The slow burn of anti-minority prejudice, from 1984 to 2020

Sandeep Dikshit in New Delhi

THERE are occasions when even the most assured practitioners of statecraft fail to control the plot. US President Donald Trump was in town on a rare single-country visit and the last thing Prime Minister Narendra Modi would have wanted was to share the airwaves of his diplomatic triumph with a messy situation in another part of the national capital. As the body count rose, PM Modi would also not have wanted the sizeable international media to link the violence to the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, that has the entire liberal corner in western democracies up in arms.

There has been no cataclysmic event in the past six years but the slow burn of anti-minority prejudice has reflections of the Delhi political climate in the days leading to the 1984 riots. It was not just the assassination of Indira Gandhi that provided the spark. The anti-Sikh prejudice was steadily percolating into the societal fabric; from Kanpur to Jamshedpur and from Hondh Chillar in Haryana to Delhi, the ideological fuel had been imparted well in advance.

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At the national level, knives had been sharpening well before the Delhi 2020 riots as well; perhaps when Kashmir was unilaterally dragged into a military lockdown while the government bent over backwards to accommodate the tribes of the North-East. If the subtext was not immediately apparent, it became clear when the UP government followed up its gunning down of protesters in December last year with moving to enforce victors’ justice by arm-twisting suspected Muslim protesters to pay damages, with no culpability sought from the police for wanton violence and even ransacking in many cases. The courts seemed to revel in taking to task playwrights and even octogenarian social workers.

In Delhi, the colourful, restrained Shaheen Bagh dharna — decked with national flags and women to the fore — became an antithesis of all that the Muslim was being made out to be. ‘Langars’ by Sikh farmers from Punjab and a procession of celebrities at the podium recast the narrative that CAA and NRC were religion-specific concerns. As elections to the Delhi Assembly approached, Shaheen Bagh was added to the right-wing lexicon of ‘urban naxal, jihadi, anti-nationalist’ and ‘tukde-tukde gang’; all meant to cast the wearer of the mantle as a non-person, unworthy of being extended the state’s social contract of impartial justice and opportunities.

By the time the Delhi polls were over, local factors joined the mix. In the Delhi elections, the urban poor cutting across religious divide opted for the Aam Aadmi Party. This held true for Mustafabad that AAP wrested from the BJP (one of the three seats it won in 2015). But the Shaheen Bagh innuendoes and a local agitation against a mosque cost AAP the neighbouring Ghonda seat (that includes the badly affected Chand Bagh). Despite a campaign where the BJP positioned itself as an insurgent — this time to claim the legacy of Hindutva — it handily lost most neighbouring seats.

The days of 1984 were more helpful for the perpetrator and the collaborator as photographic evidence was scarce. A considerable part of the mayhem took place with the confidence of immunity if the state was an accomplice, which has been comprehensively proven in every riot. A redux of 1984 or a 2002 is ruled out because of the risk of a blowback in the form of documentary evidence.

Back then there was no pressure of economic growth either. PM Modi would not have wanted his attempts to turn around the economy go up in smoke because of an uncontrollable conflagration in the national capital’s underbelly.

When National Security Adviser Ajit Doval twice stepped into the gullies of Chand Bagh, the message for a clampdown on the violence was unmistakable. But the element of perceptible even-handed justice has again gone missing. If the intention was to provide a balm, a probe panel should have been judicial rather than being headed by a police officer removed by the Election Commission for the firing on his watch at Shaheen Bagh. Another has been unable to trace the ABVP activists accused of JNU violence.

The CAA agitation has so far claimed more than 75 lives all over the country, besides the countless broken limbs and police cases that will dog them for the rest of their lives. The Modi government cannot step back, for fear of the domino effect: what if the Kashmiris then sought a rollback of Article 370?

In the zero-sum politics practised by the BJP, there can be just one winner: the party itself. If the images of the killings are not gruesome enough (eight bodies could not be identified by their gender, leave alone ascertaining their respective religions) to persuade the BJP to ease the foot off the religion accelerator, one alternative is to ensure a crackling economy. However, the coronavirus epidemic may have put paid to hopes of a healthy economic growth rate for the next six months. The third alternative is the national security card that has already been played to stunning effect.

Delhi still sits on a powder keg. The manner in which the AAP councillor is being hounded while those on the other side have been given a one-month breather suggests partiality and selective targeting. Even Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal was rattled into giving sanction for Kanhaiya Kumar’s prosecution in order to retrieve the political ground he thinks he lost due to the shrill media trial of AAP councillor Tahir Hussain. The BJP may consider itself to be on a high, as any party with decisive back-to-back wins is entitled to. But the aggressive, poisoned on-call force of lumpens, which has just muddied the Trump visit, has the potential to embarrass it considerably more.

Anatomy of a riot

The days of 1984 were more helpful for the perpetrator and the collaborator as photographic evidence was scarce. A considerable part of the mayhem took place with the confidence of immunity if the state was an accomplice. Delhi still sits on a powder keg, but a redux of 1984 or 2002 is ruled out because of risk of blowback in form of documentary proof