Communal violence is a peculiar phenomenon of Indian politics. For the last half a century, major incidents of communal violence have broken out fairly regularly in one part of the country or the other. This class of ‘Hindu-Muslim’ violence, as it is called, also elicits voluminous coverage in both the vernacular and the elite English media unlike, say, caste-related violence committed on Dalits.
Yet, paradoxically, at the popular level, communal violence is almost universally misunderstood. Or one might say “misrecognized”, the term the sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, used to explain the interplay among power, knowledge and legitimacy. For Bourdieu, misrecognition refers to a social process which ensures that a certain phenomenon is not recognised for what it is because it is rendered unrecognisable via a deliberately constructed maze of misleading attributions. This is a systematic
social process whose function is to protect certain interests and iniquities, which are deeply embedded in the ‘misrecognized’ phenomenon.
The systematic mendacity which shrouds communal violence in India, going back to the Indira Gandhi era, can be considered a classic case of ‘misrecognition’. Here, all sorts of dubious historical/sociological theories and frames of ‘action-reaction’ sequences have been freely slapped together to form the standard media template of covering riots. Hence, much of the media-produced information on any riot is either misleading, irrelevant or downright untrue.
Paul Brass, one of the foremost experts on the subject, has written at length on the complicity of the media in communal riots. “In general, the press in north India is directly involved in the spread of rumors during riots that aids their perpetrators in recruiting and mobilizing participants,” Brass wrote in The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India.
What about the elite English newspapers? These newspapers, Brass argued, are not active participants in communal violence like their Hindi counterparts but are nevertheless complicit in the process of reproducing violence. They do so through consistent “obfuscation” and “misinterpretation” of the political context of the riots in their coverage. One pattern Brass cites is the reflexive way in which “communal sections” among both communities are blamed for inciting “religious passions” which led to the “spontaneous” riot.
Yet, barring the odd exception, this is a grossly inaccurate representation in a country where ‘communal violence’ usually refers to (effectively) ‘anti-minority’ violence deliberately ‘organised’ by the political elites in the service of specific political functions. That is not an arbitrary claim, but a close approximation of the dominant view among the leading scholars on communal violence who have studied the phenomenon for decades, such as Steven Wilkinson, Paul Brass, Ornit Shani among others.
How to understand communal violence with the aid of these scholars? The first thing one does might be to zoom out of the details of the concerned incident and pursue certain structural questions: where? And why now?
Let us take the case of the recent episode of communal violence in Nuh-Gurgaon.
Where? This incident has taken place on the southeastern tip of Haryana bordering Delhi. This is, of course, the Ahirwal and Mewat belt that has been in the news all through the last decade over increasing ‘communal sensitivity’. What is causing this sensitivity? Why has there been a spate of targeted and accelerating Hindu militia activity in this specific region, a pattern we do not see in central or northern Haryana?
Writing in Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Communal Riots in India, Steven Wilkinson described communal violence as political exercises meant to manufacture electoral consolidation. The import of his argument lay in the claim that multipolar electoral competition reduces communal violence, primarily because it ensures that minorities have enough political leverage to demand their protection. In bipolar states, political elites have more room to gain through communal mobilisation. Wilkinson cites the cases of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar under multipolar, Mandal-dominated rule, which had been extraordinarily efficient in controlling riots. These were states of poor State capacity and had suffered a wave of communal riots (mainly anti-Muslim pogroms) in the 1980s. A multipolar central Haryana dominated by local Jat elites is not a fruitful terrain for communal violence. Riots happen because they are allowed to happen, often by a ruling party in collusion with local elites. “… In virtually all the empirical cases I have examined, whether violence is bloody or ends quickly depends not on the local factors that caused violence to break out but primarily on the will and capacity of the government that controls the forces of law and order,” writes Wilkinson.
Communal violence is being allowed to happen in the Gurgaon-Mewat region of Haryana primarily because it is in this region where the electoral coalition of the Bharatiya Janata Party is most susceptible to sharp reversals. The Punjabi Khatri-Brahmin dominated cities of northern Haryana do not require communal violence as they already constitute a BJP bastion. The central Jat belt, as mentioned, is an inhospitable terrain because local political elites have made it clear (including
in this episode) that they are in favour of communal peace. Of course, this spurt of communal brotherhood has much to do with the political context rural-based Jats faced following the Jat agitation in the state as well as the farmers’ movement.
In the southern Ahirwal region, no group enjoys dominance and there is intense competition among the ascendant middle castes of Ahir (Yadav) and Gujjar farmers, rural Jats and a prosperous urban middle class. In this chaotic theatre, communal violence draws the greatest political effect, particularly in mobilising a middle caste peasantry that forms a mobile base for both ‘kisan politics’ and ‘Hindutva politics’. The BJP’s weakness here is indicated by its reliance on the co-option of traditional elites, such as the Gurgaon MP from the Yadav caste, Rao Inderjit Singh.
This is also the very region where the Indira Gandhi-led Congress played its ‘Hindu’ card (or ‘anti-Sikh’ card) most intensely in the early 1980s. In the 1982 election, in fact, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh cadre had backed the Congress in the state. The context was the declining hold of the Congress organisation among the Jat, Yadav and Gujjar peasantry that had been mobilised (just as in the case of western Uttar Pradesh) by the farmer politics of Jat leaders like Charan Singh and Devi Lal.
It is in this political context that Sikhs were massacred in the state during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. Where did the major incidents of killings take place? Not, as one might intuitively guess, in regions where the Sikhs are found in prominent numbers — the northern belt and the Jat-dominated towns of Sirsa and Fatehabad. They were mostly massacred in this very Ahirwal region where their population was sparse. As per government figures, 47 Sikhs were killed in Gurgaon (around half of the official toll in the state) and 300 homes gutted. The other major massacres occurred in nearby Rewari and Pataudi. Of course, the Sikhs were not killed here because they constituted some arbitrary threat or to ‘take out’ a ‘spontaneous anger’. The ritual killings were carried out in places where the local Congress felt constrained to bolster its declining support among the middle castes. To take the case of Rewari, the victory of Rao Ram Singh, a locally ascendant elite of the Yadav caste, in the 1982 election against the mighty Congress had exposed its loss of support among the middle peasantry there. Two years later, the Sikhs would bear the brunt of a corrective coalition-building exercise carried out by organised goons as per local testimony.
Bourdieu argued that if people clearly recognise the unjust/oppressive nature of a social structure or a social phenomenon and the mechanism through which it operates, they might stop acquiescing to it. The way towards a proper recognition of communal violence is to listen to its experts, as naturally as one refers to an economist for understanding an economic problem. Alas, that does not seem likely anytime soon given the well-established nature of the vested interests that perpetrate riots and prevent its understanding.
Asim Ali is a political researcher and columnist
