'The worst thing about communal killing is its total subjugation of rationality'

'The worst thing about communal killing is its total subjugation of rationality'

The worst thing about communal killing is its total subjugation of rationality. At the root of a calculated murder, there is a motive.

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July 17, 2013

ISSUE DATE: October 15, 1983

UPDATED: June 24, 2014 18:06 IST

"The lawlessness of communalism is a monster with many faces. It hurts all in the end, including those who are primarily responsible for it."-Mahatma Gandhi

A customer is dragged out of a shop in Hyderabad and, before he knows what it is all about, a knife carves out his stomach. A retired sessions judge, on his leisurely morning walk to the milk booth, is whisked away into a side alley where death awaits him in the form of a dagger-wielding assailant who stabs him repeatedly in the chest.

A young man, on his way back to a relative's house, strays into an 'unfriendly' area of the city where, without any warning, a gaggle of thugs hit him on his head with iron bars till his body, limp and soaked in blood, rolls towards the sidewalk.

The worst thing about communal killing is its total subjugation of rationality. At the root of a calculated murder, there is a motive. Behind war and rebellion, there are issues. But the communalist needs no specific issue: he is unleashed at a particular boiling point of the psyche where the individual and logic no longer count, and senseless passion permeates collective wrath.

Hard to believe, but the country that boasts the third largest technically, trained manpower, claims to be the tenth largest industrial nation, and derives its cultural heritage from two great exponents of non-violence in human civilisation - Gautam Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi - is now stricken by the pestilence of communal carnage like very few other nations of the same ranking in historical richness.

The tally of outbreaks and deaths in communal incidents has only been racing upwards: 230 incidents and 110 deaths in 1978; 304 and 251 in 1979; 427 and 375 in 1980; and, after hitting a happy cusp in 1981, with 319 incidents and 196 deaths, it began soaring again in 1982, with 474 incidents and 238 deaths.

The first nine months of 1983 have been even gorier, with 53 deaths already recorded, and Hyderabad, rocking with violence since January, cynically witnessing additions to that blood-splattered list with every passing day.

It is a national phenomenon and the scenario is horrendous enough without including in the list the blood-curdling violence in Assam - essentially communal in nature - in which nearly 4,000 people were killed, and the festering sore of Hindu-Sikh strife in Punjab in which nearly 150 people have lost their lives so far.

In India, men killed in mob violence are traditionally claimed by vultures and politicians, often in the reverse order as well. Behind the burgeoning communal riots, there is this cynical disregard for the human factor, for treating human lives as sacrosanct and beyond politics.

The electoral process in the country, instead of pulling down the boundary walls of community and religion, has unfortunately made them more pronounced, with the political lexicon of post-Independence India importing such patent obscenities as the 'vote bank'. The fact that the minorities everywhere tend to get huddled in their ghettos, and vote en bloc, has merely encouraged this tendency.

Its upshot: each zone of communal tension is eyed by the political parties and groups with muled expectancy, calculating which way the dice would be loaded at the next elections. Each outbreak of communal violence has made the politicians more and more blase, more and more desperate. The contagion has not spared even the prime minister of the country whose electoral forays in Assam and Jammu & Kashmir might have been playing realpolitik but put her in the same slot as other self-serving politicans.

This is occurring at a time when religion is undergoing a phase of revivalism. Whether it is Sikhism, Islam or Hinduism, the force of religious sectarianism is on the rise, coinciding with a general breakdown of the national political consensus which is pushing people to local, immediate or sectarian issues.

The roots of communal hatred are embedded in the chequered history of the subcontinent, and the socio-economic fall-out of the partition. There is no easy solution, given the political milieu, and no tonic other than a long-term one: economic development, progress out of ghettos and the creation of jobs.

At the same time there are some steps that no government can afford to leave untaken. It is a terrifying fact that in spite of the hundreds and thousands of lives lost in communal riots, in spite of commissions of inquiry and long post-mortems into incidents of communal frenzy, nobody is punished for the communal crimes they commit.

Giving information to the Parliament in 1981, the Government admitted that no fewer than 1,235 such cases were pending, some for over a decade. Each major communal incident results in the formation of an inquiry commission, yet no heads roll and no exemplary punishment is awarded.

If this is deplorable - and, something that deserves immediate rectification - there is much worse. All too often, the people responsible are politicians or self-serving vested interests who are frequently protected by political bosses or their gurus in the police and administration.

As long as communal tensions can be manipulated, as long as communal groups are considered pawns on the political chess-board, there is no hope for communal peace. India's social fabric is highly inflammable. It requires but a spark to go up in flames. And the sparks are avoidable. If politicians, and their frontmen can keep their hands off India's latent religious prejudices and antagonisms, the communal barometer would move sharply from stormy to fair.

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