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)
Communal violence is a structural given
of Indian society. In seventy-odd years of independence, hardly a
season has passed without murderous attacks on vulnerable castes and
religious minorities—crimes that generally go unprosecuted. Even pogroms
have a long history here. In Delhi in November 1984, nearly three
thousand Sikhs (official figures peg it at 2,300) were butchered in just
three days, as mobs incited by leaders of the Congress Party engulfed
the city in the wake of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination.
Though the scale of the carnage was different, there are parallels
between the events of 1984 and the horrific attacks on Muslims in
northeast Delhi last month. In both cases, the state remained a
bystander, while the perpetrators—drawn largely from among the foot
soldiers of the ruling party—were allowed to wreak mayhem. However, in
the state-led dominant discourse, the “de-nationalization” of the Sikhs
had begun earlier, to counter the Khalistan movement for a separate Sikh
homeland that had erupted in the 1970s. The movement gained sizeable
support among the Sikh youth after Indian army’s Operation Blue Star
(1984) to flush out militants from the Golden Temple collaterally
resulted in killing of a huge number of pilgrims and destruction of the
shrine. When the prime minister was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards
as an act of revenge, the Congress Party flagrantly communalized
matters. Eliminating a Sikh body was made into a kind of “national
cause”—a means, no matter how grotesque, to reaffirm one’s patriotism.
The Delhi attacks likewise come in the wake of mass protests, with a proud and visible Muslim presence, against 2019’s Citizenship Amendment Act
(CAA), which introduces a religious qualification for citizenship,
offering undocumented migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and
Afghanistan a route to naturalization, provided they are not Muslim. (In
this it resembles the Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany and Law of Return
of Zionist Israel). The CAA, coupled with the currently stalled National
Register of Citizens, threatens to deprive a large section of India’s
Muslims, now forced to scramble to find the right “papers,” of their
citizenship entitlements. It represents yet another step in the ruling
Bhartiya Janata Party’s decades-long campaign to denationalize Muslims.
The powerful civilian resistance evidently upset the government. “Bharat
Mata ki jai” (Glory to Mother India) and “Jai Sri Ram” (Glory to Lord
Ram) reverberated in the air as armed Hindu men went around in the third
week of February, punishing Indian Muslims for their opposition to Mr.
Modi’s diktat.
The violence began on February 23, 2020, and continued unabated for
the next two days: as stone pelting and intermittent skirmishes between
pro and anti-CAA factions gave way to targeted attacks by armed Hindu
gangs on Muslim lives, their homes, petty establishments, mosques, and
madrasas. Credible accounts confirm that the marauders were allowed a
free run and were even given an occasional helping hand by the police,
arguably making the state complicit in the violence. Video images now
floating across social media platforms capture the callousness of the
officials and the participation of a section of the constabulary. Not a
single shot was fired to restrain the mobs, even though the dead include
a policeman.
For most of Delhi’s middle-class
residents, the violence seemed to be happening at a distance,
perpetrated on a shadowy populace who deserved it.
The slaughter strangely coincided with the state visit of President
Donald Trump to the city—it was his interactions with Modi, not the mob
attacks, that India’s television stations chose to cover—which now
serves as an alibi for the city police to explain its state of inertia.
As of this writing, the death toll has exceeded fifty, with several
still missing, and many killings may remain unreported. Scores of others
have been left brutalized, with severed limbs, gunshot wounds, acid
burns, lost livelihoods, and scarred memories. (A fraction of those
killed and injured are Hindu residents, as well.) Reports make it clear
that this was a premeditated terror attack, not an impulsive outburst.
The Northeast district of Delhi, the main theater of violence, is a
working-class neighborhood that has endured years of neglect and suffers
from a scarcity of amenities. Nearly one third of its population are
Muslims who either are daily wage earners or work in the low-paid,
unauthorized sweatshops that dot the area’s congested lanes. There are
others who over the years were able to establish their own shops,
businesses, and trades—many of which were gutted in this communal fury.
The Northeast never features in representations of Delhi as a global
city. The miserable Muslim poor have been entirely removed from the
dreamworld of the middle class, an economic and spiritual apartheid
whose depth was made evident by the shocking indifference with which a
majority of Delhi-ites ignored this public pogrom. While the capital’s
northeast district was burning, for the rest of the city-dwellers it was
business as usual. Offices, shops, footfall in the malls and the
theaters, schools and colleges, traffic snarls—the ingrained routines of
metropolitan life remained unaffected. For most of Delhi’s middle-class
residents, the violence seemed to be happening at a distance,
perpetrated on a shadowy populace who probably deserved it.
This is not to suggest that middle-class Hindus have no culpability
in what happened. For years they have been perpetrating hate from their
living rooms and offices, spreading a continuous flow of venomously
anti-Muslim online material: distorted images, rabid speeches, and
disinformation meant to keep the pot boiling. Even as Muslims were being
killed on the streets, WhatsApp groups of old schoolmates, resident
welfare associations, citizen groups, and sundry other groups
participated in the virtual propaganda war, tacitly registering their
participation in the kill-fest. This cocktail of apparent apathy, even
callousness, and hateful online messaging shows the extent to which
majoritarianism has come to shape ordinary Indian/Hindu selves.
The BJP’s thumping victory in the general elections last year
reflects the consolidation of right-wing hegemony in India. The party
initially rose to prominence in the late 1980s, when it took up the
cause of building a Ram temple in place of historic Babri mosque at
Ayodhya (this is known as the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign). The eventual
demolition of the mosque in December 1992, a crime in which several BJP
leaders were implicated, only cemented the party’s newfound popularity
among Hindus. The period also coincided with the liberalization of the
country’s economy and the consequent expansion of the urban middle
class, who became the BJP’s social base. Since then the party has
advanced a two-pronged strategy—pathological nationalism that survives
on minority-baiting on the one hand, and a fanatical neoliberal
commitment to economic developmentalism on the other—that has come to
find wider favor in the country, among both the affluent and the
impoverished. Asad Ashraf
Yet it would be a mistake to measure the BJP’s power in purely
electoral terms. Its ultimate aim has always been to reconfigure
India—which is nominally a secular, democratic country—along principles
of racial purity, religious nationalism, and ethnically differentiated
citizenship. In pursuing these goals, through both political and
cultural projects, the party has brought about an astonishing change to
Indian society, weakening governmental institutions, unleashing communal
demons, eroding the rule of law. Today it would be at best a half-truth
to describe India as a constitutional republic: for foundational ideas
of democracy, freedom, and justice have been turned upside down.
Vigilante groups and lynch mobs are free to kill Muslims and instill
fear in the community. BJP leaders are allowed to openly spew hate
speech, even calling for violence on the Muslim community. Television
media parrots and amplifies the government’s communal line. In courts,
justice has come to mean reparation for imagined historical wrongs on
the Hindu community. For instance, last year the Supreme Court ruled
that a Ram Temple should be built on the site of the Babri mosque.
The speed with which India has embraced such virulent forms of
Islamophobia cannot be explained by the BJP’s propaganda alone. The
party has taken root in soil that was already communalized. The loyalty
of Muslims, India’s largest minority, has been held suspect in the
majoritarian narratives ever since Independence and partition of the
subcontinent in 1947. Equating religion with a form of a nationality,
Hindu nationalist thinkers have presented Muslims as a fifth column for
Pakistan.
Yet this portrayal of Muslims predates Partition. Its origins go at
least as far back as the nineteenth century, when a modern “Hindu”
consciousness was being forged in the crucible of colonialism. Drawing
on British orientalist historiography, which presented Islam as a
“foreign” religion, Hindu reformist thinkers came to imagine the modern
nation of “India” as a spiritual homeland for Hindus, besieged by
foreigners both European and Muslim. Over time they developed a baroque,
hoary mythology about the so-called Muslim conquest, focused on the
forceful abduction, violation, and conversion of Hindu women by Muslim
men. In the early twentieth century, as colonial institutions based on
communal representation were opened to the natives, a panic around
shrinking numerical strength, not to mention physical and political
potency, became entrenched in the Hindu nationalist imaginary.
This form of “othering” has found its most virulent expression in the
discourse of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the cultural outfit
which essentially controls the BJP. Founded in 1925 in Nagpur by a group
of upper-caste Brahmins, and explicitly modelled on Mussolini’s fascist
party, it is the oldest, largest, and arguably the most successful
far-right group in the world today. The RSS instills in its cadre a
ferocious hatred of Muslims, who are viewed as a barbaric internal
enemy—fanatically driven by the sword, hypersexual, and bearers of
divided loyalties. Writing in 1939, one of the organization’s longest
serving chiefs, M.S. Golwalkar, laid down the conditions under which the
Muslim could be accepted into India: they would be “wholly subordinated
to the Hindu nation claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less
any preferential treatment, not even citizen’s right.”
For the RSS, stereotyping and demonizing of the Muslim has served the
equally important purpose of cementing the Hindu nation, beleaguered as
it is by its own internal segments of hierarchically organized caste
groups, cults, and sects. V. D. Savarkar, perhaps the most influential
Hindutva ideologue, spelled this idea out in his 1923 tract, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu,
a founding document for the far-right Hindu movement: “Nothing makes
[the] Self conscious of itself so much as a conflict with non-self.
Nothing can weld peoples into a nation and nations into a state as the
pressure of a common foe.”
The Hindu right remained politically marginalized for the first four
or so decades of Indian independence. Yet during this period, the RSS
spread its communal venom at the grassroots level, indoctrinating youth
at its schools, spiritual camps, and “shakhas,” or training units in
villages and towns across the country. (The Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a
cultural organization that provides the shock troops for the RSS, also
participated in numerous communal attacks across the country.) Things
changed in 1990, when L. K Advani—a RSS graduate and the then BJP
president—embarked on a Rath yatra (roughly “chariot
pilgrimage”), traveling with followers across North India, holding
politico-religious rallies at which he exhorted Hindu youth to join the
Ram Janmabhumi campaign.
Advani’s Rath Yatra, which left a trail of communal killings and
destruction in its wake, was finally abandoned when he was detained in
Bihar by the state’s secular chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav. But by
that time his task had been more or less achieved—the forging of a new
Hindu public for whom secularism, a constitutional guarantee, was
reinscribed as minority appeasement towards Muslims. Indoctrinated into
the Hindutva ideology, right-wing Hindus began to demand sovereignty of
faith over state in matters related to Hindu religiosity. In this
pernicious new discourse, any advance in the protection of minority
cultures or demands of parity between Hindus and Muslims came to be
dismissed as “pseudo-secularism” (this remains a popular term of abuse
in right-wing Indian circles).
The persistence of communal violence in India has prompted two broad
responses from liberal intellectuals, neither of them really
satisfactory. One school, comprised largely of Gandhian and other
anti-modernist thinkers, has come to question the very efficacy of
secularism in the Indian context, underscoring—more or less—the
concept’s foreignness. It is unreasonable, these thinkers argue, to
expect the Indian masses to cast aside their religious attachments.
Instead, they seek to recover an “ancient” tradition of authentically Indian
tolerance, rooted in religiosity yet simultaneously secular, which they
offer as an antidote to rising fanaticism. The weaknesses of this
position are self-evident. In the first place, the “Indian tolerance”
narrative is based on an idyllic past which never existed; episodes of
communal violence, as historians like Christopher Bayly have showed,
occurred even in pre-colonial India. More perniciously, this
anti-secular argument caters to the Hindutva theory that Hindus are an
innately “tolerant” people, led astray (probably by the bloodthirstiness
of Abrahamic faiths). Indeed, the anti-modernists offered a counter
politics uneasily reminiscent of nineteenth century Hindu cultural
rejuvenation.
The police and security apparatus of
the state has viewed minorities—be it Muslims, Dalits, Sikhs, or
Adivasis (Indigenous people)—as the nation’s demonic other.
The other response comes from modernists and left-wing intellectuals,
who insisted on a stricter application of the principles of secularism.
They endorse something akin to the French practice of laïcité—an
equidistance from all religions, a wall of separation between church
and state, and the idea of a rootless, abstract citizenship. Under the
cover of neutrality, however, this modernist approach frowns upon
minority protection—such as affirmative action for Muslims and separate
marriage laws— condemning these as illiberal and divisive. In an
unfortunate way, this attitude too resonates with the Hindutva critique
of the “pseudo-secular” state.
In any case, such discussions were largely limited to academia. Since
independence, the Indian state’s actions have been governed by
pragmatic considerations, rather than any lofty secular or
constitutional principles. The Congress Party and other secular parties,
which have ruled India for much of the past seventy-odd years, blended
elements of both the contesting views: without really giving up on
majoritarian rhetoric, they kept hopes in the system alive for the
minorities. Thus, every incidence of violence against
minorities, was almost invariably followed by institution of Inquiry
Commissions, pronouncements of compensations, and assurances of
justice—seldom if ever met. In sum, the Congress regime practiced a kind
of ambivalent secularism, a half-hearted commitment, that made symbolic
gestures towards the minorities when in distress while condoning
communal violence at the ground level.
Worse still, entrusted with the task of securing the nation, the
police and security apparatus of the state has viewed minorities—be it
Muslims, Dalits, Sikhs, or Adivasis (Indigenous people)—as the nation’s
demonic other, essentially sharing the attitude of the criminals they
are tasked with restraining. The record of state complicity in communal
violence is long and dismal. In Moradabad in 1980, the police opened
indiscriminate fire on protesting namazis at an Eidgah leaving hundreds
dead; in Hashimpura in 1987, police rounded up forty-two innocent men,
and their decomposed bodies were fished out later from an irrigation
canal; in Bhagalpur in 1989, violence raged on unabated for nearly two
months, and the needle of suspicion pointed to the top brass of the city
police, who delayed filing of First Information Reports (FIRs) against
the real criminals, then filed FIRs against unknown persons—even when
perpetrators were recognized by victims—conducted shoddy investigations,
thus ensuring impunity; the Srikrishna Commission Report set up to
investigate the Mumbai “riots” that followed the demolition of the Babri
Masjid in December 1992, listed eleven incidents in which thirty-one
police officers were found actively participating in violence targeting
Muslim residents. And this is not even considering police complicity in
the caste atrocities and land-grabs of Adivasi territory that are the
ambient violence of modern India.
The malevolent pragmatism of the Congress Party has now given way to a
more full-blooded, and brash majoritarianism under the BJP. We were
given a taste of the BJP’s “handling” of communal violence in 2002, when
the state of Gujarat, then overseen by Chief Minister Narendra Modi,
witnessed a horrific, protracted anti-Muslim pogrom—an event widely
understood as marking a turning point in Indian politics. The trouble is
said to have begun when fifty-odd Karsevaks (RSS activists), returning
from Ayodhya where they had been agitating for the Ram temple, were
mysteriously burnt to death inside a train. This incident is supposed to
have provoked three months of retributive attacks against Muslims, a
reign of terror and unspeakable barbarism that left nearly two thousand
dead, besides numerous others injured and uprooted.
The malevolent pragmatism of the
Congress Party has now given way to a more full-blooded, and brash
majoritarianism under the BJP.
Accounts of police officials and findings by citizen’s groups
highlight how the rioters were allowed to take their revenge on ordinary
Muslims. Indeed, this was probably the first time in modern India that
the state made no pretense of neutrality and impartiality
during the orgy of rape and killing. All through the pogrom, local
police either watched as bystanders, or actively participated in the
crimes, while the central reserve were prevented from deploying. In
terms of logistics and mechanics of violence, Delhi in 2020 mirrors what
was seen and observed in Gujarat in 2002. In both cases, the attacks
were sophisticated—gas cylinders, usually in short supply, were aplenty
and produced in advanced, used to burn down shops, houses, mosques and
schools. Then as now mobs moved into the lanes and bylanes of localities
with diverse populations, and with near immaculate precision, were able
to distinguish what was Muslim from that which was not—which rebuffs
the argument that the violence was spontaneous.
In the aftermath of the Gujarat brutality, Modi’s state government
came down heavily on Muslims accused of burning down the train carrying
RSS activists, trying them under the freshly minted anti-terror law,
POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act). By contrast, the Hindus accused of
arson and killing, on the other, attracted the provisions of ordinary
Indian Penal Code. Muslims, who by far made up the majority of victims,
were being framed as perpetrators simply on the basis of their religion.
The BJP response this time around has been more galling, if that is
at all possible. After the killings in Delhi, there was not even the fig
leaf of posturing from the ruling party: no imperative to assuage
memories of brutalities, no assurance of reparations, little talk of
relief camps for victims. Home minister Amit Shah’s remarks about the
attacks in Parliament was illuminating. He offered no community
segregated figures of death and destruction, placed the burden of
igniting and inflaming violence on Muslim activists and anti-CAA
protesters, and spared even a mention of leaders from the Hindutva camp,
many of whom were caught on camera making incendiary speeches. In a
nutshell, the BJP government imputed that Muslims inflicted violence
upon themselves, as they did on some Hindus. Shah assured the Indian
people that the perpetrators would be made to pay for their
intransigence.
Riots in India have been typically followed by efforts to displace
blame. And when the victims of violence are disproportionately Muslim,
as is usually the case, attempts are made to justify the perpetrators’
crimes. “Every action has its reaction,” Modi infamously declared in
2002, implicitly blaming the Muslims for the savagery unleashed on them,
while also subtly making a case that the Hindu violence was a just and spontaneous response.
Even mainstream politicians and commentators tend to occlude history
when discussing communal attacks, reducing events to their immediate
trigger: whether it is an allegation of cow slaughter, sacrilege of some
kind, or an innocuous flare-up involving members of the two communities
(from the early history of Hindu-Muslim violence, the nodes of
incitement, which implicitly lay the blame on Muslims, have remained
virtually unchanged.) A new paranoia of the Hindu right is “love jihad,”
the idea that Muslim men lure innocent Hindu women into romantic
relationships, and by extension, into global jihad (though this also
reworks the staple of Hindutva trope of hypersexual Muslims). Yogi
Adityanath, the BJP monk turned Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, called
upon Hindu youth to entice a hundred Muslim women for each reported case
of “love jihad.” Such narratives, invoking fear, terror, and horror of
the other, are the routine precursors to conflict, a match that sets off
a familiar flame.
The very sight of a Muslim has become an anathema to the Hindutva consciousness.
What is novel about the Delhi pogrom is that there was no
identifiable trigger, though the BJP has made some efforts to concoct
excuses in retrospect. After all, the anti-CAA protests, despite
innumerable provocations (including threats from gun-wielding
vigilantes) have remained adamantly peaceful. Constitutionalism has been
celebrated; portraits of the document’s architect, Dr. Ambedkar,
adorned the walls of various protest sites—a display which exposed the
thinness of right-wing commitment to constitutional values. The
protestors also have felt compelled to reaffirm their own
patriotism, decking various occupations with the national flag, which
amounted to breaking up the BJP’s vile monopoly over national
allegiance.
But for the killers, who set out in the garb of pro-CAA protesters,
such gestures meant little. No amount of patriotism would douse their
blinding fury. No symbol of constitutionalism was sacred in their eyes.
And indeed in India today, no longer do terrible crimes need be
attributed to the Muslim to legitimate her brutalization. And no amount
of structural humiliation—incarcerations, disenfranchisement, relentless
economic marginalization—will satiate the Hindu right’s bloodthirst.
The very sight of a Muslim has become an anathema to the Hindutva
consciousness. It would appear the long-drawn project aimed at
weaponizing the supposedly “Hindu nation” is at last complete.
Tanweer Fazal is professor of Sociology at University of Hyderabad.
He works and writes on subjects of nationalism, community formation,
minority rights, and collective violence. He is the author of ‘Nation-state’ and Minority Rights in India: Comparative Perspectives of Muslim and Sikh Identities (London; Routledge, 2015), Minority Nationalisms in South Asia (ed. London: Routledge, 2012) and The Minority Conundrum: Living in Majoritarian Times (Delhi: Penguin, 2020)
