Rioting is rarely ‘spontaneous’

The last month has suddenly taken India back to a few years ago when religion-inspired violence was common. The past three or four years has been a sort of lull, with sporadic incidents of attacks by one community on another, none of which led to any further conflagrations or widespread rioting.

Yet from the serial blasts in Ahmedabad at the end of July, allegedly by activists of the Students Islamic Movement of India to Hindu-Muslim clashes in Srinagar to the Hindu-Christian violence in Orissa, it seems like we are back to the bad old days. That was when we were like an old-fashioned tinderbox and any small match could set off a giant forest fire.

Research by scholars like Paul Brass has shown that no community rage can intensify into a riot without political, government and police help. That is, people may be full of anger, hatred and violence towards each other, but full-scale mob violence is only possible with good organisation, mobilisation, official complicity, and time and space provided by the law enforcers for law breakers to have their way.

This is a worldwide phenomenon. A good example is how Hitler and the Nazis mobilised incipient, vague and petty anger against Jews in Europe into full-blown genocide.

Does this theory have any bearing on the Indian situation? Through our short history as a modern nation, we have had several examples of riots between two different religions.
The two worst would be the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi after Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 and the anti-Muslim Gujarat riots in Gujarat in 2002, after news was spread that Muslims had burnt to death Hindu kar sevaks in a train bogey returning from Ayodhya. The recent Orissa violence has similar origins. The news that a Vishwa Hindu Parishad religious leader had been killed led to wide-scale attacks on Christians in Orissa.

All these attacks require some amount of organisation. Spontaneous anger does not spread over days and adept though the human race is at warfare, armies cannot be sent in to fight and win overnight. Someone has to strategise, organise, prepare and then put troops into action. The US experience in Iraq has shown us what a tough endeavour that can be.

India then is being brought back to the edge of religious intolerance, which if allowed to grow unencumbered is likely to set us back a few crucial years. The focus of the world and of society has shifted from narrow parochial concerns to a global identity with an economic perspective.

In such a scenario, narrow sectarian concerns like those of Kashmiri Muslims getting into a frenzy over land transfer to a Hindu temple board, or the fact that it seems perfectly justifiable for innocent people to be killed as some kind of mob revenge for the death of a religious leader, do not fit in.

At the risk of sounding trite, when the Kosi broke its banks to go back to an old river route, it did not choose those that it affected by their community, caste or religion. That trite example ought to make it plain to us how the battle has to be fought together or lost by all.

Yet, of course, this is a lesson that we will be happy never to learn. It suits those in power to keep us in shrill anger, so that we refuse to see the bigger picture. The rage of the Kashmiri Muslims over “their” land being given away did not take into consideration the poor Muslims who get their livelihood from the Amarnath Yatra.

Similarly, Hindus brainwashed by Hindutva hatred will tend to demonise all Muslims. They will always miss the point that it suits political parties to separate people on these lines so that the big picture is blurred.

To point this out at all — that there is no justification for planned and well-orchestrated violence of one community over another — becomes immediate occasion for hate-mongers to point fingers and call names.

Yet, we have to ask ourselves how such carefully crafted violence and anger benefits us as a nation. Who is this ‘other’ whom we fear if it is not ourselves in some other guise?

Email: b_ranjona@dnaindia.net