Hate
violence alters the course of people’s lives forever. Years, decades,
even generations pass after hate violence is unleashed on targeted
families and communities, but their suffering does not end. It divides,
impoverishes, scatters and embitters them in ways which are
imperfectlyunderstood and rarely tracked.
In September 2013, in the two districts of Muzaffarnagar and Shamli, a
toxic hate campaign—claiming that Muslim boys were enticing Jat Hindu
girls in a “love jihad”—led to violent murderous attacks on Muslim
settlements of mainly poor agricultural workers. A people who had never
fought each other in history suddenly became bitter enemies, estranged,
fearful and angry. “Not even during the Partition riots of 1947 did a
drop of blood flow in our villages,” the survivors repeatedly told the
Aman Biradari team. When the violence ended in 2013, nearly a hundred
people had died, women endured sexual violence, thousands of homes and
livelihoods were burnt down and ruined and large numbers of people had
resolved never to return to the land of theirancestors.
People of diverse faiths who live together do not spontaneously turn
upon each other. There are three essential requisites for mass communal
violence to occur. The first is the deliberate manufacture of hatred.
The second is theorganisation of the physical execution for the riot.
The third is a complicit state: no riot can continue beyond a few hours
unless the state actively wishes that it does so. The Muzaffarnagar
communal upsurge of 2013 presents striking evidence of each of these
elements combining to violently divide communities that have lived and
worked together peacefully through generations.
Communal organisations from the stables of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh (RSS) have perfected the art of manufacturing hatred against the
“other” community by cynically deploying rumour, innuendo and falsehood.
The issue chosen to demonise the “other” varies depending on what would
resonate and enrage the people concerned most in a particular location
and time of history. In Muzaffarnagar, with the patriarchal Jat
community, the issue chosen to foment hatred was women’s “honour.”
The dominant popular narrative surrounding the communal violence that
inflamed Muzaffarnagar was that the stalking of a Jat Hindu girl by a
Muslim boy spurred mass anger and retaliatory violence. This grew into a
mega-narrative of “love jihad” that suggested that this incident is
part of a larger menacing conspiracy of Muslims to target innocent
Hindu girls, both to humiliate the Hindu community and to swell their
own numbers.
It did not matter that this story of sexual harassment of a Hindu
girl by deceased Shahnawaz, a young Muslim man, is now proved a
fabrication (Sahai 2016: 29–31). After the events on 27 August 2013 in
Qawal village in Muzaffarnagar that left Shahnawaz and two Jat men,
Sachin and Gaurav, dead, police investigations confirm that following a
heated scuffle when their motorcycles hit each other, Sachin with his
cousin Gaurav and a few others went into the Muslim enclave and stabbed
Shahnawaz. Local onlookers managed to catch Sachin and Gaurav, even as
the other killers escaped. Shahnawaz was rushed to a clinic, and when
news came in that he had succumbed to his stab wounds, the crowd killed
the two Jat brothers (Kirpal 2016). In fact, the first information
report (FIR) filed by the families of the murdered Jat boys did not
mention stalking but only a motorcycle accident involving Shahnawaz and
Sachin.
Constructing a Narrative
But this account was not emotive enough to construct a narrative of
communal victimisation to foster hate. The story was spread instead that
Shahnawaz was long harassing Sachin’s sister, and to avenge this
humiliation, Sachin and Gaurav undertook the honour killing of
Shahnawaz. Thereafter, a Muslim mob lynched the brothers to death. The
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) member of the legislative assembly (MLA)
Sangeet Som uploaded a video of the mob lynching two young men in
Sialkot, Pakistan claiming that the men were Sachin and Gaurav, and the
murderous mob Muslims of Qawal (Mishra 2016). Most newspapers and
television channels relayed thisstory uncritically (and continue to do
so even today), although Som’s video was proved to be bogus, and
Sachin’s sister testified on NDTV that she did not even know Shahnawaz
(Jain 2013).
Today, the actual facts no longer matter for the Hindu residents of
western Uttar Pradesh. They hold Muslim neighbours of generations
vicariously guilty of a crime that never occurred, and of a sinister
conspiracy of “love jihad” that by any rational evaluation is a fanciful
and mischievous charge. The claim is that good-looking Muslim boys are
identified, trained in madrasas, equipped with tools for female
entrapment, including motorcycles and smartphones, and mobilised to
romantically entangle innocent Hindu girls. Their purpose is allegedly
only to convert them to Islam, use them to produce Muslim babies, and
cause them various forms of suffering. This highly improbable hate
narrative spread like a malevolent forest fire across UP, and in the May
2014 general elections helped garner an unprecedented harvest of votes
for the BJP.
The second requirement for communal violence to occur is the
organisation of the “riot” itself. Once this story had entered popular
consciousness, the next steps were easy. It was propagated that this was
not a stray incident but a larger trend—of Muslim boys in large numbers
sexually harassing Hindu girls, and indeed that this was part of a
larger sinister conspiracy of “love jihad.” Just 10 days after the
killing of the three young men in Qawal village, building on the
groundswell of local Hindu fury against their Muslim neighbours because
of their alleged deliberate assaults on the “honour” of Hindu girls, a
mahapanchayat was called with the theme
Beti Bachao (Save our
Daughters). And this paved the way for the crucial step of justifying a
retaliatory attack on all local Muslims. Fiery speeches were made
against Muslims and afterwards, the frenzied crowd dispersed and
attacked Muslim settlements. In the majority of villages, Muslims were
labourers in Jat-owned sugar cane farms. Their small houses were set
aflame and looted, some were killed, while other terrified people fled
to the safety of numbers in Muslim majority villages. Attacks on Muslim
enclaves led to nearly 100 deaths, uncounted rapes, arson, looting and
the fleeing in terror of 75,000 people.
The third prerequisite for a manufactured riot is a complicit state
administration, which fails in prevention, control, rescue and relief.
The administration took no steps to quell the rumours, arrest those
stoking hatred, or prohibit the mahapanchayat. Once violence broke out,
the police forces mostly stood watching as the crowds attacked Muslim
settlements, without using force or firing to disperse the furious mobs.
They did not rescue those trying to escape; instead survivors depended
on wealthy Muslim landowners to protect them as they fled. The
administration did not establish relief camps; instead these were
organised by the victimised community in Muslim majority villages. We
found little presence of the state in these camps: it did not provide
sanitation, healthcare, childcare or police outposts to record people’s
complaints.
Judicial Commissions and the Truth
Although catastrophic communal massacres recur from time to time, the
Indian state has never appointed truth and reconciliation commissions.
Instead, in the political heat that follows major communal and caste
massacres, governments often appoint judicial commissions of enquiry,
headed by serving or retired judges. Although commission recommendations
are not binding, their findings can, if conducted with fairness, carry
moral weight. The Justice Srikrishna Commission that investigated the
1992–93 Mumbai riots is a shining example of this. The report
established the criminal role of both the Shiv Sena and police officers
in the carnage (Menon 2013). It is another matter that successive
governments took no steps to punish those indicted by the commission,
but still the report remains a highly credible source of truth-telling.
However, for the greater part, complicit governments deploy several
devices to subvert the important democratic instrument of judicial
commissions for communal riots. The first is to appoint compliant and
ideologically compatible judges to these commissions. The second is to
delay the proceedings of the commissions inordinately. The third is to
delay placing the report of the commission in the legislature or
Parliament (often for years). As a result, the document remains a secret
and cannot beaccessed by citizens. The Gujarat government deployed all
three strategies after the 2002 carnage. It appointed a commission with
judges close to thepolitical leadership, the judges took 12 years to
present the report, and there is no sign of the report being placed
before the legislature. Therefore we have no idea what it contains.
The judicial commission headed by Justice Vishnu Sahai, appointed
after the 2013 Muzaffarnagar communal violence, submitted its report in
two years, and the state government tabled it in the legislature
expeditiously. However, a careful reading of the 776-page report
reflects how such commissions can actually subvert both truth and
justice. It legitimises the majoritarian Hindutva communal version about
the events and causes, and completely frees the political leadership
from any culpability for the violence and displacement.
The Sahai Commission report confirms that the police complaint filed
by the Jat boys’ family made no allegation of any teasing or harassment
of the Jat boys’ sister by the Muslim youth. The dispute arose instead
from a motorcycleaccident of the Muslim and Jat youths. In revenge, the
Jat boys went to Shahnawaz’s home and stabbed him to death. Angry Muslim
neighbours caught and killed the two Jat youths. The report also
accepts that the video of the two youths being killed by a mob was of a
lynching in Pakistan, and that it was mischievously circulated widely
with posts, including the one from MLA Som, claiming that the youths
being lynched mercilessly were the Jat brothers. This inflamed communal
tempers among the Jats against the Muslims. It also accepts that false
rumours were deliberately circulated before the mahapanchayat of 7
September 2013 that hundreds of Jats had been slaughtered by Muslims and
thrown into a canal, that communally provocative speeches were made in
the mahapanchayat, and that the widespread arson and slaughter of
Muslims started after this.
This should have established clearly the culpability of the BJP and
Hindutva organisations for raising communal tempers with criminally
circulated falsehoods against the local Muslims, and for the communally
charged speeches. Instead the commission chose to give equal, actually
greater, weightage to the version of the Hindu Jat majority.
The judge accepts without evidence the charge that while Shahnawaz
did not know or tease the sister of the Jat brothers, tensions were high
because Muslim youth in general did tease Jat girls. He also accepts
(again admittedly without evidence) that Muslim leaders made communally
provocative speeches, and also provoked Jats by attacking them as they
gathered in large numbers for the 7 September mahapanchayat, and after
they dispersed. He ignores the official and fact-finding reports that
the Jat mobs were raising threatening slogans asking Muslims to go to
Pakistan or the cemetery and attacking them in large numbers, and that
the few acts of violence by Muslims had to be seen in that perspective.
In this way, the commission mostly accepts and reproduces the Jat and
Hindutva narrative of what caused the Muzaffarnagar massacre.
It goes further by never once in the entire report even reflecting on
the role of the political leadership of the state government for its
criminal mishandling of the communal carnage, let alone indicting it.
Even the local administration is let off by the commission with a rap on
its knuckles for minor lapses. The commission suggests that for the
most part, the administration did all that was possible to control the
violence.
This is a shameful falsehood, entirely unbecoming of the office of a
judicial commission that is expected to fearlessly and impartially hold
up the light to the truth. With fair and decisive handling, by
forcefully quelling rumours that the Muslim youth was killed for
harassing Jat girls or that Muslims had slaughtered hundreds of Jats, by
acting firmly and fairly in arresting the killers on both sides, and by
preventing the series of panchayat gatherings that roused tofever pitch
communal tempers against the Muslims, the violence could have been
prevented. The administration did none of these. Instead, at every
stage, it tried to appease and accommodate the BJP and Hindutva
activists, and after the violence also to appease Muslim political and
religious leaders.
If judicial commissions will not tell the truth about who and what wasresponsible for communal massacres, who will?
No Relief for Survivors
Just three months after the carnage, the state government officially
terminated all relief camps, even though several thousand displaced
persons still lived in fear and dread, and were 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, by forcing them
to do so inMuzaffarnagar by closing the camps prematurely, thousands of
people were left without even the meagre food and health support that
the government had extended in the camps.
Contrary to claims of the state government that all camps emptied
months after the carnage, we found over 10,000 women, men and children
still living in unofficial camps in around 25 villages one year after
the carnage. Even in the immediate months after the conflagration, in
many camps state support was restricted to food supplies or a few
blankets. Only after national outrage following the death of many
children in the winter cold, were there occasional visits by medical
teams. Thereafter even this became a distant memory. Charitable
organisations, mainly faith-based Muslim associations, also closed their
offices: compassion also tires. The unhappy people—fugitives from the
hate which pervades the villages of their birth—were left to fend for
themselves. They had just survived the monsoon showers, and endured
three long winters in camps under plastic sheets.
In these camps, people subsisted mainly by working as casual labour
in the surrounding fields, and in the numerous brick kilns that dot the
landscape. But they reported much lower wages than prevailing rates, as
employers knew of their misfortunes and desperation. Besides, they also
had to compete with local labour. They still had to beg landlords for
loans, to cope with illness and hunger, and if they were lucky they got a
few thousand rupees at twice the already usurious interest rates, 10%
compound per month. “Who knows when you might run away with our money?”
reasoned the landlords. Many children dropped out of school, sometimes
because teachers refused to admit them or sometimes even taunted them
but more often because they had to labour to light the kitchen fires of
their families.
Three distinct trajectories were visible for populations who escaped
their homelands. First were residents of villages in which locals
suddenly turned upon their Muslim neighbours with daggers, country
rifles and flaming torches. People still recount with pain and disbelief
the cruelty with which old people and children were slaughtered, women
gang-raped and homes destroyed. Their houses were plundered and torched,
often by young men, who had been like sons and brothers, and by revered
village elders. Hopes of ever returning to the villages of their birth
crumbled when no one from their villages sought them out to offer solace
and comfort or to urge them toreturn home.
The state government announced a grant of ₹5 lakh for each household
only in villages that were attacked, on the condition that they would
not return to their original villages. We believe that this represents
an utterly bankrupt state policy with communal underpinnings, one that
has no precedents in past communal riots. The duty of the state was to
restore mutual faith and trust between communities to enable their
return instead of tacitly incentivising religious segregation. As a
result, the norm of centuries—of mixed villages in which Hindu and
Muslim residents lived in amity side by side—was abandoned in favour of
segregation of populations on religious lines, the ultimate success of
the communal agenda. That this was done with state support is
particularly distressing.
Displaced villagers left behind a great deal in the villages of their
birth; houses where they were born and raised, settled livelihoods,
life savings, friends of a lifetime, and most of all trust in people of
divergent faiths. Their adopted villages were far from welcoming. In
their desperation, Muslim landowners saw the chance for windfall
profits. They carved out and sold small house-plots at sometimes four
times the price before the carnage. Refugees spent all their
compensation money to buy small sites for their houses at these
extortionist prices, and took loans at usurious interest rates of up to
10% per month
compound to build modest brick houses. Many carried
loans from before theyescaped their villages, which they took care to
also return. The administration did little to pressurise those who set
up these colonies to fulfil their basic obligations to supply most
fundamental amenities of internal roads, drainage, water supply and
electrification.
The new settlers searched desperately for work, in exploitative
brick-kilns, or as casual labour on farms or building sites, or in petty
house-to-house trade. The brick kilns entailed near-bondage, whereas
petty-trading required further high-interest private loans. All this
amidst the festering pain of betrayal by their former neighbours and
aggravated by unwelcoming discrimination by original inhabitants in
their new villages. The predicament of these refugees from communal
hate demonstrated once again that sharing the same religious identity is
no guarantee of social solidarity.
A second category of affected households was of villagers who were
notattacked by their neighbours, but who still fled because they could
no longer trust their neighbours in Muslim-minority villages. Muslim
residents of a large number of villages, not just from Muzaffarnagar and
Shamli, but even surrounding districts of Meerut, Saharanpur, Baghpat
and Hapur also fled their homes in fear of attacks, lived in camps not
recognised or supported by the state government for one to two years,
and have finally gone to mostly self-settled colonies in Muslim-majority
villages. Their quandary was that the state government does not regard
them to be “affected” by the communal carnage, therefore they did not
qualify for even a rupee of compensation.
The last category was of households that ran away when neighbouring
villages were set aflame and yet agreed to return after persuasion by
the state government. We visited many of these villages. Muslim
residents everywhere said that it was only a matter of time when they
would raise enough money to also leave forever. Social relations between
communities had collapsed to such adegree that women in burqas and men
in beards were routinely taunted, and none were invited for weddings and
funerals, a dramatic reversal of co-living before 2013.
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. Many men testified that if they went back to
their villages, they were told to cut off their beards if they wished to
live in their village. People also reported similar hate exchanges in
buses and public spaces. Three young men were killed when they went to
work in their fields (
Tehelka 2013). Sporadic incidents of sexual
assault were also reported (Human Rights Watch 2013). 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 (Ali
2015).
Few Arrests or Convictions
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 often displayed communal biases. 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 showing the accused as “unknown
persons.”
Even after a year of the carnage, only 800 people were arrested, and
most of them 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 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 block village
roads? This allegation was difficult to verify independently, but no
self-respecting police administration could accept these public block to
persist when they came in the way of fulfilling their official duties.
It did not help that this “inefficiency” was selective. In the two
episodes of killings in Qawal village that set off the hate violence,
the Muslim men accused of killing the Jat cousins were duly arrested and
charge-sheeted. However, police closed the case related to the murder
of the Muslim boy Shahnawaz, claiming that no one is alive who killed
him. However, many eye-witnesses confirmed that the Jat cousins were
accompanied by many other men who participated in the murder but
escaped. Shahnawaz’s father has appealed against this final report. His
appeal is pending at the time ofwriting.
Only three of the 25 men accused in six cases of gang rape were held.
“I will carry this shame for all my life, but not one (of the men who
raped her) is in jail,” a 25-year old woman of villageFugana said to
Betwa Sharma, reporter for
Al Jazeera (Sharma 2014). Another
added sadly, “We are poor, another year will pass without arrests, and
then we will be forgotten.” Given the disgraceful record of the police
so far in apprehending those charged with grave hate crimes, her
pessimism is understandable. In one rape case, all the accused men have
been acquitted; in another even 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 in the same villages, either
evading arrest or on bail, they can 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 theIndian Penal Code
(IPC). Most of them did not even see the inside of a jail.
Several persons killed during the carnage were not considered as dead
because of murders related to the riots, as a result of which their
families were not given any compensation and employment as state
reparation. Still, around 18 people are declared “missing.” Their FIRs
were registered under murder or attempt to murder sections of the IPC,
but no decisive action was taken by the state government to find them or
their killers.
There were also other distressing signs of judicial bias, because
mostarrested 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 thesurvivors to intimidation because of their
vulnerable situation after mass targeted violence has spurred
large-scale fear,destruction of livelihoods andhabitats and migration.
In five cases of heinous violent crimes the accused have beenacquitted.
Triumph of Politics of Hatred
More than two years after the carnage, BJP member of Parliament Hukam
Singh stirred a nationwide controversy by claiming that more than 300
Hindus had been forced to leave the Muslimmajority urbanised village
Kairana in Shamli district because of extortion, threats and violence by
criminals of the Muslim community. He was forced to backtrack when
investigations confirmed that many in his list were dead, or had left
the village 10 years earlier in search of better schooling or jobs (
Indian Express
2016). It is remarkable therefore that the forced exodus of several
thousand Muslims after the communal carnage of September 2013 from Hindu
majority villages because of violence and fear in Shamli and
Muzaffarnagar has attracted little public attention, and even less
outrage, even though this represents a triumph of the politics of hatred
and division and a grave betrayal of the constitutional guarantee of
fraternity.
“There is nothing, nothing which can persuade us to return to our
villages. They burned and looted our homes: we could barely save our
lives, as we desperately ran with our children in our arms and just the
clothes we were wearing on our backs. What is there for us to return
to?” Words we hear over and over through the districts of Muzaffarnagar
and Shamli, after the storm of hate overnight tore this peaceful
countryside apart.
As we travelled from village to village in these two districts,
everywhere we bore witness to a social landscape ravaged by this
communal hate, just three years old, but already settled like the
crusted burden of generations. An old man said sadly, “No one has come
to call us back, not the village elders, nor people we grew up and
worked with.” “No village cricket team was complete without a Muslim lad
or two,” said another. “And now they don’t care if we live or die.”
“Look at this place in which we live now,” said a third, pointing to
leaking, soiled plastic sheets stretched overbamboo sticks affording
each family a few square feet of minimal shelter, surrounded by black
cesspools and mosquitoes. “We know we can die here as well. But at least
here we are assured that our loved ones will bury us. Not like
ourvillage where our people were killed and burned.”
By the third year, this expulsion from their homelands has become
permanent. The 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, or attempts at justice, these hapless
people were unable to return to their villages. 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.
The indifference of the state government is reflected also in the
fact that there is no official record of these mostly self-settled
colonies, let alone official plans to ensure that they are able toaccess
basic public goods and citizenship entitlements. Therefore AmanBiradari
and Afkar India Foundation undertook a comprehensive survey of these
new settlements of internallydisplaced persons.
With mounting astonishment andanguish, we ultimately discovered as
many as 65 refugee colonies, 28 in Muzaffarnagar and 37 in Shamli,
housing 29,328 residents, described in our report
Living Apart
(Mander et al 2016). Even this does not represent the total number of
people, displaced by the hate violence, who could never return to the
villages of their birth. Uncounted populations bought houses or rented
homes in existing Muslim settlements, or permanently migrated out of
these districts or even the state. We estimate that the mass communal
violence led ultimately to at least 50,000 people being permanently
expelled from their villages as haterefugees, of which 30,000 were in
these 65 new refugee colonies.
Among the 28 colonies in Muzaffarnagar, 19 are inhabited by people
directly affected by the riots while the other nine colonies have a
mixed population of those directly affected and those who fled due to
fear of violence. Twenty-one of these colonies are in rural areas, while
seven are in urban areas. Among the 37 colonies in Shamli, 18 have
people directly affected by the riots while 19 have a mixed population.
Of these, 26 are in rural areas while 11 are inurban areas.
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 theseefforts of the
refugees to begin a new life. Apart from a ₹5 lakh 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.
Figure 1
shows the ways of funding foracquisition of lands for houses in
Muzaffarnagar while Figure 2 shows the same for Shamli district. Part
support in many colonies came from mostly Muslimorganisations. One of
the heart-warming exceptions was Sadbhawana Trust, which assisted 230
households to design their houses and choose their neighbours in Apna
Ghar colony. And in the only initiative by a political party, the
Communist Party of India (Marxist)—
CPI(M)
gave ₹1 lakh to displaced households in Ekta Nagar. The support
ofMuslim organisations often came with strings attached, such as forcing
residents to adhere to more orthodoxbeliefs, or refusing to give land
titles to the residents. Muslim charities collected donations from
Indian Muslims overseas for a few colonies, but mostly refuse to give
them land titles. The misfortune of the displaced people mounted because
on some occasions unscrupulous touts, sadly from the Muslim community
itself, charged the residents for the land and houses.
Only in 15 colonies in Muzaffarnagar and 26 colonies in Shamli did
all residents have titles to land and houses. In 41 of the 65 colonies
across both districts, three years after the riots, households are still
unable to build houses and instead live in makeshift houses with
plastic roofs and temporary walls. In others, with grants, personal
labour but also loans fromprivate moneylenders, they have been able to
build all-weather brick houses, though these are modest and small.
The survey highlights the neglect and apathy of the state with little
evidence of any meaningful public provisioning. The developers or the
government rarelyinvested in drinking water, sewerage, drainage or
electricity, and the district administration at most installed a
handpump. Therefore typically, these colonies completely lack basic
infrastructure and public services. In Muzaffarnagar, 82% colonies do
not have clean drinking water, 93% no street lighting, 61% no drainage
and not a single colony has a public toilet (
Figures 3 and 4).
In Shamli, 97% colonies lack drinking water, 76% street lights, 70% drainage and 97% colonies have no public toilets (
Figures 5 and 6, p 45).
Education and childcare services are badly hit in these colonies.
Conflict pushed children out of school into the workforce or early
marriages. But in more than half the colonies in Muzaffarnagar, and
two-thirds in Shamli, there is no primary school within a kilometre of
the colony. Less than a quarter of the colonies have Integrated Child
Development Services (ICDS) centres. In not a single colony do people
have Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA)
job cards. In Muzaffarnagar, in 27 out of 29 colonies, no one has a
ration card. In both districts, virtually no one receives old age, widow
or disability pension. Samajwadi pension, started after 2013, is
available to only few households in seven colonies across both
districts.
A Sombre Homecoming
In this way, only around a third of the people who ran away in fear
after theattacks on Muslim villages three years ago returned home, the
remainder migrated out of the state, or rented or bought houses in
Muslim majority settlements, or established and moved in large numbers
into these new colonies in Muslim habitations. But it was a sombre
homecoming for the minority who did return. They arrived to homelands in
which they are no longer friends and neighbours but hated “others,”
suddenly unwelcome at festivals and weddings. Taunts and barbs have
become commonplace in the region, and young men are particularly
discourteous, pulling beards and heckling women in burkhas. Social
hatred has replaced traditions of shared living that endured all of
living memory. Consequently, many who return are saving to buy land and
ultimately move to Muslim villages.
Rural riots are very different from urban ones, because people know
their attackers in the former, unlike in the relative anonymity of
cities. The sense of betrayal and loss, and the associated anger, pain
and bitterness generally runs much deeper in rural riots. As one
survivor, who continued to live in a makeshift unofficial camp for
nearly two years, remarked to us, “Houses can be built again. But when
faith is broken, it is very hard for this to be rebuilt.”
Before the violence, residents in this agriculturally prosperous
region saw themselves first as farmers and farm workers, then as
members of certain castes, and only after this as persons of different
religions. The region wasdistinct for its farmer-led politics, and
Gujjar and Jat farmers, both Hindu and Muslim, shared strong political
andsocial solidarities. Today all of this has crumbled, and cleavages of
religiousdifference have erased all other solidarities of class and
caste that marked this region during the many decades since
independence.
These divided populations represent the triumph of communal
politics,successfully undoing histories of shared living between Hindus
and Muslims in the region over centuries. This emulates the “Gujarat
model”, now unleashed on Uttar Pradesh, which deploys communal violence
and hate to drive out and “cleanse” entire villages of their erstwhile
Muslim residents. These strategies of engineered social hate continue to
yield a rich harvest of votes of polarised populations. But new
generations of Hindus and Muslims will be raiseddeprived of friends and
neighbours of the “other” community. This will render them much more
amenable to communal politics, eroding ultimately the idea of India
itself.
References
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Human Rights Watch (2013): “India: In Aftermath of Riots, Support Sexual Assault Victims,” 7October,
https://www.hrw.org/news/2013/10/07/india-aftermath-riots-support-sexual....
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http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/kairana-exodus-b....
Jain, Sreenivasan (2013): “The Mystery of Kawwal: Were Muzaffarnagar Riots Based on Distortion of Facts?,” NDTV, 14 September,
http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/the-mystery-of-kawwal-were-muzaffarnagar-....
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http://centreforequitystudies.org/report-of-muzaffarnagar-inquiry-commis....
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Firstpost, 16 September,
http://www.firstpost.com/politics/muzaffarnagar-riots-how-bjp-sp-and-bsp....
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Hindu, 20 March,
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/two-decades-on-the-inconvenient-tr....
Mishra, Subhash (2016): “Old Taliban Video Uploaded by Som Fanned UP Violence,”
Times of India, 8 March,
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Old-Taliban-video-uploaded-by-S....
Sharma, Betwa (2014): “Justice Eludes Indian Rape Victims,”
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