Resources for all concerned with culture of authoritarianism in society, banalisation of communalism, (also chauvinism, parochialism and identity politics) rise of the far right in India (and with occasional information on other countries of South Asia and beyond)
Yogi Adityanath is as much a creation of the so-called secular parties as of the Sangh
The parties in the Opposition have long abandoned any real
commitment to secular values, or even the defence of the country’s
minorities.
AFP PHOTO / SANJAY KANOJIA
The masks have been thrown to the winds. Prime Minister
Narendra Modi and his most trusted aide and Bhartiya Janata Party
President Amit Shah have audaciously signalled to both national and
global public opinion that they feel no need for masks and fig-leafs any
longer. So many commentators in the mainstream media had wasted reams
to persuade us that the emphatic vote for the BJP in the spring
elections of 2017 in Uttar Pradesh represented not a hard communal
consolidation of the Hindu voter against the perceived Muslim “other”.
It was instead, they argued, a cross-caste, cross-community vote for sab ka vikas – development for all – and Modi was the new Indira Gandhi, the combative leader for building a better life for the poor.
Many
Hindu voters read the election results quite differently. They saw it
just the way many voters saw the election of Donald Trump in the United
States a few months earlier, as a vote for majoritarian triumphalism, a
vote against Muslims and minorities, a vote that legitimised prejudice
and hatred. I saw a Facebook post of a notice pasted in villages of Gorakhpur district in Uttar Pradesh. It
starts with the rallying slogan of the Ram Janam Bhumi movement – Jai
Shri Ram. It goes on to give notice to the Muslims of the village that
they must leave the village by the end of the year. It warns them that
if they do not comply, then they themselves will be responsible for the
consequences. It goes on to warn them that they will be treated in the
way that they are being treated in Trump’s America, because a BJP
government will be installed in Uttar Pradesh. Decide quickly, the
notice says, because you do not deserve to live in the village. It is
signed by the Hindus of the village, whose sanrakshak or patron is said
to be Yogi Adityanath, Member of Parliament from Gorakhpur.
But by
selecting Adityanath, one of its most belligerent anti-Muslim
campaigners, given to unapologetically coarse hate speech and
skirmishes, as chief minister of the country’s largest state in terms of
population, Modi and Shah have gestured unambiguously and brazenly
their frank and unashamed resort to hard-line Hindutva as the calling
card of their party.
Hate speeches
The
election speeches of Modi and Shah already signalled the direction the
party has chosen. Adityanath’s hate speeches are in-the-face and
dangerously toxic. Ever since he was hand-picked by Modi and Shah as
chief minister, the social media is full of his pronouncements. I rely
here on only one such compilation.
His
intent is unambiguous: “I will not stop till I turn UP and India into a
Hindu rashtra”. He blames Muslims for communal violence: “In places
where there are 10 to 20% minorities, stray communal incidents take
place. Where there are 20 to 35% of them, serious communal riots take
place and where they are more than 35%, there is no place for
non-Muslims”.
Despite numerous reports that deny the claim of the
“exodus of Hindus from Kairana”, he still claims in the spirit of
“post-truth” that “the population of Hindus which was once 68% has come
down to 8% there”. He blames this on alleged policies of
“pseudo-secularism and appeasement” followed by successive governments
in Uttar Pradesh, which “speak against the majority community in the
name of secularism”.
A falsehood that even Prime Minister Modi
was to echo was that “governments in UP give land for kabristans
(graveyards) but not for shamshanghats (cremation grounds)“. “Issues
like the exodus of Hindus from Kairana, love jihad and women’s safety”,
he claims are threatening to turn “western Uttar Pradesh … into another
Kashmir”.
Even more sinister are his open threats to Muslims.
“Every time a Hindu visits the Vishwanath temple, the Gyanvapi mosque
taunts us. If given a chance, we will install statues of Goddess Gauri,
Ganesh and Nandi in every mosque”. The Ram Mandir is high on his agenda.
“When they could not stop karsevaks from demolishing the Babri Masjid,
how will they be able to stop us from carrying out the construction of
the mandir?” Yogi Adityanath. Image: Hindustan TimesAny of these declarations amount to gravely provocative and culpable criminal hate speech. Adityanath has a number of hate crimes
lodged against him. These are not the utterances of an outrageous
fringe rabble-rouser. He is the man chosen by the country’s prime
minister to lead the country’s largest state in terms of population,
which if it were a separate country, would be the world’s fifth most
populous country of over 200 million people. Among these, a fifth or
around 40 million are people of Muslim faith.
It is a frightening
time to be a Muslim in Uttar Pradesh today. It was bad enough that the
election results reflected the unification of most Hindu caste and class
groups against the Muslims and that the BJP found it unnecessary to
field even one Muslim candidate from a fifth of the state’s population
and that the prime minister and, even more, his party chief and other
candidates openly resorted to a communally charged discourse. But if
some among them were still hoping that with such a large majority, at
least after the elections, there would be a move to more responsible
governance in the state, the choice of Adityanath as their chosen leader
leaves no ambiguity about their status.
The Muslims in UP, it
seems, must learn the same lesson that Muslims in Gujarat have been
forced to learn so painfully since 2002. This is that they would be
“permitted” to live in the state, but only as second class citizens, if
they accept the political, cultural, economic and social superiority and
dominance of their Hindu neighbours. It is the further fruition of the
vision for India of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, less than a hundred
years since it was constituted in 1925.
Secular culpability
This
is indeed a victory for the RSS, its ideology and cadres and for Modi’s
muscular and crushing leadership. But the victory of a brawny politics
of communal hectoring and name-calling, hate and division and the defeat
of the constitutional values of fraternity and equality, cannot be laid
only at their door. Equal credit, or culpability, lies with the parties
of the opposition, which have long abandoned any real commitment to
secular values, or even the defence of the country’s minorities.
I
will illustrate their multiple failures with their role, or the lack of
it, in Muzaffarnagar in Western Uttar Pradesh, which I observed closely
in the course of our work with the survivors of the mass communal
violence of 2013.
We must begin with the pernicious role of the
BJP, and the cadres of the RSS, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the
Bajrang Dal, in stirring the communal cauldron in these regions which
had an unbroken history so far of communal amity, even during the
Partition riots and the turbulent movement for the demolition of the
Babri Masjid.
It is proved beyond doubt that BJP MLA Sangeet Som circulated a fake video
of two youth being lynched by a crowd of Muslims. He claimed
mischievously and dangerously that the lynch mob was of Muslims of the
region, and the men who were brutally killed were two Jat brothers who
were trying to defend the honour of their sister from the sexual
harassment of a Muslim youth. It mattered little in the post-truth world
of command prejudice led right from the top, that all of these
assertions were falsehoods, that the video was of a lynching in
Pakistan, and that the Jat brothers and Muslim youth killed each other
not because of any sexual predation but following a skirmish stemming
from a motor-cycle accident. These falsehoods resulted in the largest
episode of communal violence in a decade (along with the attack on
Christians in Kandhamal).
Between 70,000 to 1,00,000 Muslims fled
from their villages in terror after their neighbours of generations
suddenly turned against them, burning and looting their homes, raping
women of their village, killing even elders and children. The role of
the RSS was not different from what it has been since the Partition
riots – fomenting communal hatred and violence through hate propaganda
and rumours. But the role of the Samajwadi Party government led by Chief
Minister Akhilesh Yadav, and other parties that claim to be secular,
requires much closer interrogation.
I found the character, the
part played and the attitude of the state administration in Uttar
Pradesh hardly different in most ways from that of the state
administration in Gujarat in 2002. It could have prevented the scale of
hate attacks on Muslims if it had been firm and steadfast in not
permitting the mahapanchayats in which hate speeches were made against
Muslims based on the RSS-created rumours. It was a mahapanchayat that
led directly to massive crowds being mobilised and provoked and incited
to inflict hate violence against their Muslim neighbours.
The
soft-pedalling by the administration did not just suggest criminal
administrative incompetence: if it was just this, it would be bad
enough. The real doubt was that it secretly believed that it would
benefit along with the BJP from the polarisation between Muslims and
Hindus in a communal riot, a harvest that both parties hoped to reap in
the 2014 general elections. Muzaffarnagar baqi hai
Payments to stay away
Even
more shameful was the neglect, and even hostility, of the Uttar Pradesh
state administration to the refugees from hate violence in camps. I
visited the camps on many occasions and found them little different from
the relief camps I had seen in Gujarat in 2002. In both, the state
administration refused to establish and run relief camps for those
displaced from their homes by hate violence.
It left this mainly
to the battered community itself, as though the responsibility for
taking care of these hate refugees was not of the state but of
organisations of Muslim people. With nowhere to go, people endured the
winter cold, the hot dusty summers and the rains under plastics, with
reports of children dying, but the state administration remained
unmoved. As in Gujarat in 2002, we found little presence of the state in
these camps: it did not organise sanitation, health care, child care or
police outposts to record people’s complaints.
The only real
departure of the practice of the Uttar Pradesh administration from that
of the Gujarat administration 11 years earlier was in the payment of
five lakh rupees as compensation to those persons who undertook that
they would not return to their original villages. This policy had no
precedent in India. For people displaced by hate violence, the duty of
the state administration was recognised to be to create conditions that
were conducive to enabling people to return to their original homes.
This required the administration to take the lead in attempting to
rebuild social bonds between the estranged communities, and to ensure
the security of those who returned.
Far from doing this, the
action of the Uttar Pradesh state government in effect accepted that
Muslim and Hindu populations would no longer live together peacefully,
and even incentivised their separation. In earlier large episodes of
rural communal violence, as in Bhagalpur and Gujarat, we found that
social fractures tend to be enduring, and Muslims are ejected from mixed
settlements. The state should have fought and resisted this, promoting
the restoration of mixed habitations, rather than for the first time
actually incentivising separate living on religious lines. This was an
utterly bankrupt state policy adopted by the Akhilesh government, with
communal underpinnings, one that has no precedents in past communal
riots. Camp at the village of Jaula in Muzaffarnagar District on April 10, 2014Image: AFP PHOTO/Prakash SINGH
Premature closing of camps
Just
three months after the carnage, the state government officially
terminated all relief camps, again as happened in Gujarat, even though
several thousand displaced persons were still in fear and dread, and
unwilling to return home because they continued to feel unsafe. Whereas
displaced persons in camps should be officially assisted and supported
to return to their original homes by promoting reconciliation and
security, to force them to do so by premature closure of camps resulted
only in thousands being left without even the meagre food and health
support which the government had extended in the camps.
The sense
of fear and alienation of the survivors was enhanced by distressing
reports of organised social and economic boycott of Muslims after the
mass violence, once again just as in Gujarat. Many men testified that if
they went back to their villages, they were told they should cut their
beards off if they wished to live in their village. People also reported
similar hate exchanges in buses and public spaces. Survivors recounted
intimidation and boycott in employment as farm labour, or economic
activities like pheris¸ or selling cloth and other goods from house to
house.
The Akhilesh Yadav-led state government did little to
create conditions in which survivors felt safe to return to the villages
of their birth. Without any public remorse by their attackers, any
official or community initiatives for reconciliation, and any attempts
at justice, these hapless people were unable to return to the villages
of their birth. Sometimes with small grants from government or NGOs, but
mainly with usurious loans from private moneylenders, they bought
house-plots in hastily laid out colonies in Muslim majority villages on
what were cultivated fields. Seizing the opportunity to make windfall
profits, local large farmers and real estate developers sold these plots
at exorbitant rates to these luckless displaced persons.
Living Apart
The
indifference of the state government was reflected also in the fact
that there was no official record of these mostly self-settled colonies,
let alone official plans to ensure that they were able to access basic
public goods and citizenship entitlements. In a survey undertaken by
Aman Biradari and Afkar India Foundation, we discovered as many as 65
refugee colonies, 28 in Muzaffarnagar and 37 in Shamli, housing 29,328
residents, described in Living Apart: Communal Violence and Forced Displacement in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli,
a book about the conditions of the survivors, written jointly by my
colleagues Akram Akhtar Chaudhary, Zafar Eqbal and Rajanya Bose, and me.
In hellish slum-like settlements, these internal refugees are
bravely building their lives anew. Perhaps our most striking survey
finding was the almost complete absence of the state from these efforts
to begin a new life of the refugees. Apart from a 5 lakh rupee grant
given only to households directly hit by the violence (and none to the
much larger number who escaped their villages because of fear of
attacks), the state took no responsibility for helping them resettle in
any way. The displaced were forced to either abandon or sell their
properties at distress prices in their villages of origin, and the state
compensation for the loss of their moveable assets was negligible. The
colonies were settled substantially with the self-help efforts of the
impoverished and battered refugees themselves. This again mirrors the
story of the violence-affected people of Gujarat. Muzaffarnagar, after the riots. September 9, 2013. Image: AFP PHOTO/STR STRDEL / AFP
No justice
The
confidence of survivors to return to homes was further shaken because
of the very low numbers of arrests and convictions of the men accused of
murder, rape, arson and looting. Without justice, as we have learned
from survivors in many sites of communal violence, neither do wounds
heal nor can fresh violence be deterred.
Police and even the
judiciary in Uttar Pradesh often displayed communal biases similar to
their Gujarati counterparts. Of 6,400 persons accused of crimes in 534
FIRs, charges were ultimately pursued against only 1,540 persons. Most
of the cases of murder were closed without a charge-sheet or trial
claiming the accused were “unknown persons”. Even a year after the
carnage, only 800 people were arrested, and most of those who were
arrested were quickly released on bail. One reason given for low numbers
of arrests by the police administration was that large numbers of women
blocked the entrance to the village entry whenever police vehicles
drove there for arrests, or farmers parked tractors to thwart police
passage.
Survivors on the other hand believed that police
themselves informally tipped off the villagers before arriving to make
arrests, otherwise how would so many assemble at short notice to
blockade village roads? This allegation was difficult to independently
verify, but no self-respecting police administration could accept this
kind of public blockades to persist when it came in the way of their
fulfilling their official duties.
Only three of the 25 men
accused in six cases of gang-rape were held. In one rape case, all the
accused men have been acquitted. In another, after three years no one
has been arrested. And in the other rape cases, all the accused men are
out on bail. There was enormous pressure on the witnesses to rescind on
their statements, and a large number of witnesses have turned hostile in
court.
Although Indian criminal law does not permit “compromise”
in heinous offences, this remains a routine practice after mass communal
violence. Since the accused freely roam the same villages, either
evading arrest or on bail, they are free to intimidate the complainants
and victims. It does not help that the majority of the complainants are
impoverished farm workers or brick kiln labour, critically dependent
economically on the large Jat landowners for work and loans.
The
police was particularly soft in acting against politicians who were
allegedly directly involved in the rioting. They have at best been
booked in very minor sections like Section 188 of the Indian Penal Code.
Most of them did not even see the inside of a jail. There were also
other distressing signs of judicial bias, because most arrested persons
have been granted bail almost the next day or soon after their arrests.
This ignored the gravity of hate crimes, and the susceptibility of the
survivors to intimidation because of their vulnerable situation after
mass targeted violence has spurred large-scale fear, destruction of
livelihoods and habitats and migration.
Absent political parties
When
the carnage unfolded, and in the crucial months that followed, the
Congress Party headed the United Progressive Alliance government in the
centre. But it never directed or advised the state government in Uttar
Pradesh to fulfil its constitutional duties to the violence affected
people more responsibly or compassionately, nor did it reach out to them
directly in any way.
As a party, I found Congress workers
completely absent from the relief camps, in Muzaffarnagar as much as in
the Gujarat camps a decade earlier. This is where the Congress Sewa Dal
(does it even exist?) should have been visible, extending discernible
solidarity and service to the people displaced by hate violence.
Equally,
Mayawati never once reached out to the hapless violence-hit people. She
mostly maintained her imperious silence, indicating indifference. What
credibility would she carry when years later, she reached out for an
alliance with the Muslims of the state, as she did before the Assembly
elections?
The only political party that did reach out in any way
to the violence-hit people of Muzafffarnagar was the Communist Party of
India (Marxist), which helped establish a resettlement colony. But even
this assistance was much smaller and less visible than the role that the
Communist Party played in the early communal riots after Independence.
No credible alternative
The
lesson, then, is that the runaway electoral victory of the BJP in the
elections to the Uttar Pradesh assembly in the spring of 2017 is as much
due to the BJP’s polarising campaign and Modi’s charismatic but
divisive leadership, as it is due to the failure of any authentic and
credible secular alternative.
Secularism is not treating Muslim
minorities as a hapless, powerless, dependent client population whose
votes can be taken for granted at election time and forgotten for the
rest. Secularism is not a selective, opportunistic policy, to be played
with a continuous timid eye fixed on not upsetting majoritarian communal
sentiment. It is an article of faith, which rises above all immediate
electoral considerations.
The enormous tragedy of India’s secular
majority, as much as of India’s minorities, is that India today lacks an
authentically secular political opposition. This emboldens a resurgent
and triumphalist political right, led by Modi and Amit Shah, to display
their communal fangs with the selection of communal firebrand Yogi
Adityanath as the leader of Uttar Pradesh.
It is ordinary people
who must act as the opposition. Our large so-called secular political
opposition has betrayed us profoundly, and the people if India are
paying the cost. The hot winds of communal hatred of the past three
years can be expected to grow now into a blinding sandstorm.