The Telegraph, 10 Nov 2014
A PATTERN OF VIOLENCE
- The troubles in Delhi
by Mukul Kesavan
There seems to be a pattern to the communal troubles in Delhi in the run up to the Delhi state elections. After the Trilokpuri violence, there was a mahapanchayat in Bawana, where, according to the Indian Express, in the presence of the local Bharatiya Janata Party MLA, Gugan Singh, Muslims were warned about leading the Muharram procession along the traditional route. They were told to confine the procession to ‘their’ areas. The warning was backed up by a barely veiled threat: if the procession did pass down the customary route, the Muslims and the State machinery would be responsible for the consequences. A few days later, India Today reported that a dead pig was found in the mosque at Madanpur Khadar in Okhla, a south Delhi district with a substantial Muslim population. Next to the desecrated Gausiya Masjid stands a makeshift mata ki chowki that has come up in the last month.
So: two mata ki chowkis set up cheek by jowl with two mosques, a mahapanchayat that issues peremptory instructions to Muslims and the local law-and-order machinery, two local BJP leaders, one each in Trilokpuri and Bawana, who let it be known which side they are on, a mosque defiled with the corpse of a slaughtered pig… you could be forgiven for thinking that someone was looking for trouble. Madanpur Khadar is, like Trilokpuri, a poor slum neighbourhood. The troubles are evenly spread over Delhi: Bawana in the north, Trilokpuri in the east and Madanpur Khadar in the south.
In the aftermath of Trilokpuri, local Muslim leaders in Bawana and Okhla have been careful about keeping the peace. Muslims in Bawana had volunteered to confine the route of the Muharram procession before the mahapanchayat met. The mahapanchayat’s threats were unnecessary; its resolutions were a form of bullying triumphalism. In Madanpur Khadar, the Muslim response to the desecration was restrained. There was no retaliation; the local Aam Aadmi Party leader, Amanatullah, led a joint delegation of local Hindus and Muslims to the police station to file a complaint about the desecration as an attempt to stir up communal trouble in the area.
The BJP’s Delhi leadership has either been silent about these incidents or openly partisan. This is unsurprising; the Muzaffarnagar riots in Uttar Pradesh confirmed a correlation between communal consolidation and electoral success, and the BJP seems to have taken the lesson to heart. Its local notables and cadre, even when they aren’t responsible for the violence, seem happy to keep the pot boiling.
The Hindu reports that of the 48 men arrested in Trilokpuri, 37 were Muslims and 11 were Hindus. The majority of those who left the riot-hit areas of Trilokpuri, though, were Muslims, mainly Muslim women. One reason for this was the threat of sexual violence. A college-going Muslim girl told The Hindu’s correspondent that the terraces around her house were crowded with men wearing helmets and vests who took off their trousers to threaten her family with rape. According to the paper, Sunil Vaid, who used to be the BJP MLA from Trilokpuri before he lost the last election to the AAP, instructed the area’s ACP to remove the investigating officer appointed by the Mayur Vihar police station. The reason? The investigating officer was a Muslim; that was reason enough for Vaid.
Is it reasonable to expect the National Democratic Alliance as a government to rein in the BJP and its cadre in the afterglow of a famous electoral victory? Specially when there are state elections to be won in Delhi? Perhaps not. The BJP, which runs the Central government on the strength of an absolute majority in Parliament, is an explicitly Hindutvavadi party. The consolidation of the Hindu vote is its political bread-and-butter. Orthodox communist parties reflexively invoke the proletariat; the BJP instinctively invokes a Hindu rashtra. To expect the party (or the government that it runs) to do otherwise is probably unrealistic.
But to accept that the BJP will respond to communal trouble in a partisan way is to accept that the BJP is a sectarian party indistinguishable in principle from the Akali Dal or the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen. The difference between these parties is demographic, not ideological. The Akalis and the MIM set out to represent religious communities. The BJP has the advantage of ventriloquizing for a community that constitutes roughly four-fifths of India’s population. It can, therefore, muddle majoritarianism with nationalism and claim political respectability in a way in which demographically littler communalisms cannot.
The prospect of the BJP transforming itself into a non-feral, Centre-Right party in government, rested on Mr Modi’s bland promise: “sabka saath, sabka vikas”. To read it as a new commitment to inclusiveness was always a stretch given the political histories of the party and its prime minister. The BJP’s project in office turned out to rest on a basic division of labour. The prime minister performed playlets on the theme of the purposeful nation while his party president made sure that the Hindu rashtra of parivar lore was consolidated into an electoral reality.
The contest in Delhi is broadly seen as a battle between a demoralized Congress, a waning AAP and a resurgent BJP, galvanized by Modi’s electoral drawing power. The urban middle class, that amorphous yet real and powerful constituency in a megapolis like Delhi, has, according to most commentators, moved on from its passing infatuation with the AAP and its war on political privilege and corruption. Ashok Malik, in an acute piece on the imminent assembly elections in Delhi, suggests that the AAP, given the electoral vacuum left by the Congress, will be left with “Muslims and sections of the urban underclass”. He underestimates the BJP’s ambition: the party wants the social groups that constitute this “underclass” (also known as the urban poor) and its cadre’s response to Trilokpuri and its aftermath tells us something about how it plans to get them.
Anumeha Yadav’s fine report in The Hindu on the Trilokpuri violence has another college student in Trilokpuri, a Dalit this time, examining his response to the pitched battles around the mata ki chowki in Trilokpuri. “I am a follower of Babasaheb (Ambedkar),” he said, “I understand how caste and religion operate. But that night when I saw the goddess’ crown had fallen and the stones thrown on the shrine, I felt angry. These people have no mercy, they will stop at nothing.” The self-aware Dalit pushed into taking religious sides by the violence of a communal riot... this is a textbook outcome for the majoritarian project. If you’re committed to the construction of a denominational State, even a riot can be a nation-building exercise.
|
