Ugly communal riots mar festival season in capital.
By Rajiv Theodore
NEW DELHI: It was sadly reminiscent of another time, 30 years back when sections of Delhi was rocked in swathes of ethnic cleansing, leaving more than 3000 Sikhs massacred – in retaliation of the slaying of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
The scale, however, has not reached such horrific proportions after violence broke out in the capital’s tinder box, Trilokpuri, home to a large section of Delhi’s service class living in ghettoes divided mostly along communal and ethnic lines.
This was also the place where the riots against Sikhs started in October-November 1984. Economically weak, and vulnerable to the vicissitudes of communal politics mob-rule dominates these rabbit –warren of alleys and back-lanes that has open drains with stray pigs cleaning up the unending mess.
And come festival time, the ugly face of violence rears its head and almost anything could spark clashes in the area that has the potential to spread like bush fire. And it happened couple of days back on Diwali, the pre-dominantly Hindu festival, when Muslims reacted to loud music and revelry. The clashes that ensued left several injured and some of them are in critical condition. Armed mobs were seen prowling in the now deserted streets.
Heavy police patrolling and monitoring in the area continues, with gatherings banned on the streets.
In India, communities live side by side with feelings of their own identity and many times with disdain or contempt for members of others, but without communal incident or riots. There are periods when there may also be communal ‘incidents’ without it turning into communal riots.
‘’Local fights over parking and use of speakers during namaaz and jagrans are daily affairs,” Kumar, a local resident, told The American Bazaar.
“’These days we cannot even sit outside our houses, the police are insisting that we remain indoors. Each day after 1630 hrs. orders are on to stay indoors,’’ says Kumar.
Under security cover, people are allowed to buy essential food items, one at a time.
‘’We are buying food items at double, sometime treble the prices,’’ laments Prema, another resident of the area.
It would days or weeks for normalcy to return.
‘’Muharram is the bench-mark which is on 4th of November, till then the situation would remain tense,’’ adds Kumar.
But every now and then, whenever the police looks the other way there is a scuffle which breaks out into an ‘’incident’’ says Kumar.
Many of the local strongmen who have the power to stir people’s emotions, fish in such troubled waters and provoke incidents hoping that these clashes could tilt the balance of the power equation. In other words an outcome of a riot could mark an assertion of the might of one community in relation to another.
Another, factor that comes to mind is that riots in India which has been more or less an urban phenomenon is losing its boundaries. At the height of the Babri Masjid conflict of 1991-92-93, 90% of all rioting was centered in cities. Even in India’s worst communal conflagration of the 1947 partition, violence was largely an urban phenomenon and the villages were mostly untouched. But the concept of neo-urbanization riots have flown in the other direction as well, as is seen from the Muzzafarnagar communal violence in Uttar Pradesh.
The communal carnage in Gujarat in 2002 led many to re-examine the existing explanations of the various causative factors of religious conflagrations.
Paul Brass terms these explications as ‘unsatisfactory’ and ‘mystifying’ in his work on Hindu-Muslim violence in contemporary India. Naturalizing accounts of riots have invariably portrayed them as inevitable eruptions of anger and violence between communities divided by deep, incommensurable and often historical differences.
Imtiaz Ahmad dwells on the political and economic factors that lead to communal violence. According to him, Hindu-Muslim violence needs to be viewed as an extension of general social conflict which includes inter as well as intra communal riots, caste violence and other forms of sectional upheavals. He views Hindu-Muslim riots as a prismatic manifestation of numerous factors, historical and political and warns of any analyses that categorize communities as monolithic blocks.
Ashutosh Varshney on the other hand argues that the conflict between Hindus and Muslims is an outcome of the absence of civic ties across communities and classifies certain cities as ‘riot-prone’. He also asserts that Hindu-Muslim conflict is particularly an urban phenomenon and is concentrated in certain states and cities.
Brass identifies ‘specialists’ and ‘a network of specialists’ who form a ‘riot system’. These men, while engaging in business, politics and cultural-religious organizations, are always willing and able to translate rumors and general discourses into local mobilization. Brass does not discount the broader cultural and psychological explanations of how the history or Hindu-Muslim enmity has, over time, produced a rich archive of mythical knowledge of ‘the other’.
2 Comments
India needs to be partitioned again. Muslims need to be given a new state in central in eastern india. Sikhs need to be given khalistan. Naxals too.
Partition of india is only solution. No one can live under hindus.
One off events, that happen every so often amongst a billion population this is nothing. Meanwhile in Pakistan and Muslim countries, Hindus and Sikhs are being killed and converted daily.