Almost twenty years later, in 1969, when I was again a witness to another Hindu–Muslim riot, this time in Ahmedabad in the western state of Gujarat, I was surprised to hear essentially the same rumours I had heard as a child in Rohtak. Thus we heard (and in Rohtak believed) that milk vendors had been bribed by the Muslims to poison the milk in the morning. Four children were said to be lying unconscious and two dogs had died after having drunk of the poisoned milk. Apparently, most of the servants in Civil Lines who went into the town frequently, had personally seen the dogs in the throes of death. Women had hurried to empty out the pails of milk; sticky patches of white soon spread to plaster the cobbled stones of the streets. We heard that Muslims had broken into grocery shops in the night and mixed powdered glass with the salt. A police van with a loudspeaker was said to be driving around the town, warning people not to buy salt. Both in Rohtak and Ahmedabad there was talk of large stocks of weapons, acid and other materials needed for manufacturing bombs, put in a cache in the underground cellars of mosques; of prior Muslim preparations for a slaughter of the Hindus being forestalled by the riot. In Ahmedabad there was the additional rumour of armed Pakistani agents seen parachuting into the city at night. Its Rohtak counterpart was the imminent attack by thousands of armed Meo tribesmen making a detour to the town on their way to Pakistan.
The fact that rumours during a riot take such dramatic and fanciful turns is not surprising. In a study of the ratio of rumours to actual events such as killing, rape, beating, harassment, property violation, and inconvenience among the Asians expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin, the relationship was strikingly linear.5 That is, the more threatening and dramatic the experience, the more likely it was to be a wellspring of rumour. At the high point of a riot, the content of the rumours is at its most threatening and the speed at which they circulate at its highest. For it is at this particular time when three of the four conditions for the generation and transmission of rumours—personal anxiety, general uncertainty, and topical importance—are at their highest level. The fourth condition, credulity, is no longer in operation since at high levels of anxiety, disbelief in rumour is suspended, that is, rumours will be believed regardless how far-fetched.6
Rumours, of course, also serve some less conscious purposes. Deriving from and reinforcing the paranoid potential which lies buried in all of us, they were the conversational food which helped in the growth of a collective Hindu body. They sharpened our awareness of our own kind and many, who though they lived in the same bazaar were relative strangers earlier, became brothers overnight. They made misers discover a forgotten generosity as they offered to share food with those who had none; neighbours who had little use for each other now enquired daily about each other’s well-being. There is little doubt that rumours are the fuel and riots the fire in which a heightened sense of community is also forged. If I remember the Rohtak riots so vividly it is not only because I was an impressionable child but also because of the deep sense of communion I felt with my family and the wider, although vague, entity of ‘the Hindus’. The riots generated emotions which expanded my boundaries. They gave rise to exhilarating feelings of closeness and belonging to something beyond myself which I desperately wanted to keep. My memory of the Rohtak riots, I recognize, is not free from a shame-faced nostalgia for a shining flower which sprang from the mean soil of decaying corpses and ashes left behind by arsonists’ fires.
In undermining our familiar controls over mental life, a riot is often experienced as a midwife for unfamiliar, disturbing fantasies and complex emotions, such as both disgust and overwhelming sexual attraction for a member of the enemy community. The overcharged atmosphere of violence breathe day in and day out by a person lifts the lid on the cauldron of instinctual drives as civilized sensibility threatens to collapse before the press of instinctuality in both its sexual and violent aspects. Accounts of sexual violence during a riot, for instance, not only evoke the publicly acceptable reaction of horror but may also release the more hidden emotion of a shameful excitement which bespeaks instinctual desire in its rawer form. Besides the expression of moral outrage, riot violence can be subjectively used for an unwanted but wished for vicarious satisfaction of sadistic impulses, for the fulfilment of one’s urge to utterly subjugate another human being, to reduce his or her consciousness to a reactivity of the flesh alone.
In fiction, this complex flow of subjectivity during a riot has been brilliantly captured by the Hindi writer Krishna Baldev Vaid in his novel Guzra hua Zamana (a bygone era). Biru, the teenaged hero of the novel, together with his parents, his sister Devi, and Kumari, the young wife of a neighbour, whom Biru has always lusted after with the innocence and ancient knowledge of a boy on the verge of manhood, have been given shelter by a Muslim friend, Bakka, during the Partition riots in a small town in Punjab. As the marauding Muslim mob, consisting of many men Biru knows well, including Bakka himself, roams the streets at night in an orgy of looting, killing and rape, the Hindu family cowers in the small dark room and a terrified Biru’s thoughts flow in a full, barely controllable stream.
Even if I survive it will be as a cripple. Before pushing us out, Bakka will first cut an ear off everyone. Devi and Kumari will also have a breast chopped off. Perhaps he will also break one of my legs. What if all the others are killed and I survive! I will commit suicide. I know how to. Somewhere here there must be a rope. What if I am killed and the others live? Mother will surely kill herself. Or she will become mad. She will go around asking, have you seen my Biru? My innocent, naive Biru? What will probably happen is that we will all die and only Kumari will be left alive. Bakka will take her as his wife. Or as his slave. He will change her name. Sakina or Hafiza. I like Muslim names. Also Muslim women. When Bakka comes to kill me I will say, don’t kill me I like Muslim names and Muslim women. He will be so surprised by my courage that his uplifted hand will remain suspended in air. I’ll say, I am half a Muslim. When I hear the call for prayers from the mosque I shiver all over. He will think I am making fun of Islam but I am really telling the truth....
The killer will agree that I .am a Muslim at heart. But this will not stop him from striking. If I was in love with a Muslim girl would I have converted for her sake? I certainly would have become a Muslim if she had asked. Lovers have faith not religion....
The accounting will start once it is morning. The counting of corpses. How many Hindus, how many Sikhs. There must be a few Muslims too. The intention of killing ten of us for every one of them. On the other side (the Muslims would say) so many of ours were killed, why so few of them here? There they took out processions of our naked women, why has that not happened here? Strip off the clothes of their women! Tear apart their bodies too. In front of their men. And then parade them in the bazaar! In front of their impotent men! At least they will learn to fear God! There, we hear, they cut off the breasts of our women, their hair too. We also will not let them get away intact. Chop one off everyone! Shave their heads! And then kick them in the arse! These are the ones who would not let us touch them. They would not eat from our hands. Now force them to eat everything. Stuff it into their mouths! And say, go to your Hindustan! Why are so few orphans here? Why is the sound of the weeping of widows so low? Why are the heaps of rubble so small? Do not rest till all these accounts are settled. Avenge blood with blood! For a hurled brick, retaliate with a stone! Take vengeance on the son for the deeds of the father!...
And this cycle will continue, for centuries. It is better if it remains dark. Because the darkness of the day will be unbearable. Because when morning comes no one will be ashamed. No one will embrace. No one will console.7
Territory and Passion
The Partition violence is commonly agreed to have been the most momentous event in the shaping of Hindu–Muslim relations in independent India. It is not as commonly recognized that it may not have been the memories of this violence which have been passed down through the generations—traumatic as the violence was in its scale and intensity—but the div
ision of the country into two states of India and Pakistan which has had the stronger psychological impact on many Hindus. The partition of India sharpened, if not gave birth to, the distinction between the secularist and the nationalist Hindu. As often happens, even for the same set of memories, the lessons drawn were quite contradictory. The secularist looked confidently to the country’s future polity once this regrettable business of dividing the country was over. One of the most respected political figures of the post-Independence era, Jai Prakash Narain, argued that it had been like two brothers fighting for separation. Once the separation had taken place and the parental assets were divided, the brothers would live in amity and fraternal harmony.8 The secularist was convinced that the burning embers of the Partition conflagration were permanently extinguished. Its memories were gone forever and perhaps existed only in the nightmares of an older generation which would soon disappear. ‘It can never happen again,’ was the common refrain in the first twenty years after Independence. The gates to religious violence were securely locked, and the riots which took place occasionally were regarded like the fall of small pebbles in the aftermath of the big landslide. Men of goodwill among both Hindus and Muslims echoed the poet Iqbal’s famous line, ‘Religion does not teach mutual enmity.’ Others maintained that it was only because of the machinations of the British that the Partition riots took the gruesome turn that they did.
Most of all, the secularist pinned hopes about the end of Hindu–Muslim conflict on economic development. The stand taken by Nehru, which for many years produced a remarkable consensus within India’s political class and the Westernized intelligentsia fascinated by Marxism, was that industrialization of the country and the spread of the ‘scientific temper’ through modern education would undermine the religious outlook of the people and consolidate secular values. Implied in this ‘modernity project’—a catch-all term for political democracy, scientific rationality, and philosophical individualism—were the notions that the tasks of economic development would absorb all the energies of the people, and any conflicts which arose as a consequence of this enterprise would be taken care of by the democratic processes.
For the Hindu nationalist, politically weak till the remarkable ascent of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its Hindutva movement in the last few years, the Partition, with Jinnah’s Muslim League successfully insisting on a separate state for the Muslims, was the final proof that Hindus and Muslims were really two different nations as Jinnah had claimed. There was a basic opposition between Islam and Indian nationalism, and, given the right circumstances, Indian Muslims will want yet another separate state for themselves. As we shall see later, ‘They [the Muslims] want to create another Pakistan’, is an emotionally powerful appeal in contemporary Hindu nationalist discourse.
There was, of course, a third Hindu, probably in a large majority till at least a few years ago. This was the indifferent Hindu for whom the Hindu–Muslim problem and the national identity question were simply not salient. Such Hindus continued to live in their faith with a traditional indifference—often confused with tolerance—toward the Other sharing their space, whether the Other was the Mussulman or the Isai (Christian).
National identities, we are told by political scientists, can be based on several defining principles of collective belonging: territory (e.g., Switzerland), ethnicity (e.g., Japan), religion (e.g., Pakistan), and ideology (e.g., the United States).9 Although territory is invariably a part of the idea of the nation-state, it does not have to be the defining principle in all cases. For instance, the notions of ethnicity in Germany or religion in Iran evoke greater political passions than territory. In India, the political scientist Ashutosh Varshney suggests, for both the secularist and the Hindu nationalist, the defining principle in the idea of national identity is territory; ‘national unity’ and ‘territorial integrity’ are thus highly charged phrases in the Indian political discourse.10 In the secular imagination, the territorial notion of India, emphasized for twenty-five hundred years since the times of the Mahabharata, is of a land stretching from the Himalayas in the north to Kanya Kumari (Cape Comorin) in the south, from the Arabian Sea in the west to the Bay of Bengal in the east. These boundaries are coterminous with the ‘sacred geography’ of the Hindu nationalist whose hallowed pilgrimage sites mark off essentially the same boundaries of the country, although the Hindu nationalist would go back much further into mythic history than two and a half millennia to date the origin of these sites. Varshney remarks:
Since the territorial principle is drawn from a belief in ancient heritage, encapsulated in the notion of ‘sacred geography,’ and it also figures in both imaginations [secularist and nationalist], it has acquired political hegemony over time. It is the only thing common between the two competing nationalist imaginations. Therefore, just as America’s most passionate political moments concern freedom and equality, India’s most explosive moments concern its ‘sacred geography’, the 1947 partition being the most obvious example. Whenever the threat of another break-up, another ‘partition’, looms large, the moment unleashes remarkable passions in politics. Politics based on this imagination is quite different from what was seen when Malaysia and Singapore split from each other, or when the Czech and Slovak republics separated. Territory not being such an inalienable part of their national identity, these territorial divorces were not desecrations. In India, they become desecrations of the sacred geography.11
Later we shall look in some detail at the psychological processes involved in the arousal of political passions around the issue of territorial integrity which, the Hindu revivalist seeks to convince the indifferent Hindu, is under grave threat from all Indian Muslims and not just from those clamouring for secession in Kashmir.
Profile of a Riot
As I now look back at the Partition riots, I am aware that perhaps there are very few people who reflect on the past with the professional historian’s perspective. For most of us, as the sociologists Howard Schuman and J. Scott have remarked, it is only the intersection of personal and national history that provides the most vital and remembered connection to the times we have lived through.12 If the Partition is a significant source of collective memory it is not only because the origin of a nation is emotionally a particularly charged time. As Maurice Halbwachs has observed, not all emotion-provoking events are memorable, only those which require considerable psychological adaptation.13 The Partition events were not only unique and provoked strong emotional reactions but also required profound changes in the behaviour and beliefs of those affected by them.
Yet the memory of the deep experiences of those days grows dim as I write, like a dream which loses its experiential charge even as it is recollected and retold. Recollections of all I have heard and read about other Hindu–Muslim riots come rushing in to make my unique event part of a category, with the dulling of individual detail and highlighting of similarities which mark the birth of a category.
As a category, communal riots in India differ from other kinds of riots—student riots, caste riots, language riots, agricultural and labour rioting—in that they are the most violent and most difficult to control. They are the most virulent because the particular conflict, generally a blend of religious, political and economic aims, becomes imbued with religious ultimacy. In other words, the issues at stake become life and death issues through an arsenal of ideational and ritual symbols. Moreover, as we saw in the last chapter, both Hindu and Muslim religious cultures have a long tradition in specifying ‘the enemy’ and, as in other religious cultures, their violent champions have an acceptable, even admired rationale for the violence unleashed in ‘defence’. Communal riots also differ from other riots in that they rarely remain confined to one location so that within a few days or (given the speed and reach of modern communications) hours, they can engulf many parts of the country.
Leaving aside the difficult and contested question of their ultimate cause, the eruption of a riot is always expected and yet takes everyone by sur
prise. By eruption I do not mean that a riot is spontaneous and involves no degree of planning or preparation, but only that it generally takes place after a considerable degree of tension between the two communities has been built up. To change the metaphor, the riot is then the bursting of a boil, the eruption of pus, of ‘bad blood’ between Hindus and Muslims which has accumulated over a few days or even weeks in a particular location. In some cities and towns—Ahmedabad and Hyderabad come immediately to mind—where the boil is a festering sore, the tension never really disappears but remains at an uncomfortable level which is below that of violent eruption.
Besides the ultimate cause, then, a riot has a period of immediate tension and a precipitating incident which have received much less attention than the more glamorous search for ‘ultimate’ causes. The buildup of immediate tension occurs when religious identities come to the forefront because of a perceived threat to this particular social identity. The threat, a collective distortion of the meaning of a real event, makes members of the community demonstratively act through words and actions as Hindus, or as Muslims. In turn, the demonstration of this religious identity threatens members of the other community who, too, begin to mobilize their identity around their religious affiliation. Thus begins a spiral of perceived (or misperceived) threats and reactive counterpostures which raises the tension between Hindus and Muslims. To give examples from some major riots: The recent demolition of Babri mosque was perceived as a threat to Muslim religious identity—a chain of mental associations leading from the razing of an unused mosque to the disappearance of Islam in India—which was then openly demonstrated against and, in turn, reacted to by a further consolidation and demonstration of a militant Hindu identity. The 1969 riot in Ahmedabad was preceded by a period of tension when members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) began a campaign demanding the ‘Indianization’ of Muslims and thus initiating a similar chain of mental associations and actual events. We saw that the threat to Hindus is generally around the issue of the country’s territorial integrity which the Muslim seems to threaten either through a demonstrative identification with pan-Islamic causes or in the demand for a separate cultural identity, expressed through the insistence on maintaining Islamic personal law or in demanding a greater role for Urdu. Here the Hindu distortion of the threat takes place through an associative chain where such Muslim actions are imagined as precursors to a separate Muslim enclave, the creation of another Pakistan and, ultimately, the dreaded revival of medieval Muslim rule. For instance, the immediate tension which led to the Ranchi riots in 1967 was initiated by the state government’s plan to raise the official status of Urdu which was perceived by the Hindus as a step down the road of Muslim separatism.
Colours of Violence Page 6
