India: Pogroms and politics - Nellie, Delhi, Bombay and Gujarat are dots on a learning curve

The Telegraph, November 5, 2017

Pogroms and politics
- Nellie, Delhi, Bombay and Gujarat are dots on a learning curve
Mukul Kesavan

Pogroms in republican India don't hurt the parties that organize them. They help their cause. The Congress won the largest mandate in India's electoral history after Congressmen helped murder thousands of Sikhs in Delhi in 1984. Forty nine per cent of the vote. Four hundred and four seats. This wasn't the accidental outcome of a tragedy; the Congress milked the pogrom in its election campaign. The Rediffusion advertisements that Rajiv Gandhi ran asked potential voters to vote for the Congress if their taxi driver made them nervous. Why? Because Sikhs were often taxi drivers and the Congress, as the pogrom demonstrated, had a way with Sikhs. Congressmen accused of leading or organizing the violence remained members of parliament, ministers and senior party functionaries for decades after the pogrom.

The previous year, in February 1983, at least 2,000 Bengali Muslims were killed in Nellie in Assam. The All Assam Students Union that led the massive agitation against the enrolment of illegal Bangladeshi migrants into Assam's voter rolls before the Nellie massacre did very well out of its mobilization and the bloody aftermath. It turned itself into a political party, the Asom Gana Parishad, and handily won the state assembly elections of 1985. Prafulla Kumar Mahanta served two terms as the chief minister of Assam. No one was tried or sentenced for the 2,191 people killed (the official death toll, the unofficial estimates are several times higher); all the cases were dropped after the Assam Accord was signed. The Tiwari Commission report into the massacre was never made public.

The Bombay 'riots' of December 1992 and January 1993 were, in fact, an ongoing pogrom in the wake of the Babri Masjid demolition. At least 900 people were killed. The Shiv Sena's role in inciting anti-Muslim mobs and organizing violence was reported by journalists and criticized in the report written by Justice B.N. Srikrishna. But Shiv Sena politicians and complicit policemen didn't serve time for their role in the violence. The Srikrishna report was shelved and the Shiv Sena reaped a rich political harvest soon after. In the 1995 assembly elections that followed the violence (the pogrom and the subsequent terrorist bombings organized by Muslim ganglords like Dawood Ibrahim), the Shiv Sena formed the government of Maharashtra as the senior partner in a coalition with the Bharatiya Janata Party.

The Gujarat pogrom of 2002 was initially seen by A.B. Vajpayee and some of his colleagues as politically unacceptable, but it came to be viewed as Narendra Modi's national calling card. The criticism he received for the Gujarat government's alleged complicity in the violence was deftly turned into an occasion for aggrieved Gujarati pride and the pogrom itself became something of a badge of honour, evidence of a Hindu strongman's short way with an entitled minority. The butchery in Naroda Patiya, the rapes, the systematic destruction of mosques and dargahs, the deliberate marginalization of Gujarati Muslims as treacherous aliens came to be seen as signs of nationalist virility not communal savagery. The serious allegations against Modi and Amit Shah were formally dismissed by tribunals and courts and the BJP politicians who were sent to jail had their sentences lightened by bail and parole. Most importantly, Modi won election after election in Gujarat and finally swept the 2014 general elections to become the prime minister of India, not despite the Gujarat pogrom but in large part because of it.

In the twenty years between 1983 and 2002, it is retrospectively obvious that the organized, large-scale killing of religious minorities in the name of Hindu grievance became a springboard to political power. This is not the same as arguing that in every case the killings were premeditated; it is to say, though, that politicians and political parties learn through experience and Nellie, Delhi, Bombay and Gujarat were dots on a steep learning curve. (This is not an exhaustive list. The killing of a thousand people in Bhagalpur in 1989, more than ninety per cent of whom were Muslims, was every bit as bloody as the four pogroms detailed here.)

These two decades see two sorts of lessons learnt: a) the potential of violence as both a political statement and a form of mobilization in the name of Hindu grievance and b) the impunity with which this violence could be inflicted because of the institutional bias in the civil administration and the police against minorities in general and Muslims in particular.

The point about Hindu grievance is crucial. In Assam, the grievance was illegal Bangladeshi - Bengali Muslim - immigration. This was a deeply felt issue given the huge demographic shifts that occurred in the build-up to and the aftermath of the war of 1971. The AASU leaders argued at the time that they were opposed to all illegal migrants from Bangladesh, not just Bengali Muslims, and some of them might have been sincere, but given the faith of the majority of the migrants, the conflation of Bangladeshi and Muslim was inevitable.

Also, no other migrants offer political returns of the sort that Muslims do. The migration of Bangladeshi Muslims is resisted by locals in the Northeast as a creeping transformation of their homelands. The case of Tripura is instructive in this context. Massive migration, first from East Pakistan and then Bangladesh, turned a small tribal state into a state with a large Bengali majority in the space of two decades. For aboriginal communities in the Northeast, the fate of Tripura became a cautionary tale but this 'swamping' had no political resonance because the Bengali migrants in question were overwhelmingly Hindu. Hindu migration cannot be an occasion for violence of the Nellie sort: the State wouldn't permit it.

The grievance in 1984 was two-headed: the assassination of a charismatic prime minister and the pre-history of Khalistani terrorism. It was politically possible because a communalized police force was willing to do the bidding of feral Congress politicians and Rajiv Gandhi was willing to look the other way. The importance of 'Hindu' feeling was evident again in the Bhagalpur pogrom when Rajiv Gandhi cancelled the transfer of the superintendent of police of Bhagalpur who had allowed the mobs to rampage unchecked in the face of protests from local Hindus and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad.

In 1992-93, the Shiv Sena and the BJP used the burning of the Radhabai chawl in Bombay as a provocation for violence against Muslims generally. In Gujarat, it was the burning of the railway coach and the ghastly deaths of the Hindus inside that became both the cue for the pogrom at the time and the justification for it afterwards. The politics of provocation is unequal: for a Muslim to argue that the razing of the Babri Masjid and the killing of Muslims in the wake of the vandalism were reasons enough for him to set about Hindus in his neighbourhood would be absurd, but when the roles are reversed, Hindu grievance is always plausible and violence in its name is invariably profitable.

Why have pogroms in the majoritarian cause become drivers of Indian politics over the past thirty five years? One answer is that they haven't. India's republican history is dotted with communal riots and these eruptions are just more of the same. This is clever but untrue. The scale of the violence, the complicity of the police and the administration and, most of all, the immediate political dividends that accrue represent a real change in the nature of republican politics. The reasons for that change need another column.