Communal Riots Have Been Normalised as A Regular Political Tool In India
Muslims Have
Not Been Able to Find A Social Or Political Remedy For It.
Main
Points:
1. Hindu-Muslim riots became recurrent
in the 1930s.
2. The British played the communal card
for political purposes.
3. Mosques and festivals were used to
incite communal violence in pre-Independence India.
4. In Independent India, the political
parties followed the pattern set by the British government.
5. Mosques and festivals became the
causes of communal violence in independent India.
------
By
New Age Islam Staff Writer
21 August
2023
Asim Ali
tries to find out the root causes of communal violence in India and the social
and political factors behind them. He quotes social researchers lije Pierre
Bourdieu and Paul Brass who have studied the history of communal violence in
India and various factors responsible for it. He has rightly come to conclusion
that communal violence, mostly, anti-Muslim state sponsored pogrom have been
made to look like regular and common occurrences that don’t need to be given
importance. They have been largely misrecognised or unrecognised as a serious
social issue.
A narrative
has been circulated widely by communal groups that survive on anti-Muslim
ideology or propaganda that the Muslims, during their 800-year rule in India,
massacred Hindus, destroyed hundreds of thousands of temples and built mosques
on its remains and raped Hindu women. Therefore, even after hundreds of
thousands of communal riots and dozens of major anti-Muslim pogroms, the
majority Hindu community considers itself a victim. This is the
deliberately
created sense of victimhood among them that prevents them from expressing
remorse. The author rightly concludes that almost all the riots are allowed to
happen by the ruling government in collusion with the police and the local
elite. The riots continue for two weeks to two months. The riots in Bhagalpur
continued for two months and the government and the police seemed to be
helpless. The Gujarat riots also continued for two months. The Delhi riots
continued for weeks under the central government and the riots in Manipur have
been going on for the last two months with no end in sight.
Communal violence is being allowed to happen in
the Gurgaon-Mewat region primarily because it is in this region where the
electoral coalition of the BJP is most susceptible to sharp reversals.
Sourced by the Telegraph
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The riots
are resorted to by the political parties or the ruling governments because they
fail to perform and deliver. Corruption, nepotism and self-service of the
politicians prevent them from doing good governance. During their tenure, they
remain busy in realpolitik ignoring their electoral promises and economic and developmental
work. When the elections come close, they have nothing to show to the
electorate and resort communal polarisation and suddenly start teaching
distorted history to the ignorant and illiterate people reviving the sense of
victimhood among the majority community.
By the
2020, people, particularly Muslims, had begun to feel that big communal riots
will not occur in the 21st century because people had become more aware and
conscious of dirty politics of their leaders and the Indian society had ushered
in the 21st century. The ever spreading influence of internet and social.media
had made people more aware of how the government and the media plays with and
exploits their emotions. But their understanding was proved wrong. The Delhi
riots of 2020 showed to them that neither the government nor the people had
changed. One of the worst riots erupted in the heart of India when the
president of the US was visiting one of its states. It seemed or was made to
appear that nothing unusual was going on; that communal violence was a normal
thing in India. The same happened when the Manipur violence was ( and still is)
going on. The governments made it appear a normal happening as the business of
the government went as usual. The most heinous crime of disrobing a tribal girl
and parading her naked on the street did not stir the collective conscience of
Indians. Had it done, the riots had been stopped immediately and the whole of
India had come out on the streets in protest. Nothing of that sort happened.
Instead, a woman on twitter wrote that if women are used as a shield, they will
have to bear the brunt. Here, the same sense of victimhood was at play. The
Kukis were tyrants and using women to oppress the majority Meitei.
The most
worrying aspect of these riots is that the intensity of violence is being
increased and sophisticated weapons are being used in communal violence.
Manipur riots have shown this new trend. This is an alarming trend that must
alert Muslims. Anti-Christian riots are rare in India but anti-Muslim riots are
common. Therefore, another communal riots between Hindus and Muslims can be
more destructive. The government should track the flow of sophisticated weapons
to the rioters. The government may argue that the rioters got AK-47 because
Manipur is a border state and the neighbouring countries might have supplied
them to the rioters. The government must wake up now before another riot
erupts.
The role of
the electronic media and newspapers is also questionable. The mainstream media
has fuelled communal tensions and has published misleading information sparking
violence. News anchors openly make misleading and provocative remarks. They
also promote the sense of victimhood among the majority community saying they
are in danger of extinction under the onslaught of minority and so they need to
be united. Hindi newspapers are more vocal against the minorities.
Not only
during communal violence but also during natural calamities, particularly,
during Covid-19, the media portrayed the Muslim community as the main carriers
of Covid-19. They were presented as Corona bombs. Muslim women were called
Corona Begum. In Moradabad, three Muslim brothers died of Covid-19 and their
women were jailed because of opposing quarantine while the communal media
portrayed them as traitors of the country. The whole families of three brothers
were ruined because of the communal bias of the media. Even the crisis of
tomato becomes a communal issue for the media and politicians in India. They
may also be held responsible for onion crisis which is being predicted.
The Muslim
community is also to blame for the misrecognition of riots that have ruined
them economically and politically. They have not made any collective approach
to deal with this menace. They have become insensitive and have taken it as
normal.
------
By
Asim Ali
19.08.23
Communal
violence is a peculiar phenomenon of Indian politics. For the last half a
century, major incidents of communal violence have broken out fairly regularly
in one part of the country or the other. This class of ‘Hindu-Muslim’ violence,
as it is called, also elicits voluminous coverage in both the vernacular and
the elite English media unlike, say, caste-related violence committed on
Dalits.
Yet,
paradoxically, at the popular level, communal violence is almost universally
misunderstood. Or one might say “misrecognized”, the term the sociologist,
Pierre Bourdieu, used to explain the interplay among power, knowledge and
legitimacy. For Bourdieu, misrecognition refers to a social process which
ensures that a certain phenomenon is not recognised for what it is because it
is rendered unrecognisable via a deliberately constructed maze of misleading
attributions. This is a systematic
social
process whose function is to protect certain interests and iniquities, which
are deeply embedded in the ‘misrecognized’ phenomenon.
The
systematic mendacity which shrouds communal violence in India, going back to
the Indira Gandhi era, can be considered a classic case of ‘misrecognition’.
Here, all sorts of dubious historical/sociological theories and frames of
‘action-reaction’ sequences have been freely slapped together to form the
standard media template of covering riots. Hence, much of the media-produced
information on any riot is either misleading, irrelevant or downright untrue.
Paul Brass,
one of the foremost experts on the subject, has written at length on the
complicity of the media in communal riots. “In general, the press in north
India is directly involved in the spread of rumors during riots that aids their
perpetrators in recruiting and mobilizing participants,” Brass wrote in The
Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India.
What about
the elite English newspapers? These newspapers, Brass argued, are not active
participants in communal violence like their Hindi counterparts but are
nevertheless complicit in the process of reproducing violence. They do so
through consistent “obfuscation” and “misinterpretation” of the political
context of the riots in their coverage. One pattern Brass cites is the
reflexive way in which “communal sections” among both communities are blamed
for inciting “religious passions” which led to the “spontaneous” riot.
Yet,
barring the odd exception, this is a grossly inaccurate representation in a
country where ‘communal violence’ usually refers to (effectively)
‘anti-minority’ violence deliberately ‘organised’ by the political elites in
the service of specific political functions. That is not an arbitrary claim,
but a close approximation of the dominant view among the leading scholars on
communal violence who have studied the phenomenon for decades, such as Steven
Wilkinson, Paul Brass, Ornit Shani among others.
How to
understand communal violence with the aid of these scholars? The first thing
one does might be to zoom out of the details of the concerned incident and
pursue certain structural questions: where? And why now?
Let us take
the case of the recent episode of communal violence in Nuh-Gurgaon.
Where? This
incident has taken place on the southeastern tip of Haryana bordering Delhi.
This is, of course, the Ahirwal and Mewat belt that has been in the news all
through the last decade over increasing ‘communal sensitivity’. What is causing
this sensitivity? Why has there been a spate of targeted and accelerating Hindu
militia activity in this specific region, a pattern we do not see in central or
northern Haryana?
Writing in
Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Communal Riots in India, Steven
Wilkinson described communal violence as political exercises meant to
manufacture electoral consolidation. The import of his argument lay in the
claim that multipolar electoral competition reduces communal violence,
primarily because it ensures that minorities have enough political leverage to
demand their protection. In bipolar states, political elites have more room to
gain through communal mobilisation. Wilkinson cites the cases of Uttar Pradesh
and Bihar under multipolar, Mandal-dominated rule, which had been
extraordinarily efficient in controlling riots. These were states of poor State
capacity and had suffered a wave of communal riots (mainly anti-Muslim pogroms)
in the 1980s. A multipolar central Haryana dominated by local Jat elites is not
a fruitful terrain for communal violence. Riots happen because they are allowed
to happen, often by a ruling party in collusion with local elites. “… In
virtually all the empirical cases I have examined, whether violence is bloody
or ends quickly depends not on the local factors that caused violence to break
out but primarily on the will and capacity of the government that controls the
forces of law and order,” writes Wilkinson.
Communal
violence is being allowed to happen in the Gurgaon-Mewat region of Haryana
primarily because it is in this region where the electoral coalition of the
Bharatiya Janata Party is most susceptible to sharp reversals. The Punjabi
Khatri-Brahmin dominated cities of northern Haryana do not require communal
violence as they already constitute a BJP bastion. The central Jat belt, as
mentioned, is an inhospitable terrain because local political elites have made
it clear (including
in this
episode) that they are in favour of communal peace. Of course, this spurt of
communal brotherhood has much to do with the political context rural-based Jats
faced following the Jat agitation in the state as well as the farmers’ movement.
In the
southern Ahirwal region, no group enjoys dominance and there is intense
competition among the ascendant middle castes of Ahir (Yadav) and Gujjar
farmers, rural Jats and a prosperous urban middle class. In this chaotic
theatre, communal violence draws the greatest political effect, particularly in
mobilising a middle caste peasantry that forms a mobile base for both ‘kisan
politics’ and ‘Hindutva politics’. The BJP’s weakness here is indicated by its
reliance on the co-option of traditional elites, such as the Gurgaon MP from
the Yadav caste, Rao Inderjit Singh.
This is
also the very region where the Indira Gandhi-led Congress played its ‘Hindu’
card (or ‘anti-Sikh’ card) most intensely in the early 1980s. In the 1982
election, in fact, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh cadre had backed the
Congress in the state. The context was the declining hold of the Congress
organisation among the Jat, Yadav and Gujjar peasantry that had been mobilised
(just as in the case of western Uttar Pradesh) by the farmer politics of Jat
leaders like Charan Singh and Devi Lal.
It is in
this political context that Sikhs were massacred in the state during the 1984
anti-Sikh riots. Where did the major incidents of killings take place? Not, as
one might intuitively guess, in regions where the Sikhs are found in prominent
numbers — the northern belt and the Jat-dominated towns of Sirsa and Fatehabad.
They were mostly massacred in this very Ahirwal region where their population
was sparse. As per government figures, 47 Sikhs were killed in Gurgaon (around
half of the official toll in the state) and 300 homes gutted. The other major
massacres occurred in nearby Rewari and Pataudi. Of course, the Sikhs were not
killed here because they constituted some arbitrary threat or to ‘take out’ a
‘spontaneous anger’. The ritual killings were carried out in places where the
local Congress felt constrained to bolster its declining support among the
middle castes. To take the case of Rewari, the victory of Rao Ram Singh, a
locally ascendant elite of the Yadav caste, in the 1982 election against the
mighty Congress had exposed its loss of support among the middle peasantry
there. Two years later, the Sikhs would bear the brunt of a corrective
coalition-building exercise carried out by organised goons as per local
testimony.
Bourdieu
argued that if people clearly recognise the unjust/oppressive nature of a
social structure or a social phenomenon and the mechanism through which it
operates, they might stop acquiescing to it. The way towards a proper recognition
of communal violence is to listen to its experts, as naturally as one refers to
an economist for understanding an economic problem. Alas, that does not seem
likely anytime soon given the well-established nature of the vested interests
that perpetrate riots and prevent its understanding.
-----
Asim Ali
is a political researcher and columnist
Source: Decoding
An Evil
URL: https://newageislam.com/interfaith-dialogue/communal-riots-normalised-political-tool-india/d/130493
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