From: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol - XLVIII No. 39, September 28, 2013
Lessons from Muzaffarnagar
Editorials
Communalism cannot be fought without acknowledging caste, class and patriarchal oppressions.
The communal violence in Muzaffarnagar and neighbouring areas is a warning of the days to come. Uttar Pradesh (UP) is crucial to the electoral fortunes of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) if its prime ministerial aspirant, Narendra Modi, has to have a plausible chance of coming to power. There has been a rise in incidents of communal violence since the Samajwadi Party (SP) government was elected to office last year, but the “riot” earlier this month – when close to 50 people were killed, a few hundred injured and tens of thousands fled from their homes – stands distinct in its scale and is clear evidence of what Paul Brass has termed the “institutionalised riot system”. The “Gujarat model” of using the terror of communal violence to forge communal unity among “Hindus” to build an invincible vote bank appears to be the strategy that has been employed; it is no surprise that this has come within months of the former Gujarat minister of state for home and prime accused in the fake encounter killing cases, Amit Shah, taking charge of BJP’s UP unit.
There have been analyses of the political calculations of the BJP and the SP in these riots, and of the break-up of the political alliance between Jats and Muslims in western UP and what impact this will have on the Congress and the Rashtriya Lok Dal. In all this there have been calls to expose the communal games, book the guilty and provide relief and rehabilitation to the victims. It was good that the prime minister and the chief minister visited the violence-affected areas and promised justice and a return to normalcy. Hopefully, the governments at the centre and in the state will not forget these promises; perhaps the impending elections will help them remember.
However, viewing this violence only in terms of religious communities may not help us to either fully understand what has happened or enable political and administrative interventions which can prevent repetitions. That the “Hindus” in this riot are largely Jats has been acknowledged. However, Muslims too have caste and class markers. Some reports talk about Muslims being farm labourers, carpenters and blacksmiths to the landowning Jats. That clearly indicates a subservient relation with the dominant caste. In fact, one report quotes a Hindu Jat villager, “There will be no peace until the balance of power is sorted out. One community in each village will remain dominant.” This then raises the question of why the dominant agricultural caste would want to drive out farm labour at the very time when agricultural operations are at their peak and the harvest is only weeks away. Another newspaper reports that Muslims who have run away from their villages to relief camps claim that they have left behind acres of cultivated land with standing crops, but fearing for their lives they would not want to return. The report estimates that in total there would be thousands of acres of such land and most landholders fear that these will now be encroached by members of the dominant caste. Does this indicate that landless lower-caste Muslims are now becoming landed? Or does it mean that a section of the dominant Hindu agricultural caste is willing to forgo the services of its (Muslim) farm labourers, even when labour supply is a problem, only to be able to appropriate prime agricultural land of the landed Muslims? There have also been reports of Hindus protecting Muslims and asking them to return, but some reports suggest that this was among Hindu Jats and Muslim Jats, which would indicate a certain caste solidarity more than an attempt at building communal harmony.
The shifting of communal violence to rural areas perhaps cannot be understood without understanding the major changes in agriculture over the last few decades and there seems insufficient work on that, both in newspaper reports and academic research. At present, media and fact-finding reports do not provide a clear picture of the caste, class and property issues involved. But it is equally clear that after the Nellie and Bhagalpur killings of the 1980s, this is perhaps the first large-scale rural communal violence and a warning about the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s new strategy of breaking out of its urban enclaves.
This particular incident also built on the other trajectory of reactionary politics in the region – of trying to control the sexuality of women – which has expressed itself regularly in “honour” killings and khap panchayat embargoes on lifestyle. That the present killings, which appear to have a land-labour angle, were planned at a mahapanchayat of Hindu Jat khaps calling for the protection of the “honour” of their women illustrates the continuities between caste, class, patriarchy and property. To see this violence merely as communal (between religious communities) may not be sufficient to understand and prevent it in future. We need to unpack the category of Muslim along its caste and class lines too and identify the common patriarchy which links the dominant in both communities.
Such questioning may already have started in UP, where the non-Ashraf Muslim parties marked their presence in the last assembly elections by arguing that “Muslim” politics uses their deprivations to benefit the upper caste and wealthy Ashraf sections. If that trend grows in western UP as a result of the present violence, it could well lead to a radical challenge to the politics of communalism in both communities. There is, after all, no long-term solution to the communal problem other than the political assertion of the oppressed castes-classes.
http://www.epw.in/editorials/lessons-muzaffarnagar.html
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