Ruling by Riots

Great events in india have been shaped by the politics of the lynch mob. The last and decisive impetus to the great divide between Hindus and Muslims, which in turn led to the bitter harvest of partition in 1947, was provided by the Muslim mobs of Calcutta who ravaged the city in 1946. In 1984, Sikhs were identified, torched and killed by sword and bullet after the assassination of Indira Gandhi. In 1992 the destruction of a mosque on a disputed spot in the holy city of Ayodhya, where the Himalayas begin to meet the plains, was followed by wanton nationwide riots in which Muslims were surrounded, terrorized and massacred; rape was thrown in for evil measure in cities like Surat in polarized Gujarat, where it was also videotaped as proof of rapine conquest.

Each time, the government of the day gave implicit help to the lynch mobs by providing breathing space for hatred. Despite sufficient evidence of the coming firestorm, the police were kept immobile before and mute during the public assault, mayhem and murder. The guardians of the law handed selected areas for an average of two days to the lawless of their preference, while some group of Indians paid an indescribable price in blood. For these mass lynchings have an almost celebratory air. Mobs roam the street as if on some gruesome holiday during which they have been released from all the codes of humanity, chatting as they roam, roaring as they kill. Fire and sword is not a metaphor in my India.

Each time, politicians offer formal regrets even as they privately savor the political rewards that the storms will blow in their direction. Such hypocritical tears were more effectively shed when the world was not in the constant glare of television. These days some of them are barely able to keep a thin smile hidden while they trot out pompous phrases of concern, interjected by poison — words that send private signals to their violent constituency. The camera shows it all.

In 1946 the Muslim League government in Calcutta, and the rest of the party across the undivided subcontinent, found the “evidence” it needed for its two-nations theory in the riots it inspired in Calcutta. In 1984 the Congress Party more or less condoned with a shrug the massacre of Sikhs. The Muslim League got its Pakistan, and the Congress was re-elected in the general elections that followed the Sikh slaughter. But the consequences of both “achievements” have haunted this subcontinent.

A peculiarity of the episode in December 1992 was the collusion between the Congress government in New Delhi and the main opposition party of the country, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which was in the forefront of the movement to destroy the mosque built, it said, where the revered Hindu god Rama was born. The Congress Prime Minister at the time, P.V. Narasimha Rao, in a modern variation of the Nero legend, slept while the mosque was being destroyed. Even his Cabinet colleagues were not allowed to disturb his sleep, according to numerous statements made by them (after he lost power). Rao rationalized his abdication of responsibility with Machiavellian rationale. The BJP was committing suicide, he argued. Why interfere?

He, not the BJP, died a political death. At least the latter was not duplicitous. But that clarity has been fogged by the nature of the first BJP Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, a liberal at heart though not always in action. An attendant problem is the nature of the coalition that runs India now: most of its members do not share the Hindu ideology of the principal party and want a settlement of the dispute through the courts.

The impatience of the mobs has been a constant headache for the Prime Minister. His ability to keep contradictions under control was strained with the call given by sadhus and zealots to start construction of a temple at the disputed site this month; it snapped when Muslim fanatics attacked a train in Godhra, Gujarat, and killed Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya. In its first test of lynch-mob politics, the government of Vajpayee in New Delhi failed, while the BJP administration in Gujarat could barely conceal its support for those mobs. Paradoxically, Muslim fundamentalists, like the hectoring, acid-tongued Syed Shahabuddin, created a platform for the Hindu resurgence in the 1980s with their virulent and purposeless rhetoric. Their successors in 2002 have provided Hindu fanaticism with another cause célèbre. Sadly, in the darker shades of India’s patchwork history still lie the present and perhaps the future.

M.J. Akbar is editor in chief of The Asian Age. His next book, The Shade of Swords: Jihad and the Conflict Between Islam and Christianity, will be published in May