communal strife
The core of our secular-pluralist democracy has survived mass communal violence. But it may not survive the ongoing normalisation of hate and bigotry.
AFP
Independent India has witnessed sporadic bloodletting against people because of their religious identity as part of a political and social enterprise to break their economy and spirit. These bloodbaths are often described as communal riots. These episodes typically constitute targeted hate killing, gang rape, arson of homes and businesses, large-scale looting, and destruction and desecration of places of worship. I have grave reservations with calling these riots, because the term “riot” suggests people of two communities battling each other, usually spontaneously. But this is most often not the case. For instance, it is a travesty to describe the violence against the Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 as anti-Sikh riots, because it was exclusively the Sikhs who were the victims of violence in almost all these attacks. The same is the case with many, if not most, other episodes of communal violence. The survivors in Gujarat widely describe the mass violence against Muslims in 2002 as toofan, or storm.
The current phase of lynch attacks on minorities and Dalits is another mutant of low-intensity localised communal violence. It is too early to say if this represents an evolving fourth phase of communal violence after Independence, or whether lynching will continue to coexist with low-intensity, dispersed episodes of communal violence.
The culpability for each of these incidents – lynch attacks as well as small decentralised communal clashes – lies with the organisations bent on fomenting communal animosities. But it is shared equally by the shamefully weak-kneed (or actively prejudiced) responses of the state and district administrations. Each of these episodes could have been prevented or rapidly quelled, if only local officials had effectively dispelled hate rumours and expeditiously arrested those who spread the falsehoods and organised violence. Prime Minister Narendra Modi periodically speaks a few lines of condemnation for lynch attacks, apparently only to allow his domestic supporters and foreign governments to absolve him of any responsibility for such crimes. IndiaSpend reported in June that of all the cow-related attacks since 2010, 97% happened after Modi was elected in May 2014. Lynching is a device by which the ruling establishment outsources violence against minorities to mobs. It creates an enabling environment for people to violently act out their hate against minorities with assured impunity, while allowing governments to absolve itself of any responsibility.
The core of our secular-pluralist democracy has survived mass communal violence. But it may not survive the ongoing normalisation of hate and bigotry.
AFP
India, as we know it, is being
unmade with every passing day. In this bewilderingly changing land, hatred and
bigotry are fast becoming the new normal. Hate-mongering is led powerfully and
charismatically from the top – a kind of “command bigotry” – and Muslims are
fast being reduced to second class citizens. Everywhere, on the streets, in
workplaces, in living rooms, in neighbourhoods, in television studios and on
the internet, there is a permissive environment for hate speech and mob
violence that labels and targets Muslims, but also Dalits, Adivasis,
Christians, women, people of colour, ethnic minorities from India’s North East,
and liberals.
A climate of everyday, mostly
unspoken, dread has mounted because of the reckless stoking of embers of
recurrent, divisive and considered provocative hate speech, threats, incitement
and assaults. The aim is to force a single way of living upon all Indians – a
homogenised faith system and set of cultural practices, with violent
prohibitions on what you can eat, whom you can love and what you can think.
If this pattern of routinising
systematic hate violence is not effectively resisted, the danger is that it
will spiral downwards into unending cycles of dark and deepening strife, which
will continue to target innocents and ultimately tear us apart as a people.
India already has an ancient and troubled history of socially legitimised
inequality and violence against savagely oppressed castes and women, and a more
recent
history of horrific bloodletting in the name of religion. But it also has
an iridescent tradition of pluralism, and respect and protection for diverse
religious faiths going back to the time of King Ashoka in 270 BC. A tradition
sustained – after centuries of brutal violence against Buddhists, wiping them
out from the land of their birth – by Emperor Akbar in 1556 AD and Mahatma
Gandhi during the anti-colonial freedom struggle.
After attaining freedom, we tried
to put behind us our history of cruelty and segregation against the browbeaten,
subjugated castes and women, and claim instead that part of our civilizational
history that was comfortable in diversity and tolerant, as we forged a compact
of unity as a pluralist, humane and inclusive democratic nation.
Despite frequent failures, setbacks
and betrayals, there were significant efforts over seven decades of
independence to live up to those promises. Successive governments compromised
cynically with secular and egalitarian principles over and over again, thereby
failing both their constitutional mandate and the people of India. But through
all this, the constitutional core of secular and pluralist democracy held.
However, it increasingly appears that the central organising principle of the
current ruling establishment is to deny religious minorities their right to
exist with dignity as equal citizens.
Deadly history
Independent India has witnessed sporadic bloodletting against people because of their religious identity as part of a political and social enterprise to break their economy and spirit. These bloodbaths are often described as communal riots. These episodes typically constitute targeted hate killing, gang rape, arson of homes and businesses, large-scale looting, and destruction and desecration of places of worship. I have grave reservations with calling these riots, because the term “riot” suggests people of two communities battling each other, usually spontaneously. But this is most often not the case. For instance, it is a travesty to describe the violence against the Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 as anti-Sikh riots, because it was exclusively the Sikhs who were the victims of violence in almost all these attacks. The same is the case with many, if not most, other episodes of communal violence. The survivors in Gujarat widely describe the mass violence against Muslims in 2002 as toofan, or storm.
I observe three distinct phases in
India’s troubled history of periodic mass attacks on Muslims and other
minorities since it became free in 1947 amid the Hindu-Muslim riots that took a
million lives.
Beginning with a communal
conflagration in Jabalpur in 1961, 14 years after India’s freedom, many parts
of the country have witnessed sporadic episodes of hate violence victimising
people because of their religious identity. Especially since the 1980s, this
sectarian violence has spiked, targeting Bengali Muslims in Assam in 1983; the
Sikhs in the nation’s capital after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s
assassination in 1984 and subsequent years of Khalistani militancy; and Muslims
in many parts of the country during the movement that led to the destruction of
Babri Masjid, beginning with the Bhagalpur
massacre in 1989 and peaking in the Gujarat carnage in 2002.
Post-Gujarat, I believe we see the
emergence of a new phase, with much in common with the phase stretching from Nellie
1983 to Gujarat 2002 – the creation of hatred around issues such as cow
protection, religious conversion and alleged sexual predation, one-sided
targeted pogroms, sexual violence, rural riots, violence against minorities
other than Muslims, social and economic boycott, sustained social divides and
population divisions, and so on. The big difference in this phase is much less
loss of life than in the worst massacres of 1983, 1984, 1989, 1992-93 and 2002,
but significant damage to property and far greater displacement of populations.
I speculate that the intense legal accountability enforced by actions of many
organisations, and the international odium and disrepute which followed in the
aftermath of the Gujarat carnage, has resulted in a shift to attacks with far
fewer deaths but extensive social mobilisation through hate, attacks on
property, and much larger displacement of populations.
In this phase, we see first the Kandhamal violence of 2008. We also see the extensive
low-intensity hate mobilisation in coastal Karnataka from around 2006. The
violence in Lower Assam in 2012 saw comparatively fewer deaths, but half a
million people were displaced, the largest displacement by targeted violence
after the Partition. (I must add strong caveats here that Assam did not see
communal violence of the kind seen in other parts of India. Here, oppressed
minorities attack other oppressed minorities. In this particular case, Muslims
did to Bodos in Muslim-majority areas exactly what Bodos did to them). In 2013,
Muzaffarnagar again saw limited number of deaths (at least 62) but more than
50,000 people were displaced in just two districts (Remember, Gujarat saw two
lakh people displaced by violence that affected 20 districts and two large
cities). This scale of displacement – often permanent – was rarely witnessed in
the communal violence of the 1960s and 70s.
More than
50,000 Muslims were displaced by the Muzaffarnagar communal carnage in 2013.
Photo credit: Reuters
Everyday dread
The current phase of lynch attacks on minorities and Dalits is another mutant of low-intensity localised communal violence. It is too early to say if this represents an evolving fourth phase of communal violence after Independence, or whether lynching will continue to coexist with low-intensity, dispersed episodes of communal violence.
Lynching is fast becoming the new
normal in these times of orchestrated hate and rage in India. The targets of
furious public bloodletting are most often Muslims, but Dalits are also in
danger. It has become increasingly common for mobs to gatherand to publicly
attack, lynch and murder people they claim have broken the law or hurt their
(Hindu) sentiments. The excuse for the mob killings is often the claim that the
victims were transporting cows for slaughter. In Jammu in April 2017, even
women and a young girl from a pastoral Muslim tribal community that
traditionally rears livestock were attacked
while they were taking their animals to the higher mountain reaches, where they
migrate every summer. If the animals being transported turn out not to be cows,
the vigilantes claim instead to be animal rights activists, and beat the
transporters for alleged cruelty to the animals. In Assam in May 2017, two
young Muslim men were killed by villagers because they suspected them to be cow
thieves. But the claimed love of cows is not the only reason for murderous
attacks. In Jharkhand, rumours of child kidnapping circulated on social media
and led to mobs brutally killing seven men. In Bulandshahr, Uttar Pradesh, six
men alleged to be members of the Hindu Yuva Vahini, a private militia raised by
Chief Minister Adityanath,
killed
a 59-year-old Muslim villager only because he was the neighbour of a Muslim
man who had eloped with a Hindu woman. One of the most sensational
instances of lynching occurred in 2015 when a mob broke into the Dimapur
Central Jail in Nagaland, dragged out a 35-year-old Muslim man accused of
raping a Naga woman. He was stripped naked, paraded and beaten to death in the
city square.
Only a tiny fraction of the most
dramatic of such mob killings make it to the front pages of newspapers or
television screens. In most contemporary instances of mob lynching, the police
are absent or merely stand by, and defend themselves by claiming they were
outnumbered. Both in cases of cow vigilantism and those where Muslim men and
Hindu women have even consensual relations, the police are seen to tacitly or
openly encourage mob attacks. Often, the attacks are recorded on mobile phone
cameras and uploaded to the social media because the attackers gloat over what
they see as acts of valour. Part of the new normal is also that no one comes to
the rescue of the people attacked. Afterwards, it is common for the police to
charge the victims for alleged offences, thereby constructing a rationale for
the mob violence, while the attackers are recorded as anonymous men enraged by
the illegal activities of the victims.
The internet has become a handy
tool for communal mobilisation. The carnage
in Muzaffarnagar was triggered partly by an unrelated video circulated on
social media, and the lynching of seven men in Jamshedpur early this year was
spurred by WhatsApp rumours about child-kidnappers.
In the political and social
enterprise of reducing minorities to second class citizens, lynching is a
critical instrument. Mass communal and caste violence created fear among the
targeted communities, but it was still bounded by geography and time. Lynching
respects no boundaries, of either space or time. Every person of the targeted
community feels vulnerable everywhere and at all times. For them no place feels
safe – they can be attacked in their homes, or on trains, buses or public
roads. Christian minorities, especially in the tribal regions, are being
terrorised not by lynching but by attacks on their places of worship as well as
by draconian anti-conversion laws of the kind the Jharkhand government has just
approved.
Hindu Yuva Vahini is a private militia raised by Uttar Pradesh Chief
Minister Adityanath. Photo credit: Reuters
State complicity
The culpability for each of these incidents – lynch attacks as well as small decentralised communal clashes – lies with the organisations bent on fomenting communal animosities. But it is shared equally by the shamefully weak-kneed (or actively prejudiced) responses of the state and district administrations. Each of these episodes could have been prevented or rapidly quelled, if only local officials had effectively dispelled hate rumours and expeditiously arrested those who spread the falsehoods and organised violence. Prime Minister Narendra Modi periodically speaks a few lines of condemnation for lynch attacks, apparently only to allow his domestic supporters and foreign governments to absolve him of any responsibility for such crimes. IndiaSpend reported in June that of all the cow-related attacks since 2010, 97% happened after Modi was elected in May 2014. Lynching is a device by which the ruling establishment outsources violence against minorities to mobs. It creates an enabling environment for people to violently act out their hate against minorities with assured impunity, while allowing governments to absolve itself of any responsibility.
Much of the blame lies with the
central government. It is true that law and order is primarily the
responsibility of states, but it is no secret that the Bharatiya Janata Party
rose to power with the active support of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh cadres.
The decisive victory of 2014 has emboldened these cadres – raised on a staple
diet of anti-Muslim propaganda, and further encouraged by the open deployment
of these sentiments to reap a profoundly polarised vote in states such as Uttar
Pradesh and Assam – to pursue their intensely divisive agendas even more
vigorously. High-pitched communal tempers are not a genie that can be released
and then pushed back into a bottle at will.
Now, a sense of dread mounts,
almost invisibly, as communal tempers are cynically and perilously being
overheated for a series of electoral harvests, and for drawing ever larger
sections of low caste Hindus to stand with their upper caste oppressors against
the Muslim “other”, who is cultivated as their common enemy. The Congress,
socialists and the Left are too decimated and dispirited – and most importantly
too
weak in their convictions – to convincingly take to battle.
India has survived as a relatively
peaceful nation, rebuilding itself from the ravages of colonial rule and the
desperate poverty of millions of its people, because it has forestalled the
path of majoritarian dominance, protected minority rights and respected
difference and diversity. India’s admittedly imperfect adherence to its core
constitutional values has so far enabled it to avoid the enormous civil discord
and violence that several other countries in the neighbourhood and beyond have
experienced since their independence. But today, we are witnessing the growing
destruction of the egalitarian and humane principles of secular democracy.
India as we know it – both as an idea and an aspiration – stands profoundly
threatened.
After the general election of 2014,
we are increasingly witnessing the dispersed low death but high hate, fear and
displacement communal violence as well as lynch attacks that threaten to grow
into a new normal. Is this the new normal?
It is imperative that people do not
allow hatred and bigotry to be routinised into a new “normal” that would have
been morally and politically unacceptable in the past. Solidarity with and
between religious, ethnic and sexual minorities; oppressed castes and tribal
people; women; poor and dispossessed people; immigrants and working class
people; and people of colour must be forged and strengthened. Above all, in
these times of normalising hate, a new imagination must be nurtured – that of
people, of differences of religion, caste and gender, within and across
borders, bound together by love and respect.
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