Communalism and Sexual Violence

Title: Communalism and Sexual Violence – Ahmedabad Since 1969

Author: Megha Kumar

Publisher: Tulika Books, 2017 (First)

ISBN: 9789382381907

Pages: 255

 

Indian society is ruled and regulated by religion. Even though the country avows secularism, the dictates of religion often influence government action. India also allows its citizens to follow their own religious personal codes in matters of marriage, property and inheritance. Consequently, the Muslims still practice polygamy and denial of rights to women on their father’s property with the full support of the state. Till a decade ago, Christian women also had had no equal rights on their parental property if there was a male sibling. In such a powder keg of incompatible religious sentiment, even the slightest provocation has the potential to incite a communal riot in which men would be killed and their womenfolk sexually violated. Former Justice Markandeya Katju once remarked that one could foment communal trouble in Delhi for as little as Rs. 2000. With such a background in mind, we need to look back to the morning of Feb 27, 2002, when the Sabarmati Express carrying – among others – kar-sewaks returning from Ayodhya, stopped at Godhra station in Gujarat which was a Muslim-dominated area. There seemed to be a minor altercation between a few kar-sevaks and platform vendors. As the train started to move a little later, it was stopped and an angry Muslim mob armed with weapons and sticks surrounded the S-6 coach. They quickly doused the compartment with petrol and set it alight. Nobody was allowed to jump out. 58 Hindus, including women and children, were roasted alive in a few minutes. The nation was stunned at the unprecedented level of brutality from the minority community. The retaliation was swift and massive. Hundreds of Muslims were killed in Gujarat, many of them burnt alive and a lot of women paraded naked or gang-raped. Incidents that shocked human sensibility occurred in a few days after Godhra. This book is an analysis of the violence spearheaded by communalism. In addition to 2002, the riots occurred in the years 1969 and 1985 in Ahmedabad are also covered in this book. Megha Kumar is deputy director of analysis at Oxford Analytica, the global analysis and auditing firm. She has also studied in Oxford University.

 

The book blames Hindu nationalists on every page and devotes some care to their alleged propaganda against Muslims. The Muslim male is portrayed as a violent iconoclast, proselytizer and a sexually promiscuous rapist. The Muslim female is stereotyped as immoral, perverse and violent. By contrast, the Hindu male is described as peaceful, sexually abstinent, monogamous and civilized and the Hindu female as a chaste and devout mother and wife. But what the author describes as the cause of the 1969 riot seems to endorse a part of this stereotyping. It also shows how easily the Muslims get provoked and how fast a communal riot could break out in Ahmedabad of the 1960s. In March 1969, a police officer in Kalupur locality moved aside a handcart packed with books which was obstructing the road. In the process, the cart toppled over and a copy of the Quran fell to the ground. The owner alleged sacrilege, an unruly mob of 2000 gathered and pro-Pakistani slogans were raised (p.69). The police promptly issued a public apology on loud speakers on behalf of the commissioner of police. But the mob turned violent and a full-scale communal riot ensued in which 660 people were killed! Hardly four months later, far away in Israel, an Australian Christian who was later identified as mentally unstable, set fire to the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. Muslims in Ahmedabad rioted against this too.

 

While it is true that Muslims were at the receiving end of the majority of the violence, a considerable number of equally heinous acts came from them against their Hindu neighbours. This was true even in 2002 when the Hindu nationalists controlled the government and police. Hence the Muslim belligerence in 1969 and 1985 can only be imagined. However, Kumar takes a highly biased view, completely ignoring the violence on Hindus. The gravity of the situation could be understood from one or two sentences which inadvertently slip out of the strategic narrative. She admits that “it is possible that during some attacks, Muslim men raped Hindu women” (p.82). After the 1985 riot, “both Hindus and Muslims were so anxious about their safety that they sold their houses in mixed neighbourhoods at throw away prices” (p.143). Regarding 2002, the author admits that ‘of the 150-200 women who were sexually brutalized, the majority were Muslims’ (p.1, 9), which means that Muslims indulged in exactly the same kind of violence against Hindu women. But where are their stories, Ms. Kumar? As per official records, of the 1044 people killed in the riots, 790 were Muslims and 254 were Hindus, which clearly shows that the riot was not one-sided or of the scale of genocide as claimed by anti-India groups. Kumar apparently does not seem to be concerned about their stories or perhaps does not find them worthy enough for consideration. In a riot, several rumours and pamphlets demonizing the other community usually circulate. This book collects such vicious propaganda but ensures that only those against Muslims are reproduced. The rhetoric in them is so full of hatred and violence that it is possible that even moderate Muslims would feel embittered against Hindus. Probably that is the author’s intention in producing these anonymous leaflets of only one community in the book.

 

The 2002 riot was ignited by the inferno at Godhra in which 58 Hindus were incinerated alive by a Muslim mob. But the author sidesteps this issue by offering three probable causes for the train fire, each more outrageous than the previous one. The first is that the kar-sevaks harassed Muslim women on the Godhra station platform and the Muslims retaliated. This is highly unlikely as the Sabarmati Express stops here for only five minutes. Then she claims that the fire may have started accidentally! Yes, she wants us to believe that the victims stayed glued to their seats without making any effort to get out of the burning train. And the last is that the Hindus deliberately caused the fire to kill their own people. Believe me; this woman has done her research in Oxford, no less! And then she concludes that ‘even after a decade, no consensus was reached’. Do you need an academic consensus about an incident in which many tens of people were killed by a mob many hundreds strong and watched by a few thousands of mute spectators? This is the touchstone of the level of falsification employed in this book. She always treats the Hindu community separate as upper castes, OBCs and Dalits, but singles out the OBCs and Dalits for carrying out the actual violence. In 1969, most of the violence was done by Dalits and OBCs while in 2002, tribes-people also joined this group. However, the author remains silent about the caste background of those people killed in the Godhra train.

 

This book purposefully attempts to foment trouble between communities by incorporating one-sided, provocative slogans and inserting photographs of such pamphlets. It tries to stoke Muslim anger with sentences like ‘the perpetrators sought to impregnate Muslim women with the seed of the superior Hindu race; evisceration of the Muslim women’s reproductive organs was in order to diminish Muslim population’. In one instance, the boast of a Hindu goon as to the step by step acts by which he raped a Muslim girl is reproduced verbatim. Here, the deplorable crimes committed by a few people are attributed to the entire community. If this false logic is extended to terrorism, the entire Muslim community would have to be held responsible. Kumar frequently asserts that Hindu nationalist propaganda involves ‘imaginary history of Muslim atrocities’. Is it really imaginary? You only have to open your eyes to see signs of the atrocities of Muslim invaders around you – in the form of a broken idol, a fully or partially demolished temple, an area of the town you can’t enter in a procession with music playing or even in place names. The Sabarmati Express itself passes through Muzaffarpur, Hajipur, Muhammedabad, Azamgarh, Shahgunj, Akbarpur, Faizabad, Daryabad, Mahmedavad and finally, Ahmedabad. One unintentional slip of the author is that she claims that the caste system is not so rigid after all and upward or downward movement is possible along the ladder. The Kshatriya Rajputs in Gujarat accepted into the Kshatriya fold the backward-caste Koli community in the 1940s to increase their electoral clout and since then, the Kshatriyas are seen as a backward-caste group in Gujarat (p.103).

 

Kumar admits that many Muslim women were sexually exploited by activists and Muslim religious leaders in the relief camps in which they stayed after the riot. Even well-known Maulanas asked for sexual favours in lieu of much sought-after relief material. The author stoops so low as to differentiate between the unwelcome sexual episodes and claims that in the maulana’s case, ‘despite the coercion and abuse of power, his proposal created a scope for agency and choice for the woman’ (p.194)! Everybody turned a blind eye to this depredation. The head of the women’s wing of the Jamaat e-Islami Hind justified it like this: “if you put so many women in front of a man, of course he will take advantage of it. That is his need” (p.197). Were they running relief camps or harems?

 

The mere fact that a large part of the research for this book is facilitated by Teesta Setalwad proves its partisan subjectivity. Kumar claims that ‘in Mumbai, Teesta and others welcomed me into their homes and lives in a way I thought only family could. Teesta also generously shared with me her boundless knowledge on Gujarat and gave me access to critical sources’. This book accuses patriarchy in many places for all the ills of Indian society and claims that ‘the brutal sexual violence against women is a patriarchal idea of sex’ (p.5). She compares the 2002 rape cases to the 2012 Delhi Nirbhaya case and claims that while Hindu nationalists targeted Muslim women in the former, the Nirbhaya victim and assailants were Hindus. As a matter of fact, this too is wrong like many other claims in this book. The juvenile who inflicted the most brutal violence on the Nirbhaya victim was a Muslim. Clever tricks to fool the readers can be seen in this book with selective disclosure of data. It is stated that “Muslims were badly affected in the 1985 riot: of the 220 estimated fatalities, 100 were Muslim” (p.96). Read this again. This really means that the number of Hindus killed is 120, which is much more than the Muslim toll. If you had read that sentence casually, you might have missed it and bought the author’s false claim. Another ridiculous finding is that the Ramayana is revered only by upper caste Hindus (p.40). This book is based on interviews made by the author in 2007-8 in which people remembered and duly told her about their experiences in 1969 and 1985.

 

The book is full of half-truths and plain lies. Moreover, the communal venom it spreads unsettles readers. It seeks to drive communities forever against each other rather than forgetting the past and reconcile in the future. It nourishes Muslims’ sense of isolation and insecurity by feeding it tales of victimhood. It contains implicit incitement to violence and needs to be tackled accordingly. Regarding Hindus, the author tries to push through three simultaneous wedges between the upper castes, OBCs and Dalits. What is masqueraded as research is in fact just hearsay and urban gossip. In fact, it contained so much filth that I was reminded of an incident in the Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Devil’s Foot’. In the story, Holmes and Watson came across a fumigant toxic powder which was used to kill several members of a family. Holmes decides to test how powerful it is and sprinkles some on an open flame. In no time, the vapours surrounded them causing deadly suffocation and horrific visual experiences. In the nick of time before permanently losing mental balance, Watson regains his senses for a moment, throws away the fuming lamp into a trash bin and took his friend along to dive on to the outside meadow amid clear daylight and pure air.

 

That’s why I threw this junk book into a waste basket.

 

The book is not recommended.

 

Rating: 1 Star