sounds of silence ....

The title of today's blog is not just a clever play on another song title but, indeed, an apt description of what I am surrounded by on this day of 'bandh' or 'hartal', called by the BJP political party here in Kerala to coincide with today's Founding Day Anniversary and the first visit of India's new President since she was appointed recently. The Kerala Online website (http://www.keralaonline.com/news/news.php?id=1433) reports as follows:

"Thiruvananthapuram, Thursday, 1 November: President Pratibha Patil will get a taste of hartals in god’s own country Kerala as she starts her official functions in the State today. The Kerala Chief Minister has appealed to the BJP to withdraw its hartal call, but the saffron party has decided to go ahead with the hartal.The BJP wants to, among other issues, protest against the formation of Salem railway division that will adversely affect the existing Palakkad division in Kerala. "The reasons for which the hartal was called was still relevant and as such there was no question of calling it off," party state president P K Krishnadas told reporters in Palakkad.
"Those demanding its withdrawal in view of the President's visit and state-formation day celebrations would have made timely intervention to secure the state's due interests," he said.
Essential services and pilgrims visiting Parumala church and Mannarassala temple had been exempted, he said. "

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartal) has the following entry:

Hartal (also hartaal) is a term in many Indian languages for strike action, used often during the Indian Independence Movement. It is mass protest often involving a total shutdown of workplaces, offices, shops, courts of law as a form of civil disobedience. In addition to being a general strike, it involves the voluntary closing of schools and places of business. It is a mode of appealing to the sympathies of a government to change an unpopular or unacceptable decision.[1]
Hartal was originally a Gujarati expression signifying the closing down of shops and warehouses with the object of realising a demand. MK Gandhi, the Indian national leader from Gujarat organised a series of anti-British general strikes which he called hartals, thereby institutionalizing it.

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandh) also has the following entry for bandh:

Bandh, originally a Hindi word meaning 'closed', is a form of protest used by political activists in some countries in South Asia like India and Nepal. During a Bandh, a large chunk of a community declares a general strike, usually lasting one day.

Often Bandh means that the community or political party declaring a Bandh expect general public to stay in their homes and strike work. Also all the shopkeepers are expected to keep their shops closed and the transport operators like buses and cabs are supposed to stay off the road and not carry any passengers. All this is expected to be voluntary, but in many instances people are terrorized into participating in a Bandh. There have been instances of large metro cities coming to a standstill.

Bandhs are powerful means for civil disobedience. Because of the huge impact that a Bandh has on the local community, it is much feared as a tool of protest.

Bandhs have been criticized because of the disruption of everyday life caused by them. The Supreme Court of India has banned bandhs in 1998,[1] but political parties still organize them. In 2004, the Supreme Court of India fined two political parties, BJP and Shiv Sena for organizing a bandh in Mumbai as a protest against bomb blasts in the city.[1] The state with the maximum Bandhs in India is West Bengal[2] where the average number of bandhs per year is 40-50 (ranging from a couple of hours to a maximum of 2 days per bandh).

A bandh is not the same as a Hartal, which simply means a strike: during a bandh, any business activity (and sometimes even traffic) in the area affected will be forcibly prevented by the strikers.

(I apologise, dear reader, if you're not used to reading citations in the midst of your blog, but academic habits die hard, I'm afraid, and I wouldn't feel right if I didn't provide you with proper references for the sources of additional material I use here).

Now it would appear that we are indeed experiencing hartal rather than bandh, although Jayaraj and his auto will not be seen today and Raju is coming at 9.30am on his bike to take me to the office.

The bottom line in all this is that I awoke this morning to a strange silence, with no traffic or people noises to be heard. The eeriness of this quiet was added to when one of the regular power outages in the apartment block occurred and then there was not even the "whm whm" of the ceiling fan or the humm of the fluorescent light to break the silence. They say that you get used to the noise around you such that it becomes so much, well, background noise, and it was with this sense that this morning's lack of that noise was so striking (err, excuse the pun, unintended, I assure you dear reader). The silence was broken subsequently by the grinding startup of the building's emergency generator and, with that now thankfully replaced by the return of the power and the usual "whm whm"/hum, there appears to be some return to normalcy, as the traffic noises begin to build up again outside.

More to say later but, for now, it's time for daily ablutions and getting ready to be picked up by Raju (can't be late!)