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Rites of Hatred
Stoking Communal Fires in India
Ever since India was Partitioned
on communal lines in 1947, orgies of violence between Hindus and Muslims
have recurred with sickening regularity. The last major round of bloodletting
was after a sixteenth century mosque at Ayodhya – Babri Masjid – was
brought down by right wing Hindu mobs in December 1992. For nearly a
decade since then, there has been a continuous decline in communal violence
in the country, with no major conflagration reported in any State.
On February 27, 2002, any
delusions that this trend represented a process of political evolution
and maturity were dispelled by the extraordinary brutality of riots
that claimed nearly 600 lives in Gujarat. The trouble began when a trainload
of Hindu kar sevaks (religious volunteers) returning from Ayodhya
was attacked by a Muslim mob at Godhra, 136 kilometres from the State
capital at Ahmedabad. Two compartments were locked from the outside
and set on fire, leaving 58 people dead. Over the next three days, an
unchecked ‘backlash’ swept across this prosperous State in West India.
Gujarat is ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a political formation
that heads the coalition government at Delhi, and that is closely linked
to the Hindu rightwing groupings – particularly the Vishwa Hindu Parishad
(VHP, World Hindu Council) and the Bajrang Dal. The VHP-Bajrang Dal
are at the helm of a movement to construct a temple precisely where
the Babri Masjid – to which they refer as the ‘disputed structure’ –
once stood. There are widespread and credible allegations that the State
government headed by Chief Minister Narendra Modi deliberately held
back, while mobs went on rampage, targeting Muslims and their properties.
Modi has vigorously denied these charges, claiming credit for ‘restoring
order in a record 72 hours’, after some one hundred rioters were killed
in police firing, and thousands were arrested in efforts to bring the
situation under control. The State’s police chief, who initially conceded
that his men were infected by the communal polarisation, subsequently
blamed the lack of manpower for the initial loss of control, stating,
"We have six thousand policemen for a population of five million.".
Order was restored after the deployment of Army units that were pulled
out of the massive military mobilisation along the border with Pakistan.
The impact of the riots
on the State has been devastating. Apart from the direct losses to life
and property, the economy lost an estimated 22.5 billion Rupees ($462
million) in trade and industrial output in just the first week after
the riot. Gujarat is one of India’s most affluent States, contributing
as much as 6.5 per cent to the national GDP. All major sectors of the
thriving economy – petrochemicals, textiles, auto industry and real
estate – were badly affected by the riots, and confidence in the State
as a safe and stable location for commercial and industrial activity
has been significantly eroded.
Worse, the impact on India’s
politics promises to be serious. The riots in Gujarat were a significant,
though not irreversible, victory for those who seek to divide the communities
into exclusionary ghettos across the country, and are part of an extended
process the most recent phase of which commenced with the Ram Janmabhoomi
(Birthplace of Ram) movement in the end-1980s, and that contributed
substantially to the BJP’s rise to power. It is significant that both
the riots of 1992 and the carnage at Godhra are integrally linked to
this movement that seeks to construct a temple where the Babri Masjid
stood. The Hindu zealots claim the mosque was built by conquering Muslim
armies over the rubble of a temple marking the birthplace of their deity,
Lord Ram, and was ‘an insult to national pride’. It was not the only
such structure that offended their sensibilities, since waves of iconoclastic
Muslim invaders are said to have destroyed thousands of Hindu temples
and built mosques over their sites. These included at least two others
– at Mathura and Varanasi – that are attributed with extraordinary sanctity.
The issue, according to the more extreme voices in the VHP, however,
is "not three, but three thousand" such disputed structures.
To the extent that the VHP-Bajrang Dal combine derives its power – and
a large proportion of its revenues – by projecting and pursuing maximalist
sectarian goals, it is clear that their agenda is linked to long-term
prospects of polarisation and recurrent violence. Tension has been raised
over the past months by mass mobilisation for an intensification of
demands that land for the proposed Temple at Ayodhya be handed over
by the government before March 15. This was subsequently diluted to
a demand that a ‘symbolic puja’ (religious ritual) be permitted
at the disputed site, but even this was eventually disallowed by the
Supreme Court.
It was against the backdrop
of this mobilisation that the triggering incident at Godhra occurred.
It has often been remarked that there is no such thing as a ‘spontaneous
riot’ in India. These events are usually carefully orchestrated. Even
a superficial review of the history of communal violence in the country
demonstrates how these have been engineered by partisan political interests,
often with an eye to the consolidation of sectarian ‘vote banks’ and
concomitant electoral gains. This, the Opposition parties contend, is
what happened in Gujarat. "The fortunes of the BJP were going down sharply
and consistently in Gujarat," claims the Congress-I party spokesman
Jaipal Reddy. "The only way to improve them was to sharpen the communal
divide." What is inexplicable, however, is why, if electoral considerations
underlie these riots, were they engineered after, and not before, the
state assembly elections in five crucial states and at a time when no
significant elections are due in the immediate future? Moreover, from
the BJP’s perspectives at the Centre, the outcome has been disastrous,
with many of its crucial coalition partners threatening to withdraw
support if it did not take a unambiguous stand on Ayodhya against the
Hindu fundamentalist forces, and this issue has certainly weakened the
government. Despite the VHP Temple campaign, moreover, there had been
no violence – and little expectation of violence – prior to February
27. The sheer fury and savagery of the Godhra incident that triggered
the State-wide carnage, consequently, was entirely unexpected.
There is more than what
immediately meets the eye here. Investigators have now uncovered clear
linkages with Pakistan-based terrorists and the leaders of the Godhra
incident. Arrests include the President of the Godhra Municipal Council,
and another three councillors, including Bilal Haji, are absconding.
Evidence recovered includes photographs showing Haji with the Pakistan-based
Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorist group’s leader, Masood Azhar, as well as
others of various terrorist training camps. Haji was also linked to
Harkat-ul-Jehad-Islami (HuJI) cadres arrested earlier at Kolkatta in
connection with the attack on the United States Information Service
Centre there. Interrogations have indicated that five Pakistanis, among
a number of other ‘outsiders’ had been hosted by the Municipal councillors
and a local Imam at Godhra prior to the attack, and were involved
in the conspiracy. Clearly, as the earlier patterns of Pakistan’s interventions
in India – including support to terrorism in J&K and other theatres
– become increasingly untenable, it will continue to explore and exploit
alternatives rooted in the faultlines within the Indian social and political
structure.
Godhra was an exceptionally
suitable place to hatch and execute such a plot. It has a long history
of communal violence, and has, moreover, a flourishing criminal economy
organised almost exclusively on a communal basis. Gujarat, in its entirety,
moreover, has become a communal tinderbox, with the State government
squarely rooted in the right wing ‘Hindutva’ ideology. There has also
been a continuous process of Islamist mobilisation among the State’s
minority community, and this has combined with a flourishing underworld
that has profited immensely from the smuggling of arms, contraband and
silver from Pakistan to Bombay via Gujarat. A very significant proportion
of this money has been cornered by religious extremists, both Hindu
and Muslim. Criminal gangs, moreover, openly take sides in communal
riots, and are integral to the processes of sectarian political mobilisation.
The cumulative impact of
these factors make Gujarat uniquely susceptible to externally inspired
mischief, and unless the politics of the State changes radically – an
improbable prospect in the proximate future – the cycle of provocation
and retaliation can be expected to recur, and to sharpen the knife-edge
of sectarian violence across the country.
(Edited version
published in Pinkerton Global Intelligence Services, March 14, 2002.)
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