Despite the State: Why India Lets Its People Down and How They Cope by M. Rajshekhar

Author:M. Rajshekhar [Rajshekhar, M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

To understand this shift, 1989 is where we should start.

That year, Bhagalpur, the third biggest town in Bihar as of 2020, saw what were described as the worst Hindu-Muslim riots in India since Partition. These riots connoted a break in the history of post-Independence communal violence in Bihar, social activist Arshad Ajmal told me. ‘Riots before and after it have generated very different levels of insecurity for Muslims.’ He was sitting in his office in a semi-populated residential colony in Patna, where houses had come up on some plots, while others stood barren, with grass, sewage and garbage gathering in them. From here, the fifty-something director of the Patna-based Al-Khair Charitable Trust, which worked for communal amity, had been observing religious violence return to the state.

Before 1989, he told me, encroachment of qabristans used to be a trigger for riots. As villages grew and needed more land, whenever non-Muslim residents claimed any portion of the graveyards, riots ensued. Another trigger was religious processions. In already tense areas, when Hindus tried to enter Muslim-dominated neighbourhoods or vice versa, processions would catalyse violence. ‘Otherwise, processions were mostly filled with women, children and young men. They were a time of celebration. If you look at Chhath Puja processions, these don’t provoke tensions even now. Their spirituality hasn’t been compromised. That is how all processions used to be,’ said Ajmal.4

It was a gentler time. ‘Ram used to be a loving character in the Muslim psyche, not someone frightening. He was an ideal character. What people used to hear [in processions] was “Sitaram, Sitaram”, not “Jai Shri Ram”, which is much more martial.’ Violence lasted a week at the most, and then the curfew would be lifted. They also did not spread far. ‘When there were riots in Rourkela or Jamshedpur, they stayed local. They did not have any effect on Patna.’ But the most striking quality was the equanimity with which society absorbed them. ‘People might have died, but no one ever felt they would have to leave. Something was there in those societies which gave people this strength. They knew mistakes would happen.’

This conversation with Ajmal revealed an older baseline on community relations. ‘After 1947, the India that was created, because of [Jawaharlal] Nehru and freedom fighters like Maulana Azad, reassured Muslims about India. Azad did that by asking, “Where will you go after cutting your roots?” They restored people’s belongingness. Till 1989, [despite occasional communal violence], people did not leave their bastis.’

And then, L.K. Advani revived hard-line Hindutva as the BJP’s core ideology. The Ram Janmabhoomi campaign, seeking to build a temple for the god Ram at his purported birthplace in Ayodhya, got underway.

On the twenty-second of October in 1989, as the Sangh Parivar was collecting bricks in Bhagalpur for the Ram temple, a procession triggered tensions in Fatehpur village. Two days later, while one procession passed peacefully through Tatarpur, a Muslim-dominated area, after agreeing not to raise provocative slogans, a second one was halted by the locals when some members shouted

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