Book review: Ananya Vajpeyi on Berenschot's Riot Politics - Hindu-Muslim Violence and the Indian State

The New Republic, October 12, 2012

Hate and The State - Hindu-Muslim Riot Politics in India

BY ANANYA VAJPEYI

Riot Politics: Hindu-Muslim Violence and the Indian State
by Ward Berenschot
Columbia University Press, 320 pp., $40

THE PHRASE “Gujarat 2002” has, for the past decade, struck fear and shame in the hearts of many Indians. It marks a period of about three months, from late February 2002, when the Western state of Gujarat, and especially its first city, Ahmedabad, erupted into ugly mass violence targeted at local Muslim communities. About 2,500 people died (though official figures claim half that number), and tens of thousands were displaced, many of them permanently.

The episode produced a sense of national crisis: the violence seemed overwhelmingly directed at the Muslim minority (though Hindus also died); much of it was heinous and brutal (particularly for women and children); and by all independent accounts, it proceeded with the full knowledge, support, and complicity of the state government, led by the Hindu supremacist Bhartiya Janata Party. Worse, the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) has been re-elected to power twice in Gujarat since that dark time. The state’s Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, enjoys such absolute political popularity on his home turf that he is currently presenting himself as a possible contender for Prime Ministership in India’s general elections in 2014. In the moral conscience of secular Indians, both within Gujarat and elsewhere, 2002 remains a calamitous setback for India’s diverse and democratic polity.

In the bloody tumult of Gujarat in 2002, one incident that stood out for its heinousness took place in a locality called Naroda Patiya, an industrial suburb of Ahmedabad, where close to a hundred Muslims were massacred on February 28. The details of the rape, gang rape, and mutilation of women are too awful to bear repeating—in any case media reports at the time, as well as subsequent recollections, have been graphic enough. This year, on August 29, a verdict pronounced by a fast-track Gujarat court on the basis of a report filed by a Special Investigative Team (SIT), convicted 32 persons for their role as perpetrators in the Narodiya Patiya massacre. Those sentenced include Maya Kodnani, a gynecologist, a thrice-elected legislator from Naroda constituency, and a former minister for Woman and Child Development in Modi’s cabinet, as well as Babubhai Patel or Babu Bajrangi, a local leader of one of the Hindu nationalist organizations on the far right, the militant Bajrang Dal. Kodnani faces 28 years of imprisonment; Patel, a life-sentence. Neither one was sentenced to be hanged, even though India still upholds the death penalty.

The Gujarat verdict has been ubiquitously described as “stunning,” because so few expected any justice would be done, and because powerful politicians such as Kodnani and Patel, protected and promoted by the BJP, and by Modi personally, were indicted at long last. Never before in the history of India’s courts has a sitting legislator been given what is effectively a life-sentence for inciting mass violence. Stunning also was the fact that Kodnani is a woman and a doctor; that she was repeatedly elected to her seat in the Gujarat legislature; and that Modi actually rewarded her ghastly instigation and abetment of violence (for example, by distributing sharp weapons to rioters) by appointing her a minister—with ghoulish irony—in charge of the welfare of women and children.

Modi’s escalating efforts to project himself as prime ministerial material, as well as his insistent denials that any harm was done to Gujarat’s Muslims with his government’s complicity, have been seriously damaged. The challenge to his apparent impunity is indeed stunning, for him as for the public. But the Naroda Patiya verdict also rekindles in the nation’s consciousness the old trauma of why, how, and when Mahatma Gandhi’s Gujarat became the theater of India’s worst nightmare of religious politics, sectarian strife and horrible, indeed atavistic, violence.

The term that Gandhi used to spell out his political creed of non-violence in the first half of the twentieth century throughout India’s anti-colonial struggle was ahimsa. We now think of ahimsa as a Gandhian coinage, but in fact the term and the idea both existed for close to three millennia in Indian religious and philosophical thought, particularly in Jainism and Buddhism. The significant presence of Jains in elite Gujarati society—the Jains have constituted wealthy commercial classes from ancient times, and continue to do so in Gujarat today—exposed Gandhi to the concept of ahimsa, literally “the absence of the desire to harm others,” from a very young age.

As he became the leader of India’s nationalist movement against the British Raj, Gandhi transposed non-violence from the esoteric and ascetic doctrines of the Jain philosophy into popular politics, urging the people to fight for the truth without visiting violence upon their enemies, even the hated English rulers. For Gandhi, India’s political goal was swaraj or self-rule, but for every Indian freedom-fighter, self-rule was not only a collective project of emancipation from foreign rule; it was also the effort to liberate the self from the desire to harm others, and thereby to achieve a real mastery over violent impulses lodged in each and every human being. In the Gandhian struggle, ahimsa and swaraj were inextricably connected to one another—there could be no true freedom, for the individual or for India, without non-violence.

British India’s violent partition into the two nation-states of India and Pakistan in 1947 undid Gandhi’s decades-long leadership of a non-violent freedom movement. He was devastated by the slaughter of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs at the hands of their fellow-countrymen. Unable to bear the ripping apart of the subcontinent, the millions dead and displaced, the sectarian animosities spreading like wildfire from Punjab in the west to Bengal in the east, he retreated from public life. Six months later, in January 1948, he was shot dead by a Hindu fanatic, who represented the resentful hope of many Indians that if there were no more Gandhi, there would be no more archaic talk of ahimsa hampering the unambiguously violent advance of the new nation into its postcolonial future.

In keeping with this cruel volte-face of history, Gujarat, Gandhi’s home state, was the first to forget him and move on. Today the symbol of Gujarat is not Gandhi but Modi, who could hardly be a more Manichean Other to the Mahatma. He is committed to the unashamed deployment of himsa—etymologically, both “harm” and “the desire to harm”—as a necessary tool of governance and development (his two pet agendas, according to his own propaganda). It is not only the fact of violence but also the hidden agenda—the wish to dominate the weak, to put minorities in their place, to establish supremacy through bullying and hurting the most vulnerable of Gujarat’s citizens—that makes Modi’s politics starkly anti-Gandhian.

The name given in Indian politics to strife between religious groups is “communal violence,” and the ideology driving such violence—a peculiarly Indian inflection of Fascism—is called “communalism.” Throughout the past century, in both British India and independent India, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, and others, indeed all types of Indian groups whose identities are based broadly on religion and on religious politics, have been both the perpetrators and the victims of communal violence.

From its earliest appearance in Indian political discourse—in 1905, when the Viceroy Lord Curzon announced the partition of the province of Bengal into two Hindu-majority and a Muslim-majority sectors—communal antagonism between groups has been seen as the outcome of a meddling, malignant state, out to “divide-and-rule.” Partition in 1947 was widely perceived as an apotheosis of such policies on the part of the British. After independence, the Indian state—and particularly the ruling Congress Party that led the national movement since its foundation in 1885—smoothly took over the function of dividing communities and setting them against one another for electoral gains and raisons d’état. In recent memory, communal violence against Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 (following on the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards), and against Muslims in North India and Bombay in 1992–1993 (following on the demolition of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya by the BJP and its Hindu majoritarian allies) both vindicated the assumption of government complicity in the targeting of particular groups. [. . .].

[FULL TEXT AT: https://tinyurl.com/p49546r