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.