Gujarat’s human rights activist and popular retired physics professor JS Bandukwala, who became target of Hindu as well as Muslim fanatics and who fought against ghettoisation of the minorities, on Saturday passed away at his home in Vadodara, leaving a void of a strong voice in the State.
Bandukwala had told this reporter way back during the thick of the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat that Muslims should give up their stake on the Babri Masjid to prevent their further marginalization and stop the Hindutva brigade in its tracks. He aggressively pursued the cause of reforms in the Muslim community and worked relentlessly towards this goal.
A day after he turned down his doctor’s request to get himself hospitalized, Prof Bandukwala – Bandukwala Sir to many rights activists and journalists alike – breathed his last at his home in Pratapgunj area in Vadodara. He was 77. The former physics professor had several age-related complications.
A graduate from Bombay University, Bandukwala held a doctorate in Physics. He suffered for his firm stance for human rights when his house in the Sama area of Vadodara was torched by marauding mobs. His wife went into depression after this and died a few years later.
He decided to stay alone at his Vadodara home and did not join his son and daughter in the US, saying that he had a duty towards the upliftment of the community.
Even as Ahmedabad city has a huge Muslim ghetto in Juhapura area, Prof Bandukwala launched a crusade against this in his Vadodara city in 2015 for rehabilitation of some 450 displaced Muslim families of Kalyannagar slums after the Vadodara Municipal Corporation cancelled a housing draw following protests by the majority community against allowing the Muslims to stay in a mixed neighbourhood. This continued for five years.
He even sent a strong letter to the then Gujarat chief minister Vijay Rupani in 2018 comparing the BJP-led civic body with the apartheid system of South Africa. He refused the VMC’s offer to shift the Muslim families to a minority-dominated area. He wrote that the Muslims had the right to live wherever they wanted to and not in certain select areas.
Prof Bandukwala wrote: “This is segregation as practiced in the USA before Martin Luther King struggled to abolish it 50 years ago. Note that this apartheid system last prevailed in South Africa. Does Gujarat want a repeat of this apartheid in 2018 vis-à-vis Muslims?”
