Who killed Kader Mia ?

In the last chapter (‘Freedom to think’) of his book ‘ Identity and violence’, Amartya Sen dwelt on his personal experience as an eleven year old child in Dhaka (at the time part of the undivided India) of a nasty act of communal violence during the Hindu-Muslim riots of late nineteen forties. Kader Mia, a Muslim day labourer, happened on that day to stray into a predominantly Hindu neighbourhood of the city (where Sen’s family lived at the time) in search of work for a tiny wage to provide for his impoverished family. Hindu thugs, who did not, in all likelihood, even know him nor met him before, knifed him simply because of his religious identity.  

While expressing his bewilderment even sixty years after this incident Sen correctly rationalised it within his conceptual framework of the solitarist view of an individual’s identity – in this case the identity of Kader Mia just as a Muslim. Those who engineered his death, including those who actually executed the action, did not stop to consider his other obvious identity as one belonging to the working class (proletariat), as a poor daily wage earning odd-job workman (having to face, probably, much the same economic hardships as some among the mob of killers) or as a fellow Bengali-speaking countryman sharing the same cultural practices of the rural Bengal, a good normal human being who cared for his family.

What perplexed Sen the most, and justifiably so, is why and how “political instigators who urged the killing … managed to persuade many otherwise peaceable people of both communities to turn into dedicated thugs … made to think of themselves only as Hindus or only as Muslims (who must unleash vengeance on ‘the other community’) and as absolutely nothing else : not Indians, not sub-continentals, not Asians, not members of  shared human race” (Sen, Identity and Violence, Allen Lane, 2006, p 172). Continuing in this vein Sen made an inspired guess about who could be participating in this macabre dance of death. Though a large number of ordinary people were entrapped by the demagoguery of those preaching identity politics it is the savage fringe “often at the troubled ends of each community who were induced to kill ‘the enemies who kill us’”.

But this is the closest Sen had come to analyzing the art of fostering communal violence. In the end he came back to effectively restating his two formal propositions made in this book (see my earlier blog “Roots of communal violence – solitarist view of identity”) and rested his case. However, it is clear from above that Sen was looking for not just a formal answer to his question as to why, if violence is not the norm with an average human being but only an aberration, it has always been relatively easy for the architects of carnages and pogroms to successfully bring out the beast in men.

I suspect a rationale for ethno-communal violence may not be found in a purely rational, however confused or obdurately narrow and one-sided, view of identity that has presented the intellectual armor Sen had assiduously tried to demolish in this monograph. There is an irrational side to our mind that probably carries layers of unresolved existential insecurities men have accumulated over centuries, imbibed under hostile environment of fierce competition among racially or ethnically identifiable groups or communities. In this scenario sense of belonging and bonding among the communally homogeneous is valued and the perceived ‘otherness’ of any entity that is exogenous by way of food habits, dresses, look, conduct of daily life activities, is a potential threat and hence the subject of a deep-seated antipathy. In the modern world the perspective for above black and white distinction (singular identity) may present itself in a more ambiguous manner but is still socially perpetuated by uncritical consumption through the family values, religious practices, folklore and wider cultural behaviour patterns.

The alchemists of the partition violence in Bengal (politicians, businessmen and other vested interests and finally, the ‘troubled ends’ of the community, the criminals, lumpen elements) first engineered strategic provocative acts of desecration (of symbols and places of mass reverence), arson, rape and murder, spreading exaggerated lies and tendentious rumours about the same events. In this atmosphere of purported hostility by ‘others’ (sporting a specific selected religious identity and painted as the ‘enemies who kill us’) Kader Mia’s killers, despite sharing with him plural identities as noted earlier could be manipulated to a confused and raging state of mind whereupon they lost their ‘freedom to think’ and reacted from an instinctive fear and hatred of the ‘other’ (as a mere Muslim man) rather than reason. This reminds me of the inherent irrationality of men in the context of the partition riots to which Saadat Hasan Manto hinted (see my earlier blog “Communal riots : The heart of darkness”). In that blog  it was noted that the similarity of certain aspects of the current ethno-communal violence in Bodoland, Assam (July 2012 onward) with the partition riots was uncanny.  

Roots of communal violence – solitarist view of identity

In his book ‘Identity and violence’, Amartya Sen has argued, I think more or less convincingly, that world over there is a growing retrograde tendency to take a deliberately restricted view of a human being’s obvious and naturally occurring spectrum of associations, loyalties or identities and choose to tag him or her with a particular identity, say a racial or religious or even a so-called civilisational one (a la’ Samuel Huntington). He has also argued that a natural corollary of ‘boxing’ an individual to an exclusive identity, such as belonging to a religious or a racial community, is the potential for communal or racial violence.

The arguments for the first proposition, remaining largely at an abstract schematic level, perhaps sound believable. There appears to be no dearth of empirical evidence from the umpteen carnages in India and the world in the last century (just think of post Babri Masjid riots and especially the 2002 Gujarat pogrom in the recent memory, massacre of Sikhs in 1984, periodic and serial bloodbath in Assam through the last quarters of that century, not to forget the latest one during July this year) that stand testimony to the tremendous persuasive power of the identity politics leading people to violence. Hence his second proposition also seems to acquire an indirect validation.

But whether a solitarist view of the identity by itself should invariably or always presage violence may require careful re-look at the empirical evidence gleaned from more elaborate or detailed analysis of sequence of events as a prelude to several large-scale communal or racial violence in different parts of the world than was possible in this book. This kind of conceptual moorings could possibly be a necessary but not a sufficient condition for much of the violence. The point is that race, religion, ethnicity, language may appeal, sometimes quite strongly, to any or all of us as an abstract idea of identity, but as Sen has argued, we have several other associations or loyalties as well, simultaneously, at any given time. Why and how some of us come to be persuaded to choose to be designated with one of these singular identities, for all practical purposes, in exclusion to any of our other loyalties and in an apparent disregard for the commitments or duties that those other identities might enjoin us to do or not do, may not have a simple causality as Sen’s book might tend to suggest.        

At various points within the book Sen happened to mention the savage Hindu-Muslim riot during the first partition of the Indian subcontinent during 1947 and held this event as a sad, perhaps avoidable, example of the fall out of the confusion created among the people belonging to both religions about the primacy of their religious identity. The final chapter of the book (“Freedom to think”) begins with a poignant personal anecdote from Sen’s childhood days where he became exposed to a brutal murder happening under communal passion during the partition riot apparently close to his house in Dhaka where he lived with his father who taught at the Dhaka University. I will have more to say about Sen’s description and comments about this incident in relation to his second proposition. Suffice it to record here that it is in these final pages of the book we notice Sen’s sincere but unsuccessful struggle to find a rationale to the raw communal violence, that he witnessed as a child and which he possibly never could forget, in terms of a virulent brand of identity politics. This was as far as he went in constructing a theory of communal riots – a conceptual basis was provided. But it still begged the question : how was it successfully engineered on such a large scale ?