A tale of two communalisms
“Minority communalism can never be compared with majority communalism,
for the former is ghettoised and mainly feeds upon its own people.”
Picture shows victims of the communal violence in Muzaffarnagar in 2013.
Photo: Rajeev Bhatt
The cycle of communal hatred and violence can be stopped only by ending first the false equivalence between minority and majority communalism
As the nation went into paroxysms of rage over the alleged eulogisation of Afzal Guru,
an anniversary passed by, as always, quietly. On February 18, 1983,
2,191 Muslims, mainly women, children and the old, were hacked to death
with machetes and daggers in Nellie, Assam. For a massacre of genocidal
proportions, not a single person has been brought to book in 33 years.
Nellie does not even exist in the public memory. The tragic irony is
that a nation threatened by anti-national slogans in not threatened by
actual pogroms, whether it is Nellie, Delhi 1984, or Gujarat 2002.
The majoritarian logic is based on the premise that the majority
religious community can commit any act of mass violence, but that will
not be anti-national. What is anti-national is only minority violence.
This logic was clearly evident in the response to the Malda riot in
January, something that acquires criticalness with the looming West
Bengal elections.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) called the riot communal: “Communalism
is on the rampage in Malda,” said its spokesperson. For a party that
rose in the 1980s mainly through engineering a tectonic shift to
politics based on religious polarisation, that is an extraordinary feat
of duplicity. All the more so, considering the costs of such a shift
have hardly been benign: the tragic loss of lives and property in communal riots from Babri Masjid to Muzaffarnagar.
Nissim Mannathukkaren
Equalising the unequal
The aftermath of Malda (which did not have any fatalities) saw another curious development: a torrent of discussion that there has been a massive silence on the part of the “secular” media, and the “Award Wapsi Brigade” about the Malda “communal” riots. The upshot of this narrative is that there should have been an equal outrage over Malda as Dadri. Unless there is equivalence in treating Hindu majoritarian communalism and Muslim minority communalism, secularism is merely pseudo-secularism. It is precisely this demand for equivalence that is dangerous at the moment, for it ignores some fundamental distinctions between the two types of communalism. First, it equalises what cannot be equalised, for equality is not the equal treatment of unequal entities. And second, it participates in the increasing conflation of Hindu communalism with nationalism.
The aftermath of Malda (which did not have any fatalities) saw another curious development: a torrent of discussion that there has been a massive silence on the part of the “secular” media, and the “Award Wapsi Brigade” about the Malda “communal” riots. The upshot of this narrative is that there should have been an equal outrage over Malda as Dadri. Unless there is equivalence in treating Hindu majoritarian communalism and Muslim minority communalism, secularism is merely pseudo-secularism. It is precisely this demand for equivalence that is dangerous at the moment, for it ignores some fundamental distinctions between the two types of communalism. First, it equalises what cannot be equalised, for equality is not the equal treatment of unequal entities. And second, it participates in the increasing conflation of Hindu communalism with nationalism.
Minority communalism can never be compared with majority communalism,
for the former is ghettoised and mainly feeds upon its own people (think
the ulemas and Shah Bano),
the very people it claims to represent, while the latter thrives by
feeding off the society at large, including the minorities. Other than
the brute power that being 80 per cent of the population brings,
majority communalism is infinitely more consequential for it determines
the sociopolitical discourse, leaving minority communalism to defend
itself and ghettoise further.
Majority communalism, dangerous in itself, becomes deadly when it
becomes the official ideology of the Indian state, as the Sangh Parivar
would want it to be. Minority communalism can never dream of state
power. That is the difference between a Yogi Adityanath and an Akbaruddin Owaisi.
Here Jawaharlal Nehru’s words are valid even now: both Hindu and Muslim
communalism are bad. “But Muslim communalism cannot dominate Indian
society and introduce fascism. That only Hindu communalism
can.”Therefore whether it is the communal riots of Gujarat, Moradabad,
Bhagalpur, Bombay or Muzaffarnagar, the overwhelming number of those
killed are Muslims. Thus it is counterintuitive for the minority Muslims
to provoke riots, for they would be the primary victims, as fatalities
and as refugees in camps. The forces that gain the most from a religious
polarisation, especially based on violence, are the BJP and the Sangh
Parivar. Unsurprisingly, 75 per cent of the Lok Sabha MPs with criminal
cases for causing communal disharmony come from the BJP.
Further, in a comprehensive study of communal riots, Yale University
researchers assert that “riots produce ethnic polarisation that benefits
ethno-religious parties at the expense of the Congress” and “the BJS
[Bharatiya Jana Sangh]/BJP saw a 0.8 percentage point increase in their
vote share following a riot in the year prior to an election”. The BJP
resorted to the time-tested method of attempting a religious
polarisation in Bihar elections, and already there are indications that
Malda will be the BJP focus in Bengal, which has no history of communal
violence.
Unlike the narrative on Twitter and television, the print media
substantially covered the Malda violence. It overwhelmingly concluded
that rather than the radicalised sections of Muslims now suddenly
deciding to wipe out the Hindu minority, what emerges is a complex web
of criminal-politician nexus having a substantive role in engineering
violence in a crowd of Muslims.
The majoritarian narrative
But this complexity does not fit well with the dominant narrative of scaremongering and Islamophobia. Witness the discourse of the Islamic State enveloping the nation rapidly, or the pre-emptive framing of Umar Khalid as an Islamist terrorist in the Jawaharlal Nehru University Case. If not Muslim-perpetrated riots, Muslim-perpetrated terror acts will destroy India.
But this complexity does not fit well with the dominant narrative of scaremongering and Islamophobia. Witness the discourse of the Islamic State enveloping the nation rapidly, or the pre-emptive framing of Umar Khalid as an Islamist terrorist in the Jawaharlal Nehru University Case. If not Muslim-perpetrated riots, Muslim-perpetrated terror acts will destroy India.
This narrative sadly ignores that the death toll in the Maoist, and the
separatist/nationality movements in Kashmir, Punjab, and the Northeast
is possibly 50-80 times that caused by Islamist terror in the rest of
India. And it also whitewashes the deadly results of state terror in
these conflict areas. In demonising Muslims, it downplays that
overwhelmingly the perpetrators of Islamist terror are foreigners, and
that the participation of Indian Muslims continues to be negligible even
after Gujarat 2002.
Despite the number of violent incidents and new vigilante groups
motivated by Hindutva, it is a categorical mistake to assess intolerance
by violence only. We will then miss the insidious working of Hindu
majoritarianism as nationalism. Hence when an Aamir Khan or a Shah Rukh Khan comments on intolerance,
there is a massive outpouring of outrage branding them as
anti-national, while when an Anupam Kher declares, “I am today scared of
saying I am a Hindu”, it hardly evokes a response.
Pointing to Muslim superstars in Bollywood as an example of India’s
tolerance is uninformed. It is like arguing as there are many black
celebrities in America, there is no racist oppression there. The Indian
Muslim today feels like a second-class citizen, an emotion which can
only be understood by looking at intolerance as discrimination at a
quotidian level (for example, the state witch-hunt through draconian
anti-terror laws). No society built on religious discrimination or the
gargantuan scale of caste oppression can be termed as tolerant. But what
is new after 2014 is that this now mixes with the ballast of
state-backed Hindutva, which sees the Muslim as well as the politically
radical Dalit (Rohith Vemula, for instance) as dangerous anti-nationals.
Ultimately, if the Hindutva project is an upper-caste (and patriarchal)
one which masks a community divided by hideous caste oppression, caste
divisions mark Muslim communalism too, albeit on a lesser level, with
the small upper-caste Ashrafs as the main beneficiaries of “vote-bank”
politics. But the vast numbers of ordinary Muslims (Pasmandas) are in a
bind: being discriminated by the larger Hindu society as well as by
their own community. Rather than flourishing through “appeasement,” as
in the majoritarian narrative, their political disenfranchisement
ensures that they are forced to survive on the crumbs offered by
“secular” parties.
Only a coalition of the oppressed castes, classes and gender across
religions can overcome communalism. But that struggle for secularisation
has to go along with the resistance to the majoritarian attempt to
equate majority and minority communalism. The scourge and cycle of
communal hatred and violence can be stopped only by ending first the
history of false equivalences and selective silences.
(Nissim Mannathukkaren is Chair of the Department of International
Development Studies, Dalhousie University, Canada. Email:
nmannathukkaren@dal.ca.)
