Colours of Violence

by Kakar, Sudhir

  ‘Tension’, of course, is too general a term to convey more than the most superficial of meanings. We need to further explore the contents and processes of this ‘tension’ in our specific context of Hindu–Muslim rioting. What happens in the period of tension is that individuals increasingly think of themselves as Hindus or Muslims. In the more psychological language of the ‘social identification’ theory, associated with Henri Tajfel and his coworkers, when group salience becomes high, an individual thinks and behaves in conformity with the stereotypical characteristics of the category ‘Hindu’ (or ‘Muslim’) rather than according to his or her individual personality dispositions.14 In a period of rising social tension, social identity dominates, if it does not altogether replace, personal identity as individuals perceive members of the Other group purely in terms of the former. As Hindus and Muslims increasingly see each other as stereotypes, there follows an inevitable homogenization and depersonalization. Individual Hindus or Muslims become interchangeable, perceiving each other in terms of shared category characteristics rather than their personal, idiosyncratic natures. Conversations couched in terms of group categories increase markedly: ‘Look at what the Hindus are doing!’ ‘The Muslims have crossed all limits!’ The stereotypes attributed to one’s own and the adversarial group, we shall see later, take their shape from popular history, orally transmitted through generations.

  The immediate tension at the eve of the riot is not merely a matter of cognitive functioning according to a social identity. The tension is also constituted of strong effects and emotions, ‘raw passions’ if one will. The somewhat bloodless formulations of social identity theory are not completely sufficient to explain a process which will end up being so bloody. Here we need to add psychoanalytic insights on the intertwining of the individual and the group from earliest childhood onward and a revival of the associated emotions in the current situation.

  In the first years of life, it is only gradually that the child learns to integrate dichotomous ‘good’ and ‘bad’ images of the self—the angry and the loving baby—as well as opposing representations of caretakers who both gratify and frustrate. The child also learns that to have hostile impulses directed toward those on whom it depends is dangerous to its own well-being and that these negative feelings must be disowned. One of the main ways of disowning ‘bad’, hateful representations is to externalize them, first on to inanimate objects or animals and then to people and other groups. In a given cultural group, mothers and other adults usually offer the same targets of externalization, or ‘reservoirs’, as the psychiatrist Vamik Volkan calls them.15 The Hindu (and associated cultural symbols) is thus an emotionally charged target of externalization for the Muslim’s own ‘bad’ representations and angry feelings (and vice versa) from an early period of life, a convenient reservoir also for the subsequent rages which grow out of thwarted needs and private hurts. Together with this creation of the enemy, which is ‘neither “merely” real nor “merely” projection’,16 there is also a process of identification with one’s group taking place. The child is assimilating within itself images of family and group members, thus coming to resemble them more and more while increasing its emotional investment in the group’s shared symbols and traditions.

  In the period of immediate tension, when the salience of one’s religious-cultural group increases markedly, the feelings of love connected with the early identifications revive, as do the hate and rage associated with the targets of externalization. Since the enemy is also a reservoir of our own unwanted selves and negative feelings, it is important it be kept at a psychological distance. Consciously, the enemy should never be like us. Even minor differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ are therefore exaggerated as unbridgeable chasms in what Freud called the ‘narcissism of minor differences’17 which evoke stronger hostility and hate than do wide disparities. There is a special quality to the enmity I feel for a person who resembles me most but is not me. Next to my brother, it is my neighbour the Ten Commandments enjoin me to love as I do myself, precisely because my neighbour is the one I am most likely to consider as a rival. The stereotyping of the enemy group involves a progressive devaluation which can extend to the point of dehumanization where ‘they’ come close to the child’s earliest, nonhuman targets of externalization. Making the enemy nonhuman is to avoid feeling guilt about destroying ‘it’ in the riot that is imminent.

  To summarize: the heightened salience of social identity, fuelled by a revival of strong childhood emotions that arise from the intertwining of the self and the cultural group, together with the fact that the groups involved are religious ones, thus imbuing the conflict with religious ultimacy, are the distinctive markers of the tension immediately preceding a riot.

  Among the various precipitating incidents, there are two which occur with such regularity in reports of riots that they may fairly be called archetypes. One of them has to do with Muslim violence toward the cow while the other pertains to disputes over religious processions. Whereas riots around the former are specific to India, riots provoked by religious processions have been common in the history of religious violence.18 Both incidents are archetypal in the sense that, irrespective of their factual veracity in a particular case, they are perceived as legitimate causes for violence to begin—shots from the starter’s gun, so to speak. There is thus an unarticulated expectation that an incident around a cow or a religious procession should belong to the account of a Hindu–Muslim riot even if such an incident did not actually take place. Historically speaking, this expectation is not unjustified. Consider, for instance, the precipitating incidents of communal riots in the Punjab in a single year in the last century.

  In 1886, riots occurred in Ambala, Ludhiana, Hoshiarpur, and Delhi. In Ambala, the precipitating incident was a change, insisted upon by the Muslims, in the route of the Hindu procession on the festival of Bawan Sawadasi. It was also widely rumoured that the Muslims intended to bring large quantities of beef into the city the next day on the occasion of Eid. In Ludhiana, the riot began with the report that a cow had been sacrificed in a Muslim’s house. In Hoshiarpur, the Muharram procession of the Muslims had passed a major part of its route when a bull suddenly appeared amidst it. The processionists were already involved in an argument with the Hindus over the entanglement of the tazia in the branches of a pipal tree, held sacred by the Hindus, which the Muslims wanted to cut. The Hindus objected to the Muslims’ beating of the bull and the riot was on. In Delhi, the riots began with the clash between Muslim and Hindu processions whose routes crossed each other.19 It is thus not surprising to read eighty years later that one of the worst riots of post-Independence India, the 1969 riot in Ahmedabad, was set off by a Muslim vegetable seller who hit a cow which had stopped at its stand for a munch. Fisticuffs with the Hindu cowherd followed and ‘the treatment of the cow (which was not seriously injured), greatly magnified out of all proportion, spread through the city and touched off further incidents. The rioting continued in various parts of Gujarat for some ten days.’20

  The precipitating incident is immediately followed by the aggrieved group taking out a procession—when the procession itself is not the incident. A procession is necessary for the creation of what I call a ‘physical’ group. A physical group is a group represented in the bodies of its members rather than in their minds, a necessary shift for a group to become an instrument of actual violence. For if we reflect on our own experiences of various groups we become immediately aware of a significant difference between, say, my experience of my cultural identity as a Hindu and my psychic processes when I am taking part in a religious assembly. In other words, belonging to a relatively abstract entity, the Hindus, touches a very different chord of the self than the one touched by being a member of a physical group, such as a tightly packed congregation in a Hindu temple. The self-experience of the latter is determined more by concrete, bodily communication and physical sensations in the press of other bodies. The self-experience of the cultural-group identity, o
n the other hand, is evoked more, and differently, by shared cultural symbols and history—heavily mythological—which is shaped by the group’s hopes and fears and distorted by its ambitions and ideals.

  The information I receive sensorially and sensually, linguistically and subliminally in a physical group and which influences the experience of my self at that particular moment, is of another order, and is processed differently, than the information received as member of a cultural group. In a crowd—an example of a physical group—the very nature of the situation with many people in close bodily contact brings a considerable sensual stimulation through channels of touch, vision, hearing, and smell which are simultaneous and are intensified by the multiplicity of their sources.21 There is also a communication of body heat, muscle tensions, and, sometimes, of body rhythms. The individual is practically wrapped up in the crowd and gets continuous sensual pounding through all avenues that his body can afford. The consequence is a blurring of the body image and of the ego, a kind of self-transcendence that is reacted to by panic or exhilaration as individuality disappears and the ‘integrity’, ‘autonomy’, and ‘independence’ of the ego seem to be wishful illusions and mere hypothetical constructs. That the physical and cultural groups sometimes coincide and that it is the endeavour of those who use and manipulate symbols of cultural identity to bring the cultural group closer to the psychological state of a physical group is a subject which I will not pursue here.

  I find the argument postulated in both the Freudian and the Jungian traditions that, as personal identity disappears in a crowd, the residue is not some regressed, primitive state where the violent side of human nature is unleashed, convincing. Such formulations need to be relativized and seen in the context and framework of a particular place and period in history—Europe between the two World Wars—when extremist ideologues of the Left and Right were creating mass movements imbued with messianic fervour. Building on the classical notions of crowds described by Gustave Le Bon (whose own ideas, in turn, were framed by the dread the French upper classes felt in relation to the revolutionary masses), Freud’s reflections on the psychology of crowds as well as Jung’s observations on mass psychology were not free of the ideological concerns of their time, namely the liberal fear of the loss of individual autonomy in a collectivity and the socialist concern about how to make the desired collectivities more tolerable and tolerant.

  Identity in a crowd only gets refocused.22 This refocusing is certainly dramatic and full of effect since a crowd amplifies all emotions, heightening a feeling of well-being into exaltation, fear into panic. The loss of personal identity in a crowd, however, makes individuals act in terms of the crowd’s identity, for instance, according to the behaviour ‘expected’ of an anti-Hindu or anti-Muslim mob. The individual is not operating at some deeply regressed, primitive level of the psyche but according to the norms of the particular group. The violent acts are thus not random but represent the expression and adaptation to a novel situation of a historical tradition of anti-Hindu or anti-Muslim mob violence.

  It is paradoxical that religious processions, presumably with spiritual aims, perhaps produce the most physical of all groups. Rhythms of religious ritual are particularly effective in breaking down social barriers between the participants. They produce a maximum of mutual activation of the participants and a readiness for action, often violent. This is why violence, when Muslim initiated, often begins at the end of Friday afternoon prayers when congregants, who have turned into a congregation, stream out of the mosque into the street in a protesting procession. Processions at Muharram for the Muslims and Dussehra (and increasingly Ganesh Chaturthi) for the Hindus are almost a certain recipe for violence when they are preceded by a period of tension between the communities and when a precipitating incident has just occurred.

  Whereas internally a procession must transform itself into a physical group, externally it should demonstrate the community’s strength. As the political scientist Sarah Moore points out, the success of the procession depends not only upon the number of people taking part but also on the route it takes.23 Routes are valued differently. To take a procession near or through an area inhabited by the adversary is more valued than taking a route which avoids potential confrontations. A procession which can pass through known trouble spots and major traffic arteries is considered more successful than one which slinks through back alleys. The number of chaperoning policemen, protecting processions which are going to cause the very trouble the police are trying to prevent, is another indicator of success.

  Normally, the first two to three days of a major riot are the most violent when a majority of the casualties take place. As the police regain control of the situation, the riot settles down to a low-level intensity of violence. Isolated incidents of stabbing, looting, and arson take place in the narrow alleys and twisting bylanes rather than in the major bazaars. Gradually, peace returns, although some kind of curfew and orders prohibiting the gathering of more than five persons may remain in force for many weeks. The official end of the riot is marked by the state appointing a commission of inquiry headed by a retired judge who is asked to determine the sequence of events leading up to the riot, name those who were responsible, tally the losses, and offer suggestions to prevent future riots. The sole result of such an inquiry, besides offering temporary employment to the judge, is the transfer of a few hapless police officers who are held culpable for not having taken adequate precautions. Police officers, of course only the dishonest, have long since calculated the monetary value of this occupational risk and have made it a part of the compensation they feel entitled to, above and beyond the miserly salary they are paid by the state.

  Hyderabad: December 1990

  The Hyderabad riot of December 1990, the central event of my study, occurred after a period of relative peace between the Hindus and Muslims, the last riot in the city having taken place in 1984. Before that, riots had been an annual feature since 1978, the year of the first major communal conflagration since 1948 when Hyderabad became a part of independent India.

  The 1978 riot was triggered off by the rape of a Muslim woman, Rameeza Bi, and the murder of her husband, Ahmed Hussain, in the Nallakunta police station. In the beginning the mobs protesting police brutality included Hindus, but soon the situation took a turn where the two communities became pitted against each other. The incident sparking off the antagonistic postures was, as usual, the tiniest of sparks: some Hindus beat up a Muslim boy, the Muslims retaliated, the Hindus retaliated against the retaliation, and so on in an ever increasing escalation. The riots were centred around Subzimandi, the central vegetable market, which is also one of the two locations of this study. Given the general propensity of the students of Hindu–Muslim relations to explain the violence between the two in economic terms, the hidden agenda of these riots is said to be an economic offensive by the Muslims designed to recapture Subzimandi from Hindu traders.24 Destitute for almost three decades, most of the wealthier members of their community having migrated to Pakistan or other countries, the Muslims of the old city had suddenly come into money through remittances from the Arab countries of the Gulf, where the economic boom in the late seventies had created a big market for Muslim labour from Hyderabad. After having suffered a rapid economic decline within a decade of Hyderabad’s integration with India, the Muslims again sought to regain control of the city’s vegetable trade which they had lost to the Hindus.

  After 1978, there was at least a riot a year, sometimes more, usually at the time of major religious festivals. The tension in the city is especially palpable during Ganesh Chaturthi of the Hindus, when clay idols of the Hindu god are taken out in procession through the streets to be immersed in the Musi river, and Muharram of the Muslims, when the Shias march through the city bewailing the martyrdom of Hussein, the Prophet’s grandson. The riots also erupted on many other pretexts: Hindu shopkeepers refusing to close their shops in the strikes called by the Majlis (to protest against the takeover of the kaaba in
Mecca by a man claiming to be the Mehdi), the burning of the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, the removal of a chief minister perceived as sympathetic to one community. Between 1978 and 1984, over 400 people lost their lives and thousands more were injured in the communal riots. A common thread in some of these riots (as in riots elsewhere) is the assumption of the state’s role by the mobs of one or the other community. Like the sixteenth-century Catholic-Protestant riots in France described by Natalie Davis, the Hindu or Muslim mob perceives itself as doing what the state should have done in the first place; it is helping the political authorities get over their failure in fulfilling their duties, thus providing itself with a certain legitimacy.25