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 Law and order
Navjotes are a time of joyful stress. The family is occupied with selecting the invitation cards, preparing the list of invitees, finalizing the menu, deciding on the floral arrangements, buying or tailoring new clothes, selecting saris, ordering jewelry, supervising the children’s prayer recital, balancing the expenditure and generally being concerned with all the niceties involved with organizing the second most important celebration in a lifetime, the first being the marriage.
For an interfaith married couple resentment from family members and friends opposing the union may linger even after the wedding. That reality detracts or casts a pale shadow over the nuptials.
As their children are raised, the question of which faith they will follow looms. And once that is decided, the family can look forward to celebrating the initiation into the chosen order.
But imagine once the invitation cards are sent out if some self-styled defenders of the faith believe that entry to the religion is on the basis of race and not choice. And picture if these agitated vigilantes manage to get high priests — who appear to draw their inspiration more from Mein Kampf than the Khordeh Avesta — to write a letter for publication terming the ceremony irreligious and divulging the full address where the family resides and where the function is to be held. This is the nightmare the Maloo-D’Souza family endured for a week prior to their two children’s navjotes on April 16, 2010.
The movement to scuttle the Zoroastrian ceremony was spearheaded by no less a person than the chairman of the Bombay Parsi Punchayet (BPP) Dinshaw Mehta with the overt support of co-trustees Khojeste Mistree, Yazdi Desai, Jimmy Mistry and Armaity Tirandaz. That their efforts met with naught — other than causing the family concerned much sorrow and distress — is a matter of luck, not intent.
Had the trustees access to the ear of the state home minister R. R. Patil before the Maloo-D’Souza-Wadia brothers-Zorabi group, he may have been sympathetic to their cause and the police may well have banned the hosting of the event. The votaries of the navjote would then have had no choice but to rush to the portals of the Bombay High Court. But after the disastrous fate met in the case of the renegade priests, which way the court may have swung is open to conjecture.
Dr Kuresh Zorabi and the remarkable Wadia brothers, Kerssie and Vispy, claimed they stymied the trustees’ attempts at sabotage as Bombay was not Sanjan. But are they different? In Sanjan, Mehta and his group of vandals managed to assault the Russian Zoroastrian Mikhail Chistyakov on the basis of surprise. Had Meher Master-Moos been aware of the impending raid, she would definitely have alerted the police and scuttled the entry of the 40 or so vigilantes. And because Master-Moos did not want Chistyakov’s passport impounded and have him stranded in India, all charges of breaking and entry, criminal trespass, physical assault, etc against the marauders were dropped. They in turn dropped their allegation of religious sensibilities being hurt.
In Bombay did not the Congress-National Congress Party (NCP) combine give Raj Thackeray and his Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) thugs a free hand to assault, terrorize and kill North Indians? And did not the home minister’s mentor, union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar, condone the vandalism at the Bhandarker Oriental Research Institute in Poona in December 2003 by goons belonging to the Sambhaji Brigade who alleged an American scholar had researched some material there for a book which they found offensive?
Former Supreme Court justice Sujata Manohar after releasing an autobiography of pioneering lawyer Mithan Lam at the K. R. Cama Oriental Institute on July 31, 2009 had commented during a question answer session that India had laws but no order. And writer and thinker Aspi Moddie often talks of the culture of sauda (deal) that afflicts our society. Everything can be managed, all transactions arranged; one has only to agree on the modalities.
But even in such an environment there are people who stand up for their rights, albeit by paying a high price for doing so. In our issue of April 21, 2010 we featured Goolrookh Gupta who in the Ahmedabad High Court is fighting for her rights to enter a fire temple in Valsad and be present for the funerary rites of her parents at the time of their demise. In the current issue we feature Roshni Maloo who is married to Savio D’Souza and wanted her children’s navjotes performed.
Both are unlikely heroines. They are everyday Parsis going about their lives, uninvolved with community politics. They are not social activists like an Alice Garg in Jaipur or a Narges Irani in Dahanu. They are not even subscribers to Parsiana, so one can’t allege the magazine’s pro civil rights content brainwashed or influenced the protagonists.
But the duo did what countless Parsi women before them shied away from doing: taking on the community establishment. Instead of capitulating, they bravely stood their ground. And because they did so lawyers like Percy Kavina, Suresh Parekh and community organizations like the Association for Revival of Zoroastrianism (ARZ), Association of Inter-Married Zoroastrians (AIMZ) and individuals like Ervad Khushroo Madon, Zorabi, Firoze Kotwal and Sohrab Zorabian helped them. In the priests’ case, lawyers Iqbal Chagla, Fredoon DeVitre, Jimmy Avasia and Rashna Dastur took up the case pro bono and are prepared to fight on despite one of the banned priests now supporting the high priests’ dictat.
Zorabi is no liberal. He was keen to contest the October 2008 BPP trusteeship elections on a World Alliance of Parsi Irani Zarthoshtis (WAPIZ) ticket but was turned down. He believes in purity of race and quality over quantity. But still he felt Maloo’s constitutional rights should not be infringed. Kotwal is viewed as a perennial litigant. But singlehandedly he went from police station to police station lodging complaints on behalf of the family. In order to throw the objectors off their trail, the Wadia brothers spread the rumor that the navjote was performed the day before it actually took place. Even Parsiana was fed this fiction.
But there was no need for fabrication. The groups opposing the navjote may readily attack women and children but the presence of a wireless police van or even a single constable could send them scurrying.
Among the pantheon of heroes, the nuns of the St Joseph Primary School must stand the tallest. Unlike our high priests and trustees who appear steeped in bigotry and racism, these dedicated women of the cloth prayed for the children of a Catholic father who were being initiated into the Zoroastrian faith. “Get thee to a nunnery,” Hamlet tells Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet so that she may lead a chaste and virtuous existence. Perhaps our trustees and high priests could similarly benefit from retiring to a monastery or nunnery for a while.
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