 2007-2008 when the law was still only a couple of years old. Rajil says he has seen at least 200 RTIs filed by Shehla.

Ajay Dubey, who runs an advocacy group called Prayatna in Bhopal, says Shehla came to him in 2009 to learn how to use the law properly. “She was short-tempered and impetuous,” he says. “It was as if, on RTI, she had lost control. This is exactly what the government wants. It becomes easy for government to dub RTI activists as blackmailers.” From mid-2010, however, the RTI crusader of many causes, started focussing on tiger conservation. “She took it seriously,” says Dubey.

The “turning point”, according to cousin Rajil, had come when her remuneration for events she organised for the Culture Department was stalled. Shehla filed an RTI in 2008, she recalled in a magazine interview published after her death, “to gather information on the tender process adopted by the cultural department”.

A public run-in with the then director of culture, Pawan Shrivastava, IPS, followed. Shehla recorded part of an allegedly threatening phone conversation with Shrivastava and also complained against him in writing.

Shrivastava, now posted in Indore, refused to comment. His successor in the Culture Department, Shriram Tiwari, says he released Shehla’s stalled payment of “5-7 lakh” after he took over in end-2008.

Shehla’s dealings with the Culture Department frame an ambivalence many are now pointing fingers at: From 2005 to 2011, she organised 7-8 events for the department, according to Tiwari, and in the same period, slapped the department with 2-3 RTIs.

Shehla’s run-in with another prominent public figure, Rajya Sabha MP Anil Madhav Dave, was sparked by her RTI questioning government land and funding for an NGO, Narmada Samagra, of which he is secretary. “We said we don’t come under purview of the law since we haven’t taken government land or funds,” says Dave.

She also took on BJP MLA Vishwas Sarang, filing an RTI against his cooperative society of tendu leave collectors, questioning his eligibility to be its chairman.

If after her murder, her confrontations with Dave and Sarang are doing the rounds in Bhopal, so also are call record details and photographs that put her in the same frame as Rajya Sabha BJP MP Tarun Vijay.

In a situation where any association with Shehla is grist for the innuendo mill, the BJP in Bhopal appears to have officially retreated behind a strategy of reticence or silence. MLAs Sarang and Singh refuse to speak to the media on Shehla. Tarun Vijay referred The Sunday Express to his blog entry, dated September 1.

Shehla’s Miracles had worked for the Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation, it says, “helping events in Srinagar, Kolkata and New Delhi. She was a brave RTI activist and a friend…I hope that this serious challenge to civil rights movement would not be politicised by anyone.”

Says BJP state media-in-charge, Hitesh Bajpai, “I have never seen her in the BJP office in any formal or informal sense. She wasn’t a party officebearer or member”. While former BJP chief minister and currently cabinet minister Babu Lal Gaur says: “After her murder, our workers told me she would come to the BJP office…she wanted to join the BJP.”

The Congress, out of power for two successive terms in MP, is relishing the BJP’s discomfort. “I asked for the case to be handed over to the CBI,” says recently appointed Leader of Opposition, Ajay Singh, son of former CM Arjun Singh. “A Muslim girl has been killed in broad daylight…Personally, I have a secular image. The Congress has also raised law and order issues in every election in Madhya Pradesh,” he says.

“She would say, if I join politics, I will join the BJP, ” says Shehla’s father, proudly showing a personally autographed copy of LK Advani’s autobiography on Shehla’s book shelf. “She told me she was being noticed and appreciated in top Delhi BJP circles through her work for the Syama Prasad Mookerjee Foundation,” says Ayesha. “It was those in Bhopal who were envious of her rise who even branded her an ISI agent,” she says.

One of his last conversations with her centred on this “predicament”, remembers Ajay K Mishra, senior advocate, to whom Shehla often turned for legal help with RTIs. “She wanted to come into politics in an organised way. Her clout was BJP-based. And she was filing RTIs against the BJP government,” he says.

To get the party to notice her, she only had “her talent and her aggression”, explains Mishra. Then, her chances as a woman from the minority community were better, he points out, in a party whose last notable Muslim leader in Madhya Pradesh was long-ago MP Arif Beg.

Even as the CBI investigation is on, a media trial puts not just all those that Shehla knew and confronted, but also, the murder victim herself, in the dock.

The activist community Bhopal has famously nurtured ever since the 1984 gas tragedy has not really warmed up to Shehla’s cause. “Perhaps it is because she wasn’t so known in activist circles,” says Rachna Dhingra, who helps run the Sambhavna Trust Clinic in Bhopal that provides free medical care to gas victims. The new kind of activists are much more “involved with government,” she says.

“None of us knows if this was an RTI death, we just have a hunch,” says Dhingra. “But she was evidently a woman passionate about doing the right things. And she was killed.”

Through it all, sister Ayesha maintains a stoic dignity. “We are not disowning anything about Shehla, and we will not be deterred by mud that is thrown at her and us,” she says.“We have already faced the worst,” says Ayesha. “As Shehla would say, to question her, someone has to first earn the right.”

The Indian Express, 18 September, 2011, http://www.indianexpress.com/news/the-life-and-death-of-shehla-masood/848087/


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