Communal riots : The heart of darkness

In a dispatch entitled ‘Mountain of mistrust between communities’ (Times of India, September 4, 2012) the correspondent Naresh Mitra quoted two displaced persons staying in two different relief camps in the Kokrajhar district of Assam, Basanti Narzary, a Bodo woman from Shimultapu, and Anuwar Hussain Juardar, a Muslim man from Dawaguri, that brought out a strikingly parallel predicament for both the communities.  Basanty was quoted as saying “Our neighbours are all muslims and we had very good relations with them prior to the clashes. We used to sell our agricultural produce in the same market and frequently interacted with each other. I don’t know how all this happened and what kind of relation we will share once we are rehabilitated in our village”. Contrast this statement with what Anuwar conveyed : “Beore the clashes, Bodos and Muslim farmers worked together in paddy fields. Even I worked for many of my Bodo neighbours. One of the closest Bodo persons to me was Anil Boro. I don’t know whether Anil Boro will be the same person once we come back to our houses at Dawaguri ”. In an ironic coincidence Anuwar from Dawaguri was rehabilitated in a relief camp at Shimultapu High School, while Basanty in her relief camp in Jaraguri was wistfully thinking about her house at Shimultapu with spacious rooms, a courtyard, kitchen and garden that was burnt by miscreants on July 23 !    

While many inmates started leaving relief camps in Kokrajhar, Chirang and Dhubri districts, there was this palpable suspicion and worry in the minds of Bodos and Muslims, who have lived peacefully as neighbours before clashes and were also good friends. The ethno-communal clashes have changed everything for them now. 

In his deeply emotional reminiscence on Shyam, his very close and dear friend from the Bombay film world of 1940s, the great Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto made an observation on the subject of communal feelings with a remarkable perspicacity (“Shyam : Krishna’s Flute” in “Bitter Fruit”, Penguin Books, 2008).

“Once during the time of Partition”, writes Manto, “when a bloody fratricidal civil war was being fought between Hindus and Muslims with thousands being massacred every day, Shyam and I were listening to a family of Sikh refugees from Rawalpindi. They were telling us horrifying stories of how their people had been killed. I could sense that Shyam was deeply moved and I could understand the emotional upheaval he was undergoing. When we left, I said to him, ‘ I am a Muslim, don’t you feel like murdering me ?’

“ ‘Not now’, he answered gravely, ‘but when I was listening to the atrocities the Muslims had committed … I could have murdered you’.

“I was deeply shocked by Shyam’s words”, Manto continues, “perhaps I could have also murdered him at the time. But later when I thought about it I suddenly understood the basis of those riots in which thousands of innocent Hindus and Muslims were killed every day.

“ ‘Not now … but at that time, yes’. If you ponder over these words, you will find an answer to the painful reality of Partition, an answer that lies in human nature itself.” No wonder many of Manto’s short stories reflected this almost unavoidable perversion of human nature at the critical juncture of partition. The bigger tragedy is that this indulgence has not been held in check, the genie of communal bad blood has repeatedly come out and wreaked havoc time and again in different areas of post-partition India among varied communities and groups.  

Despite being close neighbours and good friends for years, ordinary people belonging to different ethnicity or religion suddenly allow themselves to be incited by rabid communal rumor and hate mongers and start believing in the irreconcilable demonic ‘otherness’ and the evil intent of the community on the opposite side of the divide as an inevitable consequence. Unspeakable cruelty, bestiality happen which both groups could hardly understand or explain later while mending up the badly mangled fabric of their life as a composite community just as Basanty and Anuwar, sitting in the relief camps of Kokrajhar, were hard put to find a clue to the upheaval they experienced a few weeks ago.  

Questioning the nature of Indian democracy

·        Is holding 5 yearly elections the hallmark of our democracy ? The manner in which such elections are conducted (use of money and muscle power, inducements, openly pandering to caste, religious, ethnic, linguistic, regional prejudices are known to vitiate the electoral atmosphere) raises serious doubt whether the election results are manipulated to an extent.

·        Though in principle people can make a free choice in these elections, it is really the political parties that one gets to choose from a list (though given as a list of candidates). The parties nominate candidates by a non-transparent process in which their winability at any cost becomes the major factor in their choice. Their present and future utility to the party takes precedence over the moral character, educational qualifications and background, knowledge, competence and wisdom that the candidates, ideally, could bring to bear on the delivery of public good to the constituents who would elect them.     

·        Assuming that the election provides Indians a means to choose and/or overthrow their rulers in a non-violent manner, they have to perforce agree to be governed for the next five years by a set of ‘chosen’ people, who despite pious protestations, effectively arrogate to themselves the power to set the rules of governance as per their convenience and their perpetual benefit and continuance, and insist that these ‘rules’ are sacrosanct, next to being god-given, and can not be challenged by anybody – people at large or by some other associations, organizations, institutions on their behalf.

·        Once chosen, through a far from satisfactory electoral process, a party or an alliance of parties parading a majority of number of wining candidates (MLAs or MPs) expects an effective immunity from critical scrutiny of the policies persued by the executive (the government) formed by them as well as the details of implementation of even those stated policies. Not only are the protests by the opposition parties as well as dissatisfied members of public and civil society considered undemocratic, but even adverse comments by a constitutionally mandated auditor of the accounts of the government are deemed to contribute to the perils of our democracy. In the same spirit some unfavourable pronouncements and judgments by the highest judicial institution of the country (the supreme court) are deemed hostile and not conducive to independent and efficient operation of the three sets of wheels propelling our democracy. Whoever has talked about the checks and balances being part of democratic functioning must be ignorant of the daily grind of a state machinery !  The question is : should we be proud of such a machine or a little disgusted and even scared at the prospects of having to deal with it on a daily basis ?