Conflict around Region, Religion, Language, Culture, Caste, Ethnicity etc. etc.

Identity politics
Communalism and regionalism harming nation

by Kuldip Nayar
(The Tribune, 11 July 2008)

I HAVE lost count of the number of violent incidents in the country. India is increasingly becoming a disorderly state where political parties have no respect for the rule of law and where every community behaves as if its point of view must prevail at any cost.

Things have come to such a pass that the Supreme Court has expressed its concern over the government’s “doing nothing” while protestors hold the nation to ransom.

What has mainly held the country together is the spirit of accommodation; this is drying up and may damage our diversity, which is our strength. We cannot afford to stretch a point beyond a limit. A confrontationist posture is harmful to the country. There are so many fissiparous tendencies that they come into play at the slightest provocation.

It is true that the government tends to ignore peaceful agitations. Yet it has been seen all over the world that violence eventually kills democratic behaviour and gives way to authoritarianism.

More stringent laws or additional security forces are the stock remedies. They only increase police atrocities and custodial deaths. Agitations become more brutal.

The last three months’ violence began with the Gujjars’ agitation in Rajasthan. Woefully, it was led by a retired colonel who knew no discipline, no limits. Some 45 persons were killed in the state of lawlessness which his men created and sustained for a fortnight. The issue was that the Gujjars be considered a scheduled tribe and given reservations.

This is a matter which should have been considered by the Scheduled Tribes Commission straightway. Instead, the Gujjars took to the streets and disrupted the lives of several states in the north, uprooting railway lines, burning buses and destroying property.

Ultimately, the Gujjars got a five per cent of reservation which may well add up above the total of 50 per cent, the maximum limit which the Supreme Court has fixed.

As soon as the Gujjars were out of the way, some Sikh groups stopped railway traffic in parts of the north and burnt government property to ventilate their anger against Sacha Sauda Dehra chief Ram Rahim Singh, who was on a visit to Mysore, Bangalore and Mumbai.

That the cases pending against him for heinous crimes (his security guards killed one Sikh at Mumbai this time) have been inordinately delayed is reprehensible. But the Sikhs reacting as a community – the Punjab government also jumped into the fray – is equally disconcerting.

The Sikhs are giving unnecessary importance to the Sacha Sauda Dehra which the Haryana government can tackle. In any case, the anger against Ram Rahim Singh should not be visited upon the orderly life of others.

Then there was the attack by the Maoists who believe that they can liberate India through arms they steal from the police. The Maoists killed some 40 security men at a reservoir on the borders of Orissa and Andhra Pradesh.

I have sympathy for the Maoists’ cause of helping the poor, but I have never understood how by killing people they serve it. They remind me of the Sikh militants who practically controlled Punjab for a decade and eventually came a cropper.

The latest is the Amarnath Yatra episode and the BJP’s Bharat Bandh. The transfer of land to the Yatra Board was wrong. The old system had stood the pilgrims in good stead and it should have been revived where the old Malik families of Muslims facilitated the pilgrimage.

But it was irresponsible on the part of the Srinagar-based political parties, particularly the People’s Democratic Party, headed by former Union Home Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayyed, to make it an issue.

We can blame New Delhi for many things but not of diluting the Kashmiri identity because it has never tried to change the complexion of the state population from day one. Some 30,000 people who came from Pakistan and sought shelter in Jammu are still stateless after 60 years.

Article 370 giving a special status to the state has been its bulwark which the late Sheikh Abdullah had got included in the Constitution after the integration of Jammu and Kashmir with India.

The real problem is that of Kashmir’s autonomy. Pressures are ventilated at the smallest provocation. The Assembly elections in October will give people and politicians an opportunity to elect such members who can articulate Kashmir’s point of view.

The other type of exercises, it has been experienced, do not yield much result. They only communalise or regionalise the issue. The rift which Srinagar has created with Jammu over the transfer of land has burnt practically all bridges between the two.

Kashmiris have to wait for something concrete to emerge till the government in Pakistan settles down and the new government takes over in Delhi after elections in the next few months. Relations between India and Pakistan have seldom been as good as it is now, but political uncertainty on both sides makes any decision difficult.

The Valley has allowed fundamentalists to win the first round which will create problems when the time for settlement comes. This becomes still more obvious when the BJP stand is scrutinised. The party is always looking for an opportunity to play a communal card. Politicians in the Valley have given it the issue and that too near the parliamentary elections.

No doubt the voter will generally react adversely to the lawlessness in which the party cadres have indulged, particularly in the BJP-run states, but the damage - six killed and the destruction of property worth crores – has been done.

The unforgivable part is the force used by the Bajrang Dal, the BJP’s stormtroopers, against Muslims to shut their businesses. The police too put pressure behind the law breakers. Narendra Modi of Gujarat was at least honest enough to admit that if he were to have a bandh, he would face communal riots in the state. He did not give a call.

A party which gives a call for the Bharat Bandh in an already volatile situation is irresponsible and callous. How can the BJP imagine that it will be entrusted with power at the centre?

But I come back to the point I raised in the beginning. What happens to India’s identity if communal and regional identities are to have their way?