Rightly so, you find here stories of people who have been misguided by police right into the hands of the rioting mobs; the complacency of state authorities to punish the perpetrators and protect the victims; mass burning; and mass electrocuting. Everyone speaks of the plunder and pillage being organized like a military operation, as if against an external armed enemy. A truck arrives to the spot initially broadcasting inflammatory slogans; followed by groups of men young and old also women in uniforms, fully armed with weapons from crowbars to kerosene/petrol bombs and other inflammable materials like LPG cylinders, chemicals. They are accompanied by leaders with computerized sheets of the minority homes, worship places and properties and field operators with mobile phones. The rest carryout the orders received in style.
Nearly a decade has gone by since the Gujarat pogrom and half a decade since the Kandhamal communal violence nothing much has changed the pitiable conditions of the victims, who live in their ghettoes and makeshift camps (rehabilitation camps). With pressure to exist camps by the government on the one side and threat not to return to their homelands (native villages) on the other they have become inland unwelcome refugees. But for the pride of the communalists to have ‘cleansed themselves’ of the minority who belong to religions different from their own, there is no move towards reconciliation i.e. acknowledgement, remorse, reparation and justice. Further, a climate of hostility and ‘social and economic boycott’ make their living difficult, painful and fearful. Living with economic boycott is hard enough, much harder is to walk down the village street each day when no one greets you nor welcomes you to their houses. There are borders within the places (in Gujarat and in Kandhamal district) the divide is between communalists’ settlements and the victims’ ghettos (usually poor relief camps or recently built colonies). The former deliberately distance themselves from the latter, the demonized other. This is clear in the case of Muslims who are easily branded as ‘terrorists’ and ‘immorals’. The victims with nothing more to lose adapt themselves to the enforced second-class citizenship! Everything is done because they worship a different God. This is communalism.
The Concept
Communalism the term can be understood with a little bit of imagination. Imagine suddenly you find a throng of thousand men, women and youngsters of this locality surround Becchi-Don Bosco shouting anti-Christian slogans, breaking open our main doors, throwing petrol bombs, acids across, quickly construct scaffoldings to enter through our first floor to vandalize and loot our community – persons and properties – armed with weapons from axes, daggers, swords, guns to lathis and hammers. Meanwhile our desperate attempt to seek the aid of the local police reaches deaf ears, finally we have but left with one choice either to succumb to the violent mob or to jump from the second floor. At the end of the day almost every one of us would have been cremated except for a handful mistook to be dead and our house ransacked! This though seem exaggerated, believe me communalism is nothing less than that.
Communalism means brutality, betrayal, hatred, fear, loss of humanity, treating the other as ‘shit’ because their body, their properties belong to a different religion. The victims narrate sad stories of killing and rape. The fact finding team of the Gujarat Pogrom note about the rape of the young girls that as young as eleven year old girls were raped and then burnt in front of other family members. Young boys in the rehabilitations camps have stories about their rape and death of their mothers, sisters and aunts. The report notes that the young girls were paraded naked infront of 1000 to 2000 strong mobs who humiliated and terrorized them. Thereafter they were raped by a dozen men. After raping them, the attackers inserted sharp rods, knives or any other hard objects at hand into their bodies bludgeoning them before they were burnt.
Communalism does not mean a simple communal identity or communitarian feeling of a group founded on a religion. Rather it refers to an ‘exclusive identity’ as a social, economic and political unit tied to a religion but built on the hatred of the other wanting to ‘rape and burn them’ their bodies, culture and religion; to shout slogans ‘Kill, Burn, Hack, Rape’ at the opportune time. In short, it is a systematic mobilization of a community on the basis of religious beliefs to annihilate the OTHER. Generally it functions on the perception that religious identities are real/original transcending everything else like the ontological (created as a human being), cultural (fellow Gujarati, fellow tribal, fellow dalit), political (Indian), and functional identities.
The Institution
I mentioned here about religion. There is always a tendency to reduce ‘communalism’ to religious conflicts, as I have mentioned in the beginning of this talk. Religion is just the tip of the ice-berg. The systematic style of the riots in both Gujarat and Kandhamal betrays an institution that creates and sustains communal divides for social, economic and political gains of the individuals and the community. Take for example the partition, Gandhi and Maulana Azad devout practitioners of their respective faith preached secular democracy, on the contrary it was Jinnah (the father of the Pakistani nation) a non-practicing Muslim and Savarkar (founder of militant Hindu Nationalism) an avowed atheist who fanned the communal divide in the pre-independent India. We should not misunderstand as if communalism had its origin in them, rather that the communalism that was being reconciled in the secular nationalism proposed by Gandhi was subverted by these right-wing fundamentalists. Therefore the battle and 1947 riots in the above-to-be-independent-India was not really on any religious teachings but on whether political mobilizations and institutions should be based on identity and difference or on acceptance, respect and celebration of diversity. The former won and so resulted in the divide of the subcontinent. Gandhi, who thought otherwise, was assassinated back in India. 
Note it is the successful campaign of the right wing ideology that has rewarded Narendra Modi with third consecutive victory in the state elections and it has also definitely rewarded the people part of the communal groups, in all spheres. On the other hand it has reduced the victims into economical, social political nullity as the government failed to acknowledge the nominal, pecuniary, moral and punitive damages. Permit me to narrate the sad story of a beautiful young woman. Munnabhai, who had altered his Muslim name after the riots, encounters this beautiful young woman suddenly jumping into his auto-rickshaw with the request “drive me anywhere, do what you like with me, but give me some money”. On persistent probing she confided that she was widowed by the communal massacre in 2002 and did not know how else to feed her three children. [Remember I mentioned earlier the socio-economic boycott]. The driver himself a victim of the carnage, gave her all the money he had, weeping as he drove her home. Things were not different in Kandhamal, loot at this photograph of the relief camp as of January 18, 2012. Therefore it would be rather simplistic to reduce communalism to ‘spontaneous religion-conflict’ and so search for a solution in inter-religious dialogue while this is included. The issue, however is complex involving social, religious, cultural, economical and political factors and has a long history, experience and plan. A historian would easily point out the growth sadly towards the worst, in the brutality and precision in the execution of communal violence in India.
The Dynamics
In Gujarat it was not just the fanatic organizations that were in power, but the judiciary, prosecution, higher civil services (IAS) including police (IPS), private firms (Tatas and Ambanis who would later collaborate with Modi), and vast majority of Hindus bear responsibility for the carnage. We have reports of the staff in Government hospital refusing to treat the injuries many Muslims! Reports about district collectors refusing to establish, recognize and assist relief camps. Frugal living conditions with insanitary facilities, less medicine and food have become the everyday factor in the aftermath of both communal violences. The public (a majority of them) in both Kandhamal and Gujarat hardly share remorse and have turned to normalcy after a day or two of violence. Worst of all was the judicial legal proceedings which were frequently, deliberately unfair, partisan and communally motivated. There are more cases filed on the victims under POTA and Provocation than on the rioters. Researchers who have compared the communal violence in Gujarat and Kandhamal are surprised at their similarity in the execution , connivance of the state and civil authourities, and sequence of events post-riots.
Gujarat was only a model, Kandhamal an attempt to copy it against Christians. They are not done but continue to poison our country with the fascist ideologies posing a great threat to our secular democratic constitution. On the other side, there is a slow but steady decline setting in our bureaucracy, not only with the growth of indifference, non-accountability, corruption, sloth and arrogance but most dangerously partisanship, complicity with injustice and sectarian politics. Sections of the police, civil and military administration share their active sympathies with ideologies contrary to our constitution and opportunistically align with them to advance their careers. There is also growing hostility in parts of India towards a segment of its citizens only because they worship a different God. Even parties built on the secular ideologies have displayed a singular lack of nerve and of the courage of their convictions at these crucial moments in our history. They flounder in the faint hearted calculus of the vote-banks. Recall, the number of protests Christians had to make to get the attention of the centre with UPA in power. Consider the recent conflict on Salman Rushdie attending the Jaipur Literature festival. (Though it was hyped in the national media, the fact is that he did not come). Moreover the indifference and justification of common man in India falling prey to the twisted versions of fascists through the media, the silence of the intellectuals about the cruelty and injustice, has only increased the sense of isolation of the minority in their own country. Despite the solemn guarantees of the constitution of a ‘Free Secular India’- equal respect and protection for the people of all faiths including those with absence of faith – riots, protests, life-threats and bans provoked by communal ideologies have become annual events of our chronicle. Our secular democracy which though initially founded to bring about egalitarian society promoting honesty, truth and equality is today contaminated by majoritarianism. Truth giving way to ‘majority opinions’, has become the growing dynamism of our secular democracy. It is time that we make fundamental reforms. The line that divides between the active supporter of communal violence and the indifferent onlooker is very thin ‘neutrality amount to taking sides with injustice. As Martin Luther King said, in the end we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.
Bibliography:
Mander, Harsh. Fear and Forgiveness: The Aftermath of Massacre. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2009.
____ . "Barefoot - Kandhamal: The Aftermath". The Hindu 14 January, 2012.
____ . "Barefoot: Remembering Kandhamal". The Hindu 17 December, 20ll.
Selected Writings on Communalism. New Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1994.
Sr. Sophie said,
ReplyDeleteis a gut wrenching piece that touches the pain of the victims, thier utter helplessness in the face of the seething rage of the perpetrators and the apathy of the government machinery including the police, the supposed protectors of life and property. These shameful events have scarred civilization in the entire Indian sub-continent.
My thoughts run back to that journey from Mt. Abu to Mumbai via Godhra in Gujarat on the eve of the communal carnage a decade ago. The crowds, largely Muslims cramming up every bit of floorspace on the train, who I suspect were fleeing from the place in anticipation of the mindless violence that was to be let loose the following day are proof that it was a well orchestrated attack rather than a sporadic incident. That journey remains etched in my memory for two reasons - one, it marks one of my most memorable God experiences in the most unlikely of places and through the most unlikely of persons and for passage through a simmering couldron of hatred that was to explode the next day.
My hair stands on edge as your article recounts the atrocities committed on hapless people, the indignities heaped on defenceless women and kids. Reading your article from a woman's perspective sends a shiver down my spine. Isn't it utterly horrifying that in every war, communal or mindless violence, one group chooses to assert its supremacy over the other by disrobing its women and subjecting them to unimaginable humiliation and violence? Can religious boundaries become so important to us that we're willing to transgress boundaries of humanity? Life is not just about Being Human, its more about Being Humane.