The riot politics

By Daanish Bin Nabi

daanishnabi@gmail.com

Pakistan was born on 14 August, 1947. If we put the facts straight, Pakistan is a day older than India, as it was 15 August 1947 when India announced its freedom from colonial British yoke. The British left Indian subcontinent divided into two parts. No matter how theories are interpreted, the two countries were founded on the basis of religion, with Pakistan as so-called Islamic state and India as so-called secular plural country. 

The great partition in South Asia left both Pakistan and India devastated as it saw exodus of 15 million refugees through borders to regions completely foreign to them. In this bloody mass exodus, Hindus migrated from regions that came under Pakistan to India and Muslims migrated from regions that came under India to Pakistan.    

The blood spilled over the partition injured the people in both India and Pakistan, and after years and decades those injuries, the wounds when they got healed left their mark as ugly scars. People in the two countries are still trying to come out of the nightmares. Many are still in search of an identity and a history left behind beyond an impenetrable boundary.

Once the dust of partition settled, the makers of India promised that riots and communalism will be put to an end. But communalism as we have seen never died in India. Whenever conflicting groups from two different faiths, which are self-conscious communities, clash it results in a riot.

According to Ramananda Sengupta, riots are routine In India before elections. It is the easiest way for the politicians to polarize the community that is already deeply fractured along lines of religion and caste.

According to Bipin Chandra, in his book, “Communalism in Modern India”, communal tension and riots began to occur only in the last quarter of the 19th century but they did not occur in India on any significant scale till 1946-1947.

Communal violence since 1990s needs to be seen in the light of the changing political equation in the country, particularly after the Babri Masjid demolition and BJP’s electoral gains that followed. The decline of Congress and the emergence of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as a strong political force has resulted in shifting patterns of communal riots.

The politicization of the Babri Masjid and its subsequent demolition of the Masjid gave BJP the opportunity to consolidate its vote bank majority of which is pseudo-Hindus.

The conflict created a communal divide, and the frequency of riots also increased from this time onwards. Till date in Indian history, the Hindu communalists have always given vent to brutal suppression of Muslims of India to satisfy their thwarted desire the seeds of which were sowed in 1940s.

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) never considers Muslims as part of India. Although from the inception of Indian freedom movement, India was ruled by the grand-old Congress Party for most of its time. However, they too did little to lift up the Muslim minority in India. Congress also played vote bank politics – the Muslim minority card.

On the other hand, the RSS’s dream to turn India into a Hindu state has become more realizable with BJP’s success. Its policy in larger context is to impress the International community to depict India as a secular state and Muslims as part of the state, which is in reality its cloaked view.

In 2013 Muzaffarnagar Riots, as per media reports, a Muslim boy Shahnawaz misbehaved with a Jat girl in a village called Kawwal. And to teach him a lesson, the girl’s brothers, Guarav and Sachin, went to Shahnawaz’s house, attacked and killed him. In retaliation, his relatives beat Guarav and Sachin to death. This incident triggered communal violence and riots in the district of Muzaffarnagar where both communities have been living side by side.

Delhi based social activist Mansi Sharma explains the horrors of the riots. “Eyewitnesses told us that a 12-year-old-girl was gang-raped and killed. Some girls were stripped naked and made to dance in mosque. Several persons were put on saw-machines, which cut them into two pieces and then they were thrown into full blown pyre. Survivors said body parts of several people were chopped off, stacked in polythene bags and then thrown into a canal.”

Mansi Sharma further says, what was a matter of eve teasing between Muslim boy and a Hindu girl but RSS-BJP hijacked the episode.

On August 27, 2013 Kawwal incident was a minor accident which turned violent, which saw the murder of Shahnawaz followed by murder of Sachin and Guarav. But the rumour churning RSS-BJP combines came into action and prepared for a large-scale violence.

In subsequent anti-Muslim violence over 50 people were killed, women raped, houses looted and burnt and 50,000 have fled their homes because of scourge. Cramped into makeshift camps in Madrasas and Mosques, many adjudicate never to return to the land of their antecedents.

The Muzaffarnagar countryside in western Uttar Pradesh witnessed the gravest communal conflict India has witnessed since the 2002 Gujarat carnage.

Director of Centre for Equity Studies Harsh Mander, named these riots as ‘Doctored Riots’. He said people of diverse faiths who live together do not spontaneously turn against each other. There are three requisites for mass communal violence to occur. The first is the deliberate manufacture of hatred. The second is the manufacture of a ‘riot’. The third is a complicit State: no riot can continue beyond a few hours unless the state actively wishes that it does so.

Is the future of India being written or re-written by communal forces who are becoming all powerful, who are trying to control the laws, the justice system and the political power? Will they succeed, and if they do, who will rule whom? Probably yogis and yogas would overshadow doctors, engineers, writers, scientists, professors, lawyers, judges… anything other than faith will have no merit at all.    

Published in Rising Kashmir on 25 Jan 2018