The alchemy of begetting violent outcome from the passion play of identity politics is, to my mind, a poorly understood phenomenon, a dark secret so to speak. That a community of perfectly sane people can be persuaded to sleepwalk into the abyss of intolerance with regard to the another community of people sharing geographically contiguous space and broadly similar cultural values (differing in details that so far were largely ignored), speaking the same language, belonging to more or less similar economic strata, just because of a sudden emphasis on the difference in, say, a religious or ethnic identity is a common enough experience in both pre- and post-independence India. It is also more or less well understood that it is the political class (drawn from most political parties) with the help of the lumpen fringe of the mainly urban poor and professional criminal gangs (this include terrorists, militants of all hues) create these coloured perceptions, set up misunderstandings and eventually inflame passions that often lead to actual violent riots. We have at least two instances of pogroms (anti-Sikh, Delhi, 1984 and anti-Muslim, Gujarat, 2002) where ruling parties either at the center or at the state were widely believed to be complicit.
But the bottom line is that ordinary people could be manipulated, their minds could be poisoned just with a few rumours, a few staged incidents of beatings, killing or rape or desecration of a place of religious worship, or a whipped up misinformation campaign about a bogey (like land holdings coming under occupation by illegal immigrants thereby depriving the indigenous population of their rights in their own land) which had a degree of plausibility. People’s propensity to believe any rumour, dark deeds of ‘others’ (people belonging to the other antithetical community) has been a constant over these sixty-five years since the partition riots. A recent example is the spectacular exodus of people of Northeast Indian origin from the West and South India based on some rumour about a potential plan for attack on these people after a certain date in August 2012 (post the Muharram) as a reprisal for anti-Muslim violence by Bodos in Kokrajhar district of Assam and the adjoining areas (July 2012). Of a same piece is the rumour-mongering based on the doctored (morphed) MMS clippings of anti-Muslim violence in Assam and the Northeast circulating in early August leading to the Azad Maidan violence in Mumbai as well as sporadic violent attacks on the students and workers from North East in Pune and Bangalore. It is just that the new technologies have been harnessed to make the spread of the rumour orders of magnitude faster, lend the rumours a false photographic authenticity giving plain lies a bite of believability and immediacy.
Vital economic interests, underlying business related rivalry, deep-seated jealousy about the prosperity and economic security could sometime explain this predilection for demonisation of ‘others’. For example, there is this widespread belief among some sections of the Assamese people that the illegal migrants from Bangladesh are occupying lands meant or even reserved for the indigenous tribal population like Bodos and hence are the ‘enemies’ – with the evil intent of occupying and cultivating lands that do not belong to them. Once declared as enemies, any negative image of them or their deed becomes believable. There are definitely many cases of such illegal immigrants, thereby bolstering the plausibility of generalizing this phenomenon as an axiomatic truth. However, what the purveyors of persistent half-truth conveniently forget about Assam’s history for the last hundred odd years is that migration of Bengali Muslim peasants from the erstwhile Pakistan to Assam (both being parts of the then India) happened in many stages, with or without state connivance. Many of them having come and settled in undivided Assam for years could have migrated from one area to another for economic reasons, looking for better or more fertile land (they being basically agriculturists). Their descendants, just because of their religion or language (Bengali) or because they have a penchant for agricultural activity and hence a certain degree of lust for land, should not necessarily acquire the tag of ‘illegal’ Bangladeshi migrant population. These re-settled migrant Bengali Muslim peasants should be differentiated from those migrants crossing over from Bangladesh after 1947 and especially after 1971 (even the Assam accord, 1985, had put 1971 as the cut off date). Moreover, population data (Census) over the last three decades of the last century do not unequivocally show a spectacular swelling of the Muslim population that can only be explained by illegal migration from Bangladesh. But the high priests of identity politics, political elites and intellectuals with vested interests and agenda have no use for such fine distinctions and uncomfortabale details. Having created an atmosphere of hatred for an abhorrent entity called ‘illegal immigrants’ (and thus having demonised them) that is poised to take away people’s livelihood, the land, they would activate the killing fields by staging strategic killings and similar gratuitous violence.
The economic argument, when the context such as above admits it, is a clearly understandable one available for misuse in the demonisation game. Rumour mongering is likely to thrive among the poor who live on the edge and are generally apprehensive about the potential fall out, on their tenuous hold on the fringes of life, of broad economic and/or political policies mooted and executed by the political elite.
Unfortunately, identity politics often enough whip up very deep-seated insecurities among people harking back to historical misdeeds and wrong doing vis-à-vis their identity as a community with a single dominant characteristic like race, ethnicity, language or religion. Demons from the past history are conjured up and morphed (in a conceptual sense) on to the present leaders and members of the other community. It would be interesting to study (I do not know if such studies already exist) the mass psychology of specific communities as regards their implicit belief in the dark ‘deeds’ and ‘character/capability’ of those belonging to the ‘other’ community. What is the long term effect, for instance, of the ‘unspeakable’ partition experience on the Hindu and Muslim (Bengali and Punjabi) families in terms of forming such a subterranean well of mutual mistrust and insecurity passed on from one generation to the future in the form of orally transmitted and restricted access family secrets despite superficial attempts and pretences to forgive and forget.
The last point to touch is the apparent empirical observation made by Ashutosh Varshney in his book “Ethnic conflict and civic life’ which is that the Hindu-Muslim communal strife in India had been much less in those cities and urban centers (he also claims these are essentially urban phenomena) where communal lives of different groups have many linkages, especially economic and professional ones, the rumour mongering and, as a corollary, demonisation having found significantly less takers. Need to revisit the issue.
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