http://www.sunday-guardian.com/artbeat/anatomy-of-a-riot-what-we-can-learn-from-the-muzaffarnagar-violence
Anatomy of a Riot
Speculation is rife about the Samajwadi Party's own role in engineering the Muzaffarnagar riots
By NIDHI GUPTA
The Sunday Guardian
16th Nov 2013
Last week, BJP MLAs Suresh Rana and Sangeet Som, accused of giving inciting speeches and circulating a video that sparked communal riots in Muzaffarnagar, were released from detention, absolved of the charges they were booked under the National Security Act.
Last week also saw 8-year-old Azra Mohammad, hailing from one of the riot-hit villages in Muzaffarnagar, being discharged from a hospital in Delhi – she was knifed in the stomach and her right hand had been all but severed during an attack on her home earlier in September. She survived, but she lost her grandmother, uncle and her 11-year-old cousin in the attack.
Azra, her father Aas Mohammad, and several other victims of the Muzaffarnagar riots (including two girls who had been raped on September 8 and October 2), appeared at a day-long convention in defense of communal harmony and democratic rights, organized by the All India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA). Earlier in the day, they met representatives of the Minorities' Commission, where they put forth their plea for assistance with rehabilitation and legal action.
At the Constitution Club, they recounted horrific incidents of violence and apathy in chilling detail. "When we sensed trouble, we decided to leave the village but our Jat brothers told us to stay, that they will protect us. But once they had us assembled, they started lynching us. It has been two months, why has there not been a single arrest?" Naseem Ahmed, a resident of Jouli village, demanded to know. There were more than 100 cases of rape and another 100 of murder, he said, but people, particularly women, don't want to come forward for fear of being stigmatized. Several civil society organisations have sent inquiry teams to the district – one by Delhi-based Anhad, to document violence against women, found state and police representatives unwilling to talk. They also found that these riots were not sporadic as previously thought, but that signs of trouble had appeared as early as 2010. Another team, organized by the Centre for Peace Studies, found that any untoward incidents in the area in the past year and a half were instantly given a communal angle, and that the forces of 'love jihad', as the RSS likes to call it, were particularly in play.
Victims from the Jat community, though, are conspicuous by their absence in the aftermath of these riots – or so it would appear from these reports whose focus has been refugee camps organized by the state government, which are reportedly sheltering 60-70,000 Muslims at the moment. "These were the more vulnerable sections in these villages and towns because they are the poorer lot, tending to the land and cattle owned by the zamindar Jats. Of course, riots are always two-sided and one cannot argue that the Muslim community had no hand in them, but those who are suffering now had barely anything to do with the riots. The Jat community has been able to rehabilitate themselves, while the Muslims have not," explained Sehba Farooqui, secretary of AIDWA.
Harsh Mander, former member of the National Advisory Council, visited Muzaffarnagar's relief camps as part of a fact-finding team organized by the Centre for Policy Analysis last month. His overarching conclusion from these visits involves a complicit State. "It is possible for riots to start sporadically, but it isn't possible to sustain the violence without the collusion of the government," he said. Three factors are crucial in this regard: the 'manufacture' of hate, followed by the 'organisation' of violence, both of which can happen only with the permission of the government.
Political scientist Steven Wilkinson, in his book Votes and Violence, made this observation back in 2005, arguing that politicians have the power to both cause and prevent riots, through their control of state governments that are responsible for law and order. Through an empirical analysis of the communal riots that have taken place in India between 1947 and 2005, he observes: "Whether violence is bloody or ends quickly depends not on the local factors that caused the violence to break out but primarily on the will and capacity of the government that controls the forces of law and order."
Such complicity of the state extends into a separate observation made by Mander on the perpetuation of hate. "In Gujarat (after the Godhra riots in 2002), the communal discord persisted through a social and infrastructural boycott. It takes maybe 2-3 months to spread lasting hatred even in areas where no such history exists. The discrimination that follows only works to sustain this hatred," he said. Even two months after the first incidents of violence were reported, displaced victims don't have the courage to go back home because they still feel threatened.
Yet, the Muzaffarnagar riots were not so much a case of communal politics as of a ruler-worker relationship gone sour. "Asal mein hum unke hi mazdoor the (we were actually their own workers)," pointed out Ahmed. "We ploughed their fields, tended to their cattle. It was only the Jats that took up this war against us. The other castes – Rajputs, Valmikis – had no part to play in this. They in fact came forward to help us in our time of need," he said.
This, as a report by Ajaz Ashraf in The Hindu has observed, is a consequence of the gradual disintegration of the MAJGAR – Muslim, Ahir (Yadav), Jat, Gujjar, Rajput – alliance that former PM Chaudhary Charan Singh had managed to foster on the back of the Green Revolution. MAJGAR managed to bring together the middle agricultural classes on the back of common economic interest, but the distance of succeeding politicians (primarily Charan Singh's son Ajit Singh) and the arrival of the Bharatiya Kisan Union have torn this bond apart. Now, like scavengers, regional and identity-based political parties have arrived to pick on the remains – and speculation is rife about the Samajwadi Party's own role in engineering the Muzaffarnagar riots.
Consequently, this episode is acquiring a communal hue, where the Muslims have fled Jat-majority villages, and the Jats in turn cloister on their side of the village, fearing for life and property. Amid all this political brouhaha, AIDWA's aim in organizing this meet was to contain the growing bubble of religious hatred by intervening at the grassroots level.
There are several ways to remember history – and several moments from the past that must or will be remembered. Who decides what becomes a part of history is anyone's guess. As the Lok Sabha elections loom large over the horizon, living room conversations have reverted to the BJP vs. Congress debate. Mumbai, Godhra, Ayodhya are all revisited as sites of communal discord, and attempts to trace the roots of this division stretch back endlessly in time.
If Narendra Modi, in his public speeches, wants to remind PM Manmohan Singh of his birthplace, which now lies on the other side of the India-Pakistan border because of the Congress' decision to go ahead with partition in 1947, the victims of the Muzaffarnagar riots also want to remember that year as a time of peace and quiet, of cooperation between Hindus and Muslims of different castes. This, then, is perhaps where civil society initiatives can be most effective – in keeping the peace on ground, despite all political maneuverings aimed at the opposite, by showing that violence of this sort affects the 'other' just as much as the 'self'.
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