The Hindustan Times, October 18, 2003 | Op-Ed.
Devil’s workshop
Jan Breman
In a recent study on the socio-political context of communal violence in India, Ashutosh Varshney has focused on the importance of civic networks for binding Hindus and Muslims together.
He argues that in the case of Ahmedabad, a truly impressive level of civic activity was built up during the national movement, to a large extent initiated by Gandhi.
The main pillars of civil engagement that emerged were the Congress Party, which brought people of all communities together; a wide variety of social and educational agencies, set up by Gandhi and his associates, which later became known as non-governmental organisations; business associations, which had a long tradition of inter-communal interaction in the framework of artisan and mercantile guilds; and the Textile Labour Association (TLA) as a working class organisation which had both Hindu and Muslim mill hands in its fold and a programme that preached unity.
In Varshney’s opinion, these institutions were together crucial for producing a social climate characterised by harmony. Once these pillars started to crumble, and the collapse of the textile industry happened to be a major turning point, communal violence became ferocious. The author himself modifies his thesis of a strong Hindu-Muslim engagement which prevailed until a few decades ago. Congress leaders were never able, nor did they aim to, mobilise a large number of Muslims in the city during the anti-colonial struggle; only few Gandhian institutions reached out to either urban or rural segments of the main religious minority, the business associations in the city had an in-group character and did not promote civic interaction.
As for the TLA, Varshney concedes that a large proportion of Muslim mill workers decided to stay away from this union. I beg to differ from his main argument suggesting that political Hinduism is an altogether new phenomenon in Ahmedabad which has brought to an end the climate of tolerance and harmony built up by Gandhi and his disciples. A.M. Shah, among others, has critically questioned the suggestion that Gandhi’s message of non-violence had penetrated deeply in Gujarati society and culture during his lifetime. Whatever social relevance it then had, it certainly did not survive him.
My own opinion is that the communal divide which already existed in the past was strengthened by the segmentary, though not confrontational, politics adopted by the Congress before and after Independence. This parochial strategy, the KHAM coalition consisting of Kshatriyas, Harijans, Adivasis and Muslims, contained the underclasses in their own and separate identities as convenient vote banks. This electoral design was successful for a short span of time only because it provoked a vigorous and vicious backlash from those higher up in society. Their pent-up resentment was the momentum which the Hindutva forces capitalised to come to power...
...The recurrent riots in Ahmedabad towards the end of the 20th century cannot be understood merely as an upsurge of Hindu nationalism under high-caste leadership, planned and organised from a Hindutva perspective. The high tide of communalism is engineered by the promotion of a political economy which seeks to keep the working classes fragmented and in a state of dependency in order to reduce the price of their labour to the lowest possible level. At the end of February and in early March 2002, violence once again erupted in Ahmedabad — on a scale and intensity that far surpassed that of previous years. It is much too facile to suggest a direct causation between the looting, burning, a kill, which reached its climax in the industrial localities of the city, and massive impoverishment due to the collapse of the textile mills in the preceding quarter of a century.
A major difference with the earlier communal riots was that this time the search and destroy operation was not a spontaneous outburst of discontent and rivalry among people living at the bottom of the urban economy but well planned in advance and carried out with brutal precision...
...The residents of the slum localities were not only the victims of communal rage and hatred, but also responded en masse to the call to eliminate the members of the opposing group. The main targets of the violence were Muslims, many hundred of whom — men, women and children — were killed, often
in the most horrific ways. The pogrom made it clear that the Sangh parivar organisations had succeeded in inciting the lumpen army of unemployed and semi-unemployed youth in the industrial district to murder, looting and arson. In an early report on these events, I made a link between the mass redundancies that accompanied the closure of the mills, the impoverishment and degradation of the industrial neighbourhoods and the pogroms which took place largely in this milieu. The social cohesion that once existed has gone...
...This close-knit community feeling which used to exist, lives on in the narratives about what has been lost. They are memories of visits to one’s neighbour, to take part in the joys and sorrows of family life, to pay their respects or to show each other hospitality on festive occasions, to share the burden of everyday problems. This mesh of social cohesion that transcended the separate identify niches broke down once the mill had closed, the TLA started to fade away, and municipal agencies, due to lack of funding, ceased or drastically curtailed their welfare activities, which were also meeting points.
The climate of Social Darwinism that replaced it not only established the right of the survival of the fittest, but meant that the weakest
at the base of society are forced to compete with each other as hunter and hunted. In the course of my own stay in Ahmedabad during these fateful days in March 2002, I met with the secretary general of the TLA. He told me about his despair when he failed to get through to the police commissioner or to politicians of the ruling party once the pogrom had started. The lack of response to his incessant calls from his office on February 28, 2002, made him realise that the State machinery deliberately refused to end the rampage and that his union now really had become a spent force...
...When I left Ahmedabad at the end of March, order and peace had not yet been restored. The curfew was lifted in some parts of the city, only to be re-imposed the next day in the same or other localities because of few incidents. There has been hardly any discussion of what all this meant for the large number of working class households who fully depend on the erratic and meagre yield of their labour power.
Even under so-called normal circumstances, steady employment is difficult to come by, but for more than three weeks at a stretch they had not able to move around in their cumbersome search for gainful work. For many of them, the regular state of deprivation in which they live has further deteriorated into destitution. Without any food left and bereft of all creditworthiness, they have to survive on whatever private charities are willing to dole out to them. What does deserve attention is that, with a few exceptions, the institutions that represent civil society took no action at all when the communal riots and the horrific violence that accompanied them broke out.
Ahmedabad is proud of the large number of non-governmental agencies located in the city. In the past, commentators have widely praised their role in tackling poverty. This generated a hugely exaggerated picture, which included the glorification of NGO initiatives to which the private sector and the local government also contributed. These efforts have, however, reaped few benefits for the poorer sections of the population, and for the large number of Muslims among them in particular. For collective action, the city’s excluded minority has always been, and remain, dependent on charity from their own community. In the pauperised industrial districts of Ahmedabad ‘the righteous struggle’, which did succeed in generating a certain amount of inter-communal solidarity, lives on only in the memory of a better past.
The writer is Professor of Comparative Sociology, University of Amsterdam.
This is an edited extract from the book, The Making and Unmaking of An Industrial Working Class, Oxford University Press
|
