1984

Ongoing Shame of India:
Pogroms of 1984 - Mass-Murders of 2002
What Comes Next?

by SABA NAQVI & SMRUTI KOPPIKAR

 

 

 

"Modern" India's worst pogroms in its history took place against its own citizens - all Sikhs - in 1984.

Less than two decades later, in 2002, a similar massacre of its Muslims citizens was carried out at Narendra Modi's behest in Gujarat.

What comes next? 

 

India is a nation that was born in the bloodshed and displacement of the violence of the Partition in 1947.

In its DNA, it inherited the schizoid gene of being a multi-faith nation with a large Hindu population and one of the world’s largest Muslim populations. It was a historical fact that was exploited for politics time and again.

Ahimsa was the Gandhian ideal we paid lip service to but the reality far too often was mass violence. In urban ghettos, in the old cities across the land, small pogroms, massacres and riots - [all are bundled together by India's Hindu majority, in an attempt to triviliaze them, as "riots"] -   were part of the cycle of life.

A religious procession would be taken out, a skirmish would take place, curfew would be clamped, a minor massacre would have just taken place or been barely averted.

But the Gujarat massacres of 2002 marked the apogee of communal hatred. Ten years after the Sabarmati Express coach was set afire in Godhra on February 27, and after the bloodbath that followed, we must pause and ask: can it happen again?

Many would argue that it cannot because, in the long term, Narendra Modi has had to pay a price for presiding over a bloodbath after the advent of 24-hour television. In the immediate aftermath of the riots, however, he gained enormously. Modi ran a communally charged election campaign six months after the violence, when he would famously use “Mian Musharraf” as a rhetorical term for the entire Muslim community.

Modi had been sent to Gujarat in October 2001, at a time when the BJP under Keshubhai Patel was doing badly and had lost a byelection. He began his first term as CM on Oct 7, 2001; five months later, the carnage happened; later in the year, in December 2002, he won the state election with a huge margin and began his second term. He has now been the longest-serving chief minister of Gujarat and will contest later this year for a fourth term.

He most famously used communal polarisation as a political technique and it worked within the boundaries of Gujarat.

Sociologist Ashis Nandy says that the problem also arose because for “months afterwards, Modi celebrated the [mass-murders]. He appeared to be showing off”. Even the Shiv Sena, which had a decade before Gujarat orchestrated vicious massacres in Mumbai, looked like relative amateurs at the mass-murder technique compared to the systematic method that was applied and revelled in inside Gujarat.

Nandy points out that the anti-Sikh pogroms of 1984 actually claimed the largest toll. But it’s a blot the Congress always tries to live down and not celebrate. “The whole psychology was different as Sikhs were a prosperous community that people admired and envied,” says Nandy. The Hindu-Muslim equation is another story.

As for Modi, he has become the development man, the business-friendly leader, but his image makeover as an acceptable national figure has not worked. Even BJP president Nitin Gadkari says, “What happened in Gujarat was an unfortunate incident. I don’t think it can or should happen again.”

An "unfortunate incident"?

Modi is stuck with the taint because Gujarat was the first mega massacre in the age of 24-hour TV. There were victims in Mumbai, Surat, Bhagalpur, Jamshedpur, Hyderabad, Moradabad, Bhiwandi, earlier massacres in Ahmedabad, a city that actually recorded one of the first big post-Partition mass-murders in 1969. But they were just numbers, death tolls, the faceless victims of communal carnage.

But in Gujarat 2002, the stories were documented in heart-wrenching detail and etched in our collective memories. How Bilqis Bano’s daughter was snatched from her hands, flung against a rock, killed, and the pregnant woman raped repeatedly; how Zahira Sheikh survived the grisly burning of the Best Bakery in which her family was roasted alive; how limbs of children were hacked and little boys flung to their death in Naroda Patiya; how Ehsaan Jafri begged for the life of those who had sought his protection in Gulberg Society; how his widow Zakia Jafri still fights for justice and says her husband called the Chief Minister's residence for help.

The photograph of Qutubuddin Ansari begging for his life epitomises the plight of an entire community in Gujarat; thankfully, Ansari survived.

The 2002 Gujarat massacres also marked the coming of age of anti-communal activism.

Several citizens, activists and lawyers who live within Gujarat have consistently fought against a state administration determined to block any probe.

On the national stage, individuals like Teesta Setalvad have never relented, losing one legal battle to come back with another. Although Modi has been able to stay one step ahead of the legal snare, he is certainly bogged down by it. Outside Gujarat, he may have appeal for the BJP cadre, but regional parties want to keep a distance from him.

If the big players of any regional front in the future are to be Mamata Banerjee, Naveen Patnaik and Nitish Kumar, the Chief Ministers of Bengal, Orissa and Bihar would not like to share a platform with Modi even if realpolitik were to force any sort of arrangement with the BJP. Indeed, one can argue that the political price of mass-murders conducted by India's Hindu politicians is now too high. Modi is quite stuck.

*   *   *   *   *

The perpetrators of India's mass-murders are long-term players in the political landscape.

The Thackerays have again bounced back in the local polls in Maharashtra. But the city of Mumbai has changed under their watch. The ferocity and cruelty of the violence that ripped right through Bombay (which became Mumbai later) in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition, in two phases in December 1992 and January 1993, came to symbolise the worst face of a seemingly inclusive city.

Till then the city would be described as a cosmopolitan megacity where caste, class and religion were not the dominant markers of public life. Bombay was the city of dreams, its streets offered anonymity, its pavements could turn into homes, its constant whirring machine of enterprise and entrepreneurship played the great equaliser. Surely, such a place could not be derailed by communal violence?

This belief turned into a shattered myth in those two spans of ’92-93 when nearly 850 people were killed, 575 of them Muslims; over 2,000 injured and nearly 1,00,000 displaced.

After that, Bombay became Mumbai and no one really calls it a cosmopolitan place any longer. Resilient, yes, but not cosmopolitan. Bombay had its Hindu- and Muslim-dominated neighbourhoods but they were not community-insulated as has happened in the post-massacre era. The ghettoising effect of 1993, which continues even today, has made the divisions sharper. In fact, it’s easier now to target this or that community and in many areas the “other” is not welcome at all, says Farooq Mapkar, who was witness to five namazis (worshippers) being shot in Hari Masjid by policemen; he was mischievously accused of rioting and acquitted after 16 long years.

A bank employee now, he says, “There is now a Muslim Mumbai and a Hindu Mumbai.”

The Shiv Sena in 1993 called itself the “defender of Hindus”.

The Srikrishna Commission report famously indicted Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray and said that “like a veteran general, he commanded his loyal Shiv Sainiks to retaliate by organised attacks against Muslims, especially in January 1993”.

The Mumbai police registered four offences against him for a communally provocative editorial exhorting such violence, but the go-ahead to prosecute was not given by the state government; then CM Sudhakarrao Naik famously said if certain leaders were arrested, Bombay would burn; it escaped his notice that the city had already burnt.

*   *   *   *   *

FROM MASSACRE TO MASSACRE

-  Fifty-eight major communal mass-murders in 47 places since 1967

-  Ten in South India, 12 in East, 16 in West, 20 in North India

-  Ahmedabad has seen five major massacres; Hyderabad, four; Calcutta, none since ’64*

-  The 1990s saw the most massacres in the last five decades: 23

-  The 1970s saw seven massacres, the ’80s, 14; the 2000s have seen 13

-  Total toll: 12,828 (South 597, West 3,426, East 3,581, North 5,224).

 

* In ’64, a wave of mass-murders in Calcutta, Jamshedpur and Rourkela killed 2,500.

Note: Only massacres with a toll of five or more have been listed; deaths due to bomb blasts not included.

[However, glaring omissions from the list consist of the figures from pogroms carried out in November 1984 in virtually every major city, town and village with a Hindu population across the length and breadth of India.]  

 

Year	Place	Toll
Aug ’67	Hatia, Ranchi	183
Mar ’68	Karimganj, Assam	82
Sep ’69	Ahmedabad	512
May ’70	Bhiwandi, Mah.	76
May ’70	Jalgaon, Mah.	100
Oct ’77	Varanasi	5
Mar ’78	Sambhal, UP	25
Sep ’78	Hyderabad	20
Oct ’78	Aligarh	30
April ’79	Jamshedpur	120
Aug ’80	Moradabad	1,500
Apr ’81	Biharsharif	80
Sep ’82	Meerut	12
Dec ’82	Baroda	17
Feb ’83	Nellie, Assam	1,819
Sep ’83	Hyderabad	45
May ’84	Bhiwandi, Mah	146
Oct ’84	Delhi	2,733
Apr ’85	Ahmedabad	300
Jul ’86	Ahmedabad	59
Apr/May’87	Meerut	70
Mar ’89	Bhadrak, Orissa	17
Oct ’89	Indore	27
Oct ’89	Bhagalpur	1,161
Oct ’90	Ahmedabad	41
Oct ’90	Jaipur	52
Oct ’90	Jodhpur	20
Oct ’90	Lucknow	33
Oct ’90	Chandni Chowk, Delhi	100
Oct ’90	Hailakandi, Assam	37
Oct ’90	Patna	18
Oct ’90	Hyderabad	165
Nov ’90	Agra	31
Dec ’90	Hassan, Mandya, Mysore	60
Dec ’90	Hyderabad	200
Dec ’90	Aligarh	150
May ’91	Baroda	28
May ’91	Meerut	40
Oct ’92	Sitamarhi, Bihar	44
Dec ’92	Surat	152
Dec ’92	Malpura, Andhra	24
Dec ’92	Kanpur	254
Dec ’92	Bhopal	143
Dec ’92/Jan ’93	Bombay	872
Nov/Dec ’97	Coimbatore	20
Feb ’98	Coimbatore	60
Dec ’98	Surathkal, Karnataka	12
Mar 2001	Nalanda, Bihar	8
Mar ’01	Kanpur	14
Oct ’01	Malegaon	13
Feb-May ’02	Gujarat	1,267
May ’02	Marad, Kerala	9
Apr ’06	Aligarh	6
May ’06	Baroda	6
Dec ’07	Kandhamal	12
Oct ’08	Bhainsa, Andhra	6
Sep ’09	Miraj, Karnataka	5
Sep ’11	Bharatpur	10

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The peace is kept but the tensions simmer.

Still, the cycle has been broken in other cities. Hyderabad, for instance, has moved on. The old city is still a hothouse, but communal violence no longer pays. Amir Ali of the influential Urdu daily, Siasat, recounts this brief history of his city’s massacre.

Before 1994, he says, violence took place every year over processions of Ganesh Chaturthi, Moharram or Bonalu (an Andhra festival). The violence stopped in 1994, when the TDP came to power, though one could not pinpoint an exact reason. Then, in 1998, a poster appeared in the old city of Hyderabad depicting Ganesh with Kaaba under one foot and Medina under the other. Police investigations revealed that the poster was the handiwork of a Hindu politician and former mayor of Hyderabad.

He was in fact a member of the Majlise-e-Ittehadul-Muslimeen run by the Owaisi family that still has a grip on sections in the city! The linkages are circuitous, to say the least.

What this story illustrates is that an attempt to trigger a massacre is a political tactic.

Paul R. Brass, author and political scientist from the University of Washington, who’s studied India’s communal tension and violence, calls it the "institutionalised riot system" or IRS. This IRS, he says, was created largely in northern and western India and it can be activated by politicians during political mobilisation or elections, and “the production of a riot involves calculated and deliberate actions by key individuals, like recruitment of participants, provocative activities and conveying of messages, spreading of rumours”.

There are frequent rehearsals until the time is ripe and the context is felicitous and there are no serious obstructions in carrying out the performance. Does such an IRS still prevail in Mumbai, or Bhiwandi, Malegaon, Aurangabad, Nashik, Moradabad, Ahmedabad?

Recently, activists of the Hindu right were arrested in Karnataka trying to raise a Pakistan flag in a Muslim area. They presumably hoped they would trigger a riot and blame it on Muslims. One must conclude that small riots can and in all likelihood may continue to happen (there was recently a Gujjar-Muslim clash in Mewat not far from Delhi), but it would take a certain conjunction of politics, intent and regime to trigger anything on the scale of the Gujarat massacres.

Meanwhile, the political saga of Modi continues, with his national ambitions all too obvious. As things stand now, he can be a national player only if the BJP gets a majority on its own. As that currently seems unlikely, Modi can perhaps examine his predicament from a philosophical, moral or literary viewpoint.

He could ruminate over that quote of Lady Macbeth’s who kept washing her hands. “Out, damn’d spot! out, I say”!

 

[Courtesy: Outlook. Edited for sikhchic.com]

February 27, 2012

 

 

 

 

 

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