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 ------ 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. ------ Decoding An Evil 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 New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism