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.  

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.