Face the facts on communal violence in India

 Hate and bigotry feed on each other. They germinate and flourish on a toxic diet of divisive and schismatic ideologies and polarising creeds that discriminate against human beings on the basis of colour, region, gender, faith — and divide them between believers and non-believers — ranging the chosen ones against the idolatrous.

‘Calling out hate’ by S Y Quraishi (IE, April 15) has little to do with the anatomy of hate or its ongoing malignancy. It is more of an ad hominem attack on the ruling dispensation. A complex phenomenon has been over-simplified to suit a convenient political narrative. The arguments are drearily familiar, facts dodgy and conclusions delusional.

For aeons, India has had syncretic traditions inspired by the Vedic aphorism, “Ekam sad vipra bahudha vadanti” (there is only one truth and learned persons call it by many names). Because of this underpinning, Indian society has never insisted on uniformity in any facet of life. Indian philosophy is a smorgasbord of varied ideas and traditions — incongruous at times, but always a part of a harmonious milieu.

This equanimity of Indian society was, however, disrupted by invading creeds claiming only their God, and His messenger were true, and the rest were false and worthy of destruction, along with their followers and places of worship.

The first such incursion came in 712, when Muhammad bin Qasim vanquished Sindh, and as Chach Nama, a contemporary Arab chronicle states, introduced the practice of treating local Hindus as zimmis, forcing them to pay jizya (a poll tax), as a penalty to live by their beliefs. “Hate” and “bigotry” thus made their debut in India, which was hitherto free from this virus. Pakistan’s official website credits this invasion as when the country was born as an Islamic nation in the Subcontinent.

In the 11th century, Mahmud of Ghazni, while receiving the caliphate honours on his accession to the throne, took a vow to wage jihad every year against Indian idolaters. During his 32-year reign, he did keep his solemn promise over a dozen times. The rest is history.

But why go into the distant past? Unfortunately, the trail of hate unleashed over a thousand years ago continues to haunt us even today. The last 100-odd years witnessed the Moplah riots, Partition, and the decimation of Hindus/Sikhs/Buddhists in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Kashmir Valley. The recent pre-planned attacks on Ram Navami processions in over half a dozen states, and the onslaught on the Hanuman Janamutsav rally have reminded us that the ogre of hate is alive and stinging.

It’s uncanny: While communal mayhem was going on in India, Muslim mobs were fighting pitched battles against the police in dozens of towns in Spain, Sweden and the city of Jerusalem. In Sweden, Muslims were agitated over blasphemy involving the holy Quran. Protests in Spain are against the imprisonment of a rapper convicted of insulting the monarchy and praising terrorist violence. While the issues involving these sordid episodes may differ, the pattern is common.

Were the Hindu-Muslim relations peaceful in the past and have soured post-2014? The fact is, ties between the two communities were seldom cordial. There were intermittent skirmishes, wars and occasional short-lived opportunistic alliances. Is the current dispensation responsible for Muslim alienation? Remember, even Gandhiji failed to wean Muslims from Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s schismatic movement.

In the aftermath of the Moplah violence and communal riots at several places in India, Gandhiji observed in Young India (May 24, 1924): “My own experience but confirms the opinion that the Musalman as a rule is a bully, and the Hindu as a rule is a coward”. Nothing much has since changed in the Subcontinent.

Can laws or police fight hate? No. If they could, Kashmiri Hindus wouldn’t have gone through the hell they did in the 1990s, and would have been happily back in their homes by now. India is a secular democracy, not because of its Constitution. It’s the other way round. When Pakistan declared itself an Islamic Republic in 1947, it would have been natural for India to identify itself as a Hindu state. It didn’t, and couldn’t have — because of its Hindu ethos of pluralism. A Hindu-dominated India, is, and will always be, catholic, plural, myriad and a vibrant democracy.

George Orwell said, “The relative freedom which we enjoy depends on public opinion. The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country”.

Can one fight hate selectively? The burning of Graham Staines and his children is reprehensible. So was the lynching of Akhlaq and Junaid. But why the cowering silence on the dastardly gunning down of Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati and four of his disciples (August 2008) in Orissa for which seven Christians and a Maoist have been convicted? Over a dozen Muslim workers of the BJP have been killed in Jammu & Kashmir and other parts of India in the recent past. These victims of hate are, of course, ignored. Their deaths don’t suit the narrative.

Charged reactions, punctuated with half-truths, deliberate omissions and tailored narratives, offer no real solution. Pusillanimity to face facts will only exacerbate the situation and give egregious results. Ignorance is not always bliss.

In this context, it’s relevant to recall what Lester Pearson (14th PM of Canada) said: “Misunderstanding arising from ignorance breeds fear, and fear remains the greatest enemy of peace.”

Written by Balbir Punj

Source: Indian Express, 21/04/22

Whether in India or the UK, discrimination begins in school

 

Sameena Dalwai writes: It is a rite of passage to a senseless, prejudiced world.

Early in the morning, my brother’s message wakes me up from my slumber: “…and it has started!”

My nephew told his parents that one of his friends at school informed him that half of the class does not want to play with him because they do not like Chinese faces. How does the friend know this? It seems he asked the other kids.

My nephew is six years old — a truly beautiful boy of Chinese-Indian parentage growing up in Oxford. My brother and his wife both have PhDs in economics and finance, and hold faculty positions.

And, yet, it has started for the little boy. A life that is full of small daily rejections, token acceptance and patronising tolerance.

The United Kingdom even celebrates a “tolerance day” at school. That is the best my nephew will get. Not wholehearted acceptance, not joyful assimilation, but tolerance, for one day of the year. In a Twitter post, a Chinese Oxford faculty member reported that he was asked to step aside as white tourists wanted to take a photograph of an “authentic Oxford setting”.

When I was studying for my PhD in the UK, shopkeepers would talk loudly to me, lest I do not understand their English. “You speak English very well” was the usual compliment to Indians and we were asked if we have doctors in India. Statistics tell us that Indians form the largest English-speaking population outside the US, and the NHS, the government health provider in England, is mostly run by Indian doctors and nurses. But can you fight prejudice with statistics?

Better, then, to fight it with humour and a certain level of arrogance. When I was asked whether we have mangoes in India, I just laughed, as I had never sighted a mango tree on the green pastures of England. When I was told that I must try the black pudding or bacon, I responded with, “I do not relish pigs, dogs or frogs, but respect those who do”.

Yet, we realised that no amount of jokes can make us equal. When we are amongst a group of white people, many of them will not notice us or remember meeting us the next time. Their gaze will just pass over us as if we do not exist. We learnt that love conquers all, but not race. Being a girlfriend/ boyfriend is ok, but when it is time for commitment, it will boil down to, “you will not be able to adjust to British culture” or “wouldn’t the children face an identity crisis?”

All of this plays in my head like a reel. My heart sinks.

It starts with school. Everywhere.

I was six years old — the same age as my nephew is now — when my teacher, a Maharashtrian, called me to her and asked, “Your father writes from right to left, na?” My father was Muslim and she meant to mock his Urdu writing — a “reverse” language to her simple mind. I was perplexed. Why would my father write incorrectly? When I asked my mother, she must have been as devastated as my brother is now by the helplessness of not being able to protect one’s child from a harsh, ignorant world.

My father and his clan were Konkani Muslims and most of them spoke and wrote impeccable Marathi. Yet, we got compliments on how we speak Marathi “very well”. When, as a five-year-old, I got the first rank in Sanskrit recitation, the teachers all huddled together to discuss whether someone with that kind of name should be given an award for Sanskrit.

My brother once painted a picture of a blue sky with a crescent moon and sparkling stars. His teacher was not happy. She asked, “Why did you paint this picture? Like the flag of Pakistan? Is it because you are Muslim?” My brother was stunned. Was he a Muslim? And what was Pakistan?

As children of Hindu, Muslim, socialist parentage, we were raised on Russian books, Dalit poetry and revolutionary songs. However, since our father was born Muslim, we were marked as Muslim. Patriarchy is an unimaginative system.

The same patriarchy spared me the worst experiences because I was a girl. A Muslim girl needs saving from her own community — from abusive husbands with four wives, from oral triple talaq. My brother, however, was a boy and so definitely an “enemy”. When he was 12 years old, the boys who lost to him on the playground turned hostile, they began a tirade against him and all Muslims. “Rajputs finished the Mughals, now we will finish you,” they yelled. The intricate relationship between masculinity and violence puts little boys in harm’s way. The history classes turned into “us” vs “them”, where everyone would look at the lone Muslim boy, blaming him for the battles between Aurangzeb and Shivaji. The boys routinely taunted my brother and cousins using a derogatory term for circumcised men.

The school becomes a rite of passage to a senseless world. In parallel experiences, Dalit autobiographies recount the branding and degradation that first-generation learners face when they enter schools. It is not the difficulty of subjects such as math, science or languages that causes failure and dropouts among poor, Dalit/ Muslim/ OBC students. It is the hostility of upper-caste teachers and classmates that makes learning impossible.

Childhood humiliation haunts all of us well into our adult lives. The 36-year-old, super-educated, confident self cannot protect the six-year-old confused and hurt self. Must the next generation face it all over again?

Source: Indian Express, 21/10/21

Violence and communalism: South Asia’s disturbing commonality

 

Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes: Fundamentalists, even as they create walls between communities, recognise that South Asia has a connected destiny: They bank on it to achieve their ends

The violence against the Hindu minority in Bangladesh is an ominous development. But it is also a reminder of one cardinal truth: All of South Asia is “tied together in a single garment of destiny,” to borrow Martin Luther King’s phrase from a different context. Violence in one place will spill over to another; freedom endangered in one place will inevitably corrode the freedom of others. We have tried to act as if this was not true. But that modus vivendi has been unravelling for a while.

Anti-Hindu violence in Bangladesh is not new. The current violence is strategically timed. It is surely not a coincidence that the violence coincides with targeted attacks on Hindus in Kashmir. The intent is not just local ethnic terror, but a deepening of the communal divide in India. It is tempting to say that this violence is a strategic act by particular organised groups, perhaps with transnational links. It is not organically embedded in society. This is a comforting thought, and can empower us to the extent that it is still important to recognise forces that do not condone such violence. But in South Asia the link between strategic communal violence and organic embeddedness is always a tricky one. Such violence inevitably transforms the fabric of social relationships itself. It is fanciful to think that Kashmiriyat survived terrorism, or that remnants of Bangladeshi pluralism will survive this violence, or that blasphemy laws in Punjab will not play into hands of violent reactionaries, any more than Indian secularism survived the violence of so-called fringe groups. Over time, everywhere in South Asia, violence has fundamentally transformed politics. It is a tiger you ride at your own peril.

The Partition of India could work as a modus vivendi, if three conditions were in place. The first is that the internal conflicts in each of the states would not radically spill over into the other states. This assumption was never literally true. But it was shaken to its core by 1971. Pakistan’s horrendous internal conflicts spilled over, and Indian intervention helped the breaking up of Pakistan, creating a syndrome of deep Pakistani insecurity that still haunts the subcontinent. The second assumption was that the successor states behaved, as much as possible, like normal states in relation to each other: Pacifying violence, trading with each other, leveraging the advantages of their geographical proximity. They would, like all states, worry about the power of their neighbours. But the fact that they were states would give them enough confidence to deal with each other. Most states in South Asia, however, want to run away from each other. In Pakistan we got a state whose elites were ready to cut off its nose to spite its face, becoming an epicentre of transnational violence from Afghanistan to Bangladesh, and changing its own social character in the process.

But even the absence of these two conditions could, with some difficulty, be managed, if India remained a bulwark against spillover effects. Spillover effects don’t just work through retaliatory violence. They work by transforming the ideological climate in other states. The persecution of Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh is a pivotal strand in the mentality that India must be, if not a Hindu state, at least a “Hindus First” state. India could also remain a bulwark against these effects if in response to communalism elsewhere, it reaffirmed its own secularism more deeply. The assumption was that India is large enough to absorb a few pin pricks. Throwing cold water domestically over what our neighbours were doing, even as we tried to contain them internationally, was not a sign of weakness, it was smart strategy. The fact that Hindus are being targeted is not a creation of Hindu nationalism. The targeting of Hindus also has elements of sui generis logic. But the ascendancy of Hindu nationalism has profoundly changed how the dynamics of attacks play out. Hindu nationalism looks for pretexts to target Muslims, deepen internal divisions, and construct a seamless spectre of Muslim threat. The official response of the government of India to the violence in Bangladesh may be conventional. But this incident will have deep communal effects. Even if there is no immediate retaliatory violence, the cumulative communal undertones in India will erupt. Which is exactly what those groups who foment violence in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Bangladesh would like.

The spillover effects cannot be contained because, despite differences in political cultures, the ethnic fundamentalisms of these countries now feed off each other. They will give each other victories. All of these countries, including India, now have hegemonic ideologies at the level of civil society that revel in a vicious coarsening of discourse, are deeply committed to violence, and frankly don’t mind disorder if it increases support for society’s authoritarian instincts.

This is also of great strategic consequence. Some of Delhi’s macho strategic mandarins used to loudly thump their chests and say India can do without South Asia: It was too big and had too much legitimacy capital to have to worry about its neighbours. India’s legitimacy capital is slowly eroding as its democracy and secularism corrode. But, strategically, not placing South Asia front and centre was always a myopic view. It was also a mistake in a much deeper sense. The geopolitics of South Asia is not a conventional international relations problem; it is a deep, and increasingly traumatic, psychodrama in a long civilisational history. The international de-hyphenation of India and Pakistan may be considered a big diplomatic victory. But the de-hyphenation we are proud of is practically meaningless when even the ideological currents in most South Asian countries are now so deeply hyphenated.

In a twisted dialectic, fundamentalists, even as they create walls between communities, seem to recognise that South Asia has a connected ideological destiny: They are banking on it to achieve their ends. There are three ways of thinking about that destiny. The first is the current modus vivendi. But the historical conditions for its success are increasingly doubtful. What is replacing it is an intensification of the logic of 1947: Attempts at a deepening communal divide, ethnic cleansing and subordination in different keys, and a cult of violence. Is there a third option — a South Asia with states that reimagine the region not as joined by a murderous competition over community identity but as a new zone of freedom? This is a pie in the sky. But the thought that the only political language that unites South Asia is the deepening of the violence of 1947 is too dreadful to contemplate.

Source: Indian Express, 20/10/21

Communal violence deprive minorities of their sense of belonging: SC

Religious minorities are “as much children of the soil as the majority” and nothing should be done by the majority community to deprive them of a sense of belonging, of a feeling of security, the Supreme Court observed in a judgment condemning repeated incidents of communal violence targeting minority communities.

A Bench of Chief Justice of India T.S. Thakur and U.U. Lalit said the State’s actions should never cause minorities to fear the extinguishment of their “consciousness of equality."

The measure of civilisation prevalent in a nation is the extent to which its Minorities feel secure and are not subject to discrimination or suppression, the apex court held in a judgment directing the re-investigation of 315 cases of communal violence against Christians in the 2008 Kandhamal riots in Odisha.

Over 230 Christian religious establishments and 39 people were killed in the riots. The State Police arrested 6495 persons and registered 827 cases of communal violence. However, chargesheets were filed in only 512 cases. The police concluded that no offence or offender could be detected in the remaining 315 cases.

The apex court expressed its chagrin at the snail-paced delivery of justice to the victims even though eight years have passed since the violence. “Trials have been completed only in 362 which resulted in conviction in 78 cases while 284 cases ended in acquittal and only 15 appeals have been filed,” it noted. But it refused to order a CBI probe.

In a judgment authored by Justice Lalit for the Bench, the apex court pointed to the case of the 2013 Muzzafarnagar riots in Uttar Pradesh to hold that both the Centre and the State where the communal violence occurred were obliged to shell out additional compensation to be paid to the victims.

“Incidents of communal violence had occurred in and around Muzaffarnagar in the year 2013 and that the State itself had decided to pay compensation… We have considered the scales at which compensation has been granted and disbursed in the present matter. In our view the ends of justice would be met if the State Government and the Central Government are directed to pay additional compensations,” the apex court observed.

The judgment is the last in a series of orders passed by the Supreme Court since 2008 on a batch of petitions filed by several persons, including Arch Bishop Raphael Cheenath, highlighting the failure on part of State of Odisha to protect innocent people whose human rights were violated after the unfortunate assassination of Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati and some others on August 23, 2008 by Maoists.

The apex court orders over the past years spans a variety of issues which followed the violence, including proper and adequate facilities in refugee camps, steps to prevent communal violence, to provide adequate compensation to the victims of communal violence, to order institution of a Commission of Inquiry, etc.

Keywords: Kandhamal riots, attack on minorities, communal riots

Source: The Hindu, 4-08-2016

Mainstream, VOL LIV No 21 New Delhi May 14, 2016

Growing Intolerance in a Tolerant Society

Tuesday 17 May 2016

by Ram Puniyani

Towards the end of 2015 many writers and eminent citizens returned their national honours protesting against the growing atmosphere of intolerance. The list was long and this acted as a process where some introspection took place in society. Still the ruling dispensation and its associates in the Hindu Right-wing politics, the RSS combine, began criticising those who returned their awards, accusing them of being politically motivated. They were also criticised for doing so to influence the forthcoming State Assembly elections in Bihar.

Most of the awardees stood their ground as the perceptions about tolerance, freedom of expression had crossed the threshold and had undergone a qualitative change. This gets confirmed in a 2015 Report by the US Commission for International Religious Freedom. This USCIRF is a bipartisan US Federal Govern-ment Commission. This is the first of its kind in the world and is aimed at defending the universal right to freedom of religion or belief all across the globe. The Report is scathing and points to the state of religious freedom in India. As per the Report, freedom in India is on a negative trajectory, religious tolerance has deteriorated and ‘religious freedom’ violations have increased during 2015.

The Report points out: “In 2015, religious tolerance deteriorated and religious freedom violations increased in India...minority commu-nities, especially Christians, Muslims and Sikhs, experienced numerous incidents of intimidation, harassment and violence, largely at the hands of Hindu nationalist groups.” The Report outlines the violations and informs that the USCRIF will continue to monitor the situation and may have to recommend to the State Department that India should be kept under ‘the country with particular concern’. It is a significant Report which goes on to say that the US Government should keep this in mind while shaping the bilateral contacts with India and the future of ‘strategic dialogues’ should be determined according to that.

The Report suggests that the Indian Govern-ment publicly rebut officials and religious leaders who make derogatory statements about religious communities. This is the crux of the matter. Those understanding Indian politics know by now more clearly than before that the leaders making derogatory comments are either directly part of the ruling party, like Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, Giriraj Singh (both Ministers at the Centre), or leading Members of Parliament like Yogi Adityanath or Sakshi Maharaj. Then there are others who belong to the affiliate organisations like the VHP, Bajrang Dal, which again are part of the broader Sangh Parivar, or, more precisely, the RSS combine.

When these statements derogatory to religious minorities are made, some from the ruling party will come forward to say that this is not the official position of the party and stop at that. There is neither a reprimand neither demotion of the person concerned. Many have made these derogatory comments even before coming to power, like Giriraj Singh, but despite that they have been given the positions of power. At these times Narendra Modi, who is presented as a powerful Prime Minister, keeps silent for weeks and later comes out with some lame uncon-vincing statement, which does not take away from the impunity of those indulging in such hate speech.

As such it seems to be a coordinated game. Someone makes the provocative statement, and some others from the RSS stable come to defend/justify him/her and some others say it is not official while the PM maintains a deliberate silence. Interestingly, some statements need not sound derogatory to begin with. Hindutva’s patriarch RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat’s statement about shouting Bharat Mata ki Jai (Hail Mother India) is very revealing. First, he said that we should teach the younger generation to say this. Then he took a step back saying it should not be compulsory. In response to this Asaduddin Owaisi of the MIM gave an unwarranted statement that he will not say so even if a knife is put to his throat. To take the story further, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said it is a must for all those who want to stay in India. As a matter of fact this is a subtle intimidation of the religious minorities who don’t worship anybody but Allah; as per Bharat Mata ki Jai, it becomes like hailing Mother Goddess, which they say is not permitted by Islam.

The RSS fellow-traveller, Yoga guru and entrepreneur Ramdev, said that had the Consti-tution not been there, by now lakhs would have been beheaded. These are comments from the top rungs of the political establishment these days. The writers of the Report in their naivety may have given this suggestion, not knowing that currently the protection for such divi-siveness is coming from the top echelons.

This is not an enviable situation for demo-cracy in India. The quality of democracy is to be judged by the degree of safety and security of the religious minorities. True, even earlier also anti-minority violence was part of the Indian political landscape, but now with the BJP Government at the Centre the intolerance and divisiveness has undergone a sea-change. What the awardees were feeling has a lot of truth; the feeling of insecurity is accompanied by the gag on freedom of expression, which is going on together with the intolerance.

The Report has come out at a time Modi is packing his bags for a major trip to the US. But at best it will probably be another document for the libraries.

The author, a retired Professor at the IIT, Bombay, is currently associated with the Centre for the Study of Secularism and Society, Mumbai.

Terrorism and communal violence must carry same stigma and punishment

Three men have been marched to the gallows in recent years in India. All three were convicted of terror crimes. By contrast, I cannot recall a single person awarded the death penalty for communal violence since Independence.

Yakub Memon, convicted for complicity in the 1993 Bombay terror blasts, spent 21 years in prison without a day’s parole before his hanging. Maya Kodnani, convicted for being what the trial court described as the ‘kingpin’ in the 2002 massacre in Naroda Patiya which left 97 people dead — including 35 women and 36 children who were burnt alive, stabbed and dismembered — was awarded imprisonment for life. But she was granted three months’ bail in November 2013 for medical treatment, and the Gujarat High Court confirmed her bail for ill-health from July 2014, which continues until the time of writing.

In both popular, social common sense and the ways in which the laws are designed and implemented in India, there is an implied hierarchy of crimes, in which gravest crimes are seen to be those connected with terror and violence, meriting harsh laws, criminal procedures that severely curtail human rights of the accused, and stricter penalties including death. However, communal violence is akin to terror crimes because it is also driven by hate ideologies and target innocent populations with death and destruction. It is remarkable that these do not carry the same censure and disgrace as terror crimes, both in popular morality and in the framing and implementation of the law.

Read | Old pain, just in new bottles

This hierarchy of crimes was accepted in the Law Commission report, chaired by progressive Justice AP Shah, which recommended the abolition of the death penalty in all crimes except terror-related ones and waging war against the State. This same idea — that crimes of terror fall into a different category from other crimes, including those that target people for their religious and caste identities — is the rationale for special terror laws in India (as in many parts of the world). These laws dilute accepted standards of human rights protection of the accused. They permit statements before police officials as evidence admissible in courts, ignoring that such statements may have been coercively obtained by torture. They delay the period for communicating charges and submitting charge-sheets, and discourage bail.

There are some who argue that these human costs are regrettable but inevitable when the country battles the ever-looming perils of terror attacks; the costs of possible injustice to a small number are morally acceptable to protect the majority from terror violence. This is a deeply problematic position because justice is indivisible and injustice to some cannot result in authentic justice for the many. However, even in a practical sense, officially sanctioned and effected injustice can only breed fear and discontent that would further imperil the social order.

Remarkably, the same arguments are not applied to communal hate crimes. We have studied the aftermath of many communal massacres since Independence, and what binds them all is the pattern that few, if any, are punished for these crimes. This is the outcome of the communal bias or apathy of all arms of the criminal justice system: The police, prosecution, and courts; and the political, social and economic powerlessness of the victims of communal crimes. Among the survivors of these crimes — many of whom fight epic and hopeless battles for justice like the widows of the 1984 Sikh massacre or the survivors of the 2002 Gujarat massacre — there is little popular outrage that these crimes go unpunished. Unlike for terror crimes, there is no demand for special laws and procedures to ensure different standards of gathering evidence, issuing bail and punishment for those who commit hate crimes against persons of a particular religion or caste. We wish to see those responsible for the 1993 Mumbai blasts hang, but we are indifferent when those named guilty by the judicial commission for the Mumbai communal killings in 1992-93 continue to walk free.

Read | 1984 riots: GK seeks Modi’s help for expediting probe into cases

I am neither making a case for death penalty for perpetrators of communal violence, nor for the dilution of their basic human rights. What I am arguing is that both popular stigma and the imperative of law should apply equally to those who are alleged to participate in terror crimes as those who are charged with hate crimes targeting persons for their religious or caste identity. The selectivity of or popular outrage and the application of the majesty of the legal system reveals a very troubling underlying majoritarian bias in society and law. A majority of those charged with terror crimes are religious minorities. While a majority of those charged with communal crimes are from the majority Hindu community, its victims are mostly religious minorities.

If law and social outrage apply so differently when the minority is charged with hate crimes from when they are the paramount victims of mass hate crimes, then the promises of a secular Constitution — of equal treatment of all before the law — stands exposed, in tatters.

Harsh Mander is convener, Aman Biradari

Source: Hindustan Times, 16-03-2016

Violence as the new normal

In directing States to show “zero tolerance” to attempts to “weaken the secular fabric” of the country, the Union Home Ministry was voicing its concern at the widening social acceptance of communal violence as a normal part of everyday life. The lynching in Dadri of Mohammad Akhlaq for “eating beef” was an extreme case, but the circumstances that led to the murder were not dissimilar to those in many other parts of the country following the political mobilisation along communal lines against cattle slaughter. That the Ministry thought it fit to issue the directive despite law and order being a State subject indicates the seriousness of the situation in several States. Many Hindutva activists have projected cow slaughter as a deliberate assault on the religious sensitivities of Hindus by butchers and traders and exporters belonging to other religions. In such a situation, it would not take much effort on the part of extremist elements to portray any meal in a non-Hindu family as a grave provocation. Thus, the advisory issued by the Ministry — warning against the exploitation of religious emotions or sentiments and calling for the “strictest action as per law” against the culprits — demands the urgent attention of State governments. Law enforcers need to act at the very first sign of trouble.

However, the BJP-led government at the Centre should guard against letting this issue descend into a political slugfest with State governments run by other parties. In Uttar Pradesh, especially, the stage seems set for a blame game between the Samajwadi Party and the BJP. In its report to the Centre, the SP government avoided listing any motive for the Dadri attack. To readily grant that the violence was the result of sudden outrage over beef consumption would have been to ignore the systematic, communally charged campaign against cattle slaughter by Hindutva activists. While noting that there were allegations that Akhlaq was killed for consuming the “meat of an animal whose slaughter is banned”, the report said no conclusion had been reached as yet. Evidently, the report stuck to the bare, verifiable facts, in order to prevent Hindutva elements from making political capital out of religious sentiments around the cow. Also, this has left the window open to charge the accused with attempting to instigate large-scale communal violence. The Home Ministry, in issuing the directive, might have wanted to shift the onus to the States to prevent such incidents. But, beyond apportioning blame and shifting responsibility, the Central and State governments ought to realise the potential for trouble from this campaign against beef by communally motivated elements.

Source: The Hindu, 7-10-2015

Holy cow, unholy violence

The cow has been converted aggressively into a symbol for a religious orthodoxy demanding its place in a secular nation state.

If you love cows and care for them, you have three choices:

Choice A: Build goshalas or cow shelters where the animals can be taken care of. But this is an expensive proposition. There is heavy investment and no returns whatsoever, despite all the talk of the great medicinal value of cow urine and cow dung.

Choice B: Ban beef, stop farmers from selling cows and bulls to butchers, outlaw the culling of cattle, punish cow smugglers, declare all slaughter houses illegal, lynch people who eat beef, and justify all this using complex arguments. This results in a large number of cows (which can no longer give milk) and bulls or oxen (that are too weak to be draught animals), being abandoned to simply wander the streets eating garbage and plastic or just starving to death since Choice A is unavailable. It also destroys industries and creates widespread unemployment.

Choice C: Build local slaughterhouses near farms so that commercially unviable cattle can be humanely culled nearby, without their having to endure great suffering while being transported in horrible conditions to distant slaughterhouses. This controversial suggestion was made by none other than N.S. Ramaswamy, founder-director of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, and noted animal rights activist.

Guess which is the preferred option of the rising multitude of go-raksha vigilantes? Not A, as it is too expensive and tedious, and involves too much work. Not C, because we are conditioned to believe that violence can do no good. So it is Option B, which has the advantage in that it gives people power. It allows them to terrorise and dominate Muslims and liberals. It gives them global attention and makes them the focus of a controversy-hungry media. It is this rather than cow protection that the go-rakshaks really seek.

There is no love for cows in the go-raksha brigade — an idea systematically and meticulously unravelled in the essay ‘Why is the Cow a Political Animal?’ by Sopan Joshi, a Research Fellow at the Gandhi Peace Foundation, published in Yahoo! in May this year. It is all about power, a yearning to dominate. So, all the talk about the economic reasons for saving cows, and the importance of cow milk, cow urine and cow dung are just a rationalisation for that one single goal: to dominate and reclaim masculinity, following the perceived emasculation by the Muslims, the British and now the liberals.

Devdutt Pattanaik

New form of Hinduism

A new form of Hinduism is emerging around the world: one that is tired of being seen as passive and tolerant, like a suffering docile wife. It wants to be aggressive, violent. So it prefers Durga and Kali to the demure Gauri; Shiva as Rudra and Virabhadra and Bhairava rather than as the guileless Bholenath or the august Dakshinamurthy; and the Krishna of the Mahabharat to the affectionate Bhagavata Krishna. It visualises Ram without Sita. It wants its Ganesh to lose that pot belly and sport a six-pack ab. All this while insisting, with violence if necessary, on the values of vegetarianism and seva and ‘giving up the ego’, which is the principle of ‘sanatana dharma’ — not just a religion but a way of life.

This new form of Hinduism is what we call Hindutva. We can call it a sampradaya, a movement within the vast ocean of Hinduism that has many such movements, traditions, forces and counterforces. Hindutva sampradaya, like all sampradayas in history, insists it is the true voice of Hinduism. Like allsampradayas, it rejects all alternative readings of Hinduism.

And so, when you direct them to an article, ‘The Hindu View on Food and Drink’ by S. Ganesh and Hari Ravikumar on IndiaFacts.com, which draws attention to the fact that while Vedic scriptures do value the cow, they have no problem with the consumption of bulls and oxen and barren cows, members of the Hindutva brigade will question the credentials of the authors and their Hinduness, invariably in language that is hyperbolic, rhetorical and violent. There is no room for discussion or nuance here. The only language is force and bullying. Where is this coming from?

It comes from institutionalised paranoia: a belief that innocent Hindi-speaking rural Bharat needs rescuing from an evil English-speaking India that favours Nehru, from the liberals who equate Hinduism only with casteism, and from Euro-American scholars who insist Shiva is a ‘phallic’ god. And, to be fair, there is a modicum of truth in their argument.

In his book Rearming Hinduism, Vamsee Juluri expresses outrage at the way Hinduism is being projected in the U.S. That outrage and anguish is genuine, and can be felt in the NRI community that has increasingly become more and more vocal, even aggressive. When ‘liberals’ deny this outrage and anguish, it seems to consolidate the paranoia of the Hindutva sampradaya. When the liberal press dismisses the book by Sita Ram Goel, Hindu Temples — What Happened to Them, as right-wing propaganda, and gleefully declares that the Hindu memory of Muslim kings destroying thousands of Hindu temple is just not true on the basis of Richard Eaton’s Temple Desecration and Muslim States in Medieval India, you start wondering if the scientific and historical method is simply designed to mock all things that a traditional Hindu simply assumes to be true. When the banning of radical literature does not meet with the same outrage as the banning of Wendy Doniger’s Hindus: An Alternative History, a section of the population starts feeling that they are alone, isolated and rejected, by the people who claim to be fair and just and liberal.

How do you strike back at those who simply invalidate your memories and beliefs by constantly quoting science and facts? You simply create your own narrative and dismiss theirs. And this is what is happening in the beef-eating discourse. It is a symbolic attack on the ‘educated Indian’ who did not stand up for Hinduism in the international arena. And the Muslims, sadly, are the tragic collateral damage.

In the 1980s, we saw how the then Congress government tried to appease the Muslim orthodoxy in the Shah Bano case by diluting even a Supreme Court judgment that gave maintenance rights to divorced Muslim women, but did not bother to appease the Hindutva sampradaya in the Roop Kanwar sati case when the court declared sati a crime and not a religious act. In these cases, women were simply symbols in a fight where religious orthodoxy was demanding its place in a secular nation state. Now, it is the turn of the cow to be that symbol.

When the secular nation state tilts in favour of one religion and seems to be persecuting another, there is bound to be a backlash. And that is what we are facing now: a karma-phala (karmic fruit) of karmic-bija (karmic seed) sown by the Congress on the one hand, when it unashamedly appeased Muslim religious orthodoxy, and the liberals on the other, who endorsed their secular and rational and atheistic credentials by repeatedly projecting Hinduism as only a violent and oppressive force. Let us ponder on our contribution to the rising tide of ahimsa terrorism, while the still starving ‘rescued’ cow wades through garbage in Indian towns and villages, eating plastic.

(Devdutt Pattanaik writes and lectures on the relevance of mythology in modern times. www.devdutt.com)

Keywords: Beef ban, cow slaughter, Hindutva, sampradaya, Hindus, Muslims, violence over beef-eating, politics over beef

Source: The Hindu, 6-10-2015

Communal violence cases dropped by 22% from 2013 to 2014

Bharti Jain

New Delhi





Communal incidents in the country fell by almost 22% to 643 in 2014 from 823 in 2013. In fact, the latest figure is the lowest in the last three years, with 2012 having recorded 668 cases.A look at the data released by the government in reply to two Parliament questions dated December 2, 2014 and March 4, 2015 shows that Uttar Pradesh took much of the credit for the dip in communal attacks, recording the biggest drop (43.3%) from 247 incidents in 2013 to 140 last year. Incidentally , the high incidence of communal violence in UP in 2013 was mainly on account of the riots in Muzaffarnagar and adjoining areas in August and September that year.
The state-wise break-up of communal attacks reported in 2014 puts UP at the top of the table with 140 incidents, followed by Maharashtra with 93, Gujarat with 75, Karnataka with 74, Rajasthan with 70 and Bihar with 61. The incidence of communal flare-ups was higher in Maharashtra, Gujarat and Rajasthan in 2014 compared to 2013. While Maharashtra and Gujarat reported a marginal rise in incidents from 88 to 93 and 68 to 75 respectively , Rajasthan witnessed a significant increase in attacks from 52 in 2013 to 70 last year.
Tamil Nadu recorded just 14 incidents in 2014 compared to 36 in 2013, though Delhi recorded higher incidents at seven (an apparent outcome of the Trilokpuri riots last November) from just two in 2013.
As per a monthly break-up of communal incidents from October 2014 to January 2015, put out as an annexure to the government's reply to a Rajya Sabha query , 49 and 33 attacks were reported across the country in November and December 2014 respectively , though this went up to 72 incidents in January 2015.
The sharp rise in incidents in January was on account of higher cases reported in Maharashtra (21) and Bihar (12).

Dec 03 2014 : The Times of India (Delhi)

Communal violence down: Govt data

New Delhi: TIMES NEWS NETWORK





UP Led The Decline With Number Of Deaths Dipping To One-Third Of 2013 Figure

Uttar Pradesh led a nationwide decline in communal violence until October this year, with incidents in the state down by nearly half and deaths at onethird of the number recorded in 2013. The sharp drop in numbers though can partly be explained by the Muzaffarnagar riots last year which caused more than usual deaths and injuries.UP, which as per data presented by minister of state Kiren Rijiju in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday recorded the highest incidence of communal violence since 2012, witnessed 129 incidents (down from 247 in entire 2013) and 25 deaths (from 77) until October this year. However, the number of those injured due to rioting in the state was 364, still higher than the 360 injured reported in 2013. Ranking behind UP in terms of communal occurrences until October were states like Maharashtra (82 incidents), Karnataka (68), Rajasthan (61), Gujarat (59), Bihar (51) and MP(42).
Delhi, which had registered insignificant levels of communal violence since 2011, witnessed a spike this year with seven incidents, which caused one death and left 101 injured. This is big when compared to the figures of four, three and two incidents that were reported in 2011, 2012 and 2013 respectively. Fatalities in Delhi were nil over the last three years and injuries at 8, 28 and 1 in 2011, 2012 and 2013 respectively .
While there was no major difference in incidents of communal violence reported from Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Karnataka and Gujarat as compared to the recent past, Madhya Pradesh, which has traditionally been a close third after Maharashtra in number of flare-ups, showed significant improvement with incidents and nonfatal casualties down by a half as compared to 2013. Kerala too witnessed somewhat of a turnaround, with communal incidents in the southern state down at just three and the injured at 13 from 41 and 65, respectively , in the whole of 2013. Though communal incidents and deaths were around the same levels in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Rajasthan, the number of injured fell significantly to 165, 151 and 116 till October 2014 from 352, 235 and 194 respectively last year.
Nationally , incidents were down from 823 in 2013 to 561 until October this year, while the number of those killed and injured in rioting fell to 90 and 1,688 from 133 and 2,269 last year.