ADVAITA KALA - The tragedy in Muzaffarnagar is neither green nor saffron
Earlier this week I received two text messages issued in the public interest by the DIG of Uttar Pradesh police. The messages, firm in tone, were sent by my service provider and warned people that the video that portrays the killing of two young men is from Pakistan, and its sharing or forwarding would be a criminal act. I have never seen this video and had no intention of sharing it in any case.
But what it alerted me to is the volatile nature of a communal conflict, and how little it takes to incite violence of an irrevocable nature. Friends who have reported from the area have told me about the loss of life on both sides of the divide. Infamously, it is said that Muzaffarnagar has approximately two lakh licensed firearms owners. These were put to use during the recent riots to settle old scores. By many accounts, thousands have been displaced and rendered homeless. The young girl, whose eve-teasing supposedly sparked the riots, mourns the loss of her brothers. In interviews she has said that she only wanted to stay in school and therefore kept mum on the harassment she experienced in the past. It is a common occurrence. This time it got out of hand. It is such a common story in small town India - the girl as a victim, the male as aggressor, proprietor or protector - and the consequences inevitable.
The parallel narrative is of a traffic skirmish getting out of hand. That is the thing about the psychology of riots. The flare-up need not necessarily be communal at all, neither does it need to be so in its carriage and carnage. But when mayhem reigns people cluster for security and pick sides, and often the easiest choice is the one based on the most obvious distinction - religion. People are the same; they choose religion to differentiate themselves and thereby open the door to politicians who, sustained by vote bank politics and their eye on 2014, add fuel to the fire, with scant regard for those who have suffered or the divides that will follow.
For, once a city is tainted with a past of communal violence, it remains, always festering under the surface of normal, everyday living. Politicians move on, but the people who remain in those street corners where loved ones fell never do. So when I woke up this morning to photographs in all the major newspapers of the Prime Minister's visit to Muzaffarnagar, I was struck by the singular version of the story that moving photograph represented, that of a Muslim man reaching over and holding the PM's hand plaintively, beseeching the mighty powers for help. A photograph of human suffering so powerful that those of us who switch on the evening debates and intellectually debate political scoring as a consequence of the riots are shamed, or at least should be.
But what also concerns me is how this image only represents one side of the story, how deviously provocative a stance it is in its communication of this skewed understanding of secularity. We may be quick to surmise that one half of our political spectrum is communal, but then we fall prey to the convenient summation that the other half is secular. It is a false dichotomy, because the fact is that any party that panders to faith as a means of gaining votes and support be it to a minority faith or a majority one, cannot be defined as secular.
Our politics are communal and so are our politicians. It is us, the voters, who have to resist this manipulation of one people based on faith. I wanted to address what this photograph says, how it has the potential to anger both sides. Those who are projected as victims and the others who feel that their victimhood has been denied to them, yet again. I told a friend it disturbed me greatly and that I wanted to write about it.
He told me that if I did so, I would be immediately branded as communal. So cacophonous is our public dialogue that the only way to be heard is to choose a side, to take a stand on one side of the fence or the other. So motivated and self-righteous are the purveyors of public speak that too much will be read into a simple piece on how we are one and how tragedy need not be dyed in the colour of green or saffron.
But it is a chance one has to be willing to take for the sake of urging invested powerful parties to view this mass-scale displacement as a human tragedy and to address the failure of law and order in the region, the free sale of tamanchas, the sexual harassment of women and the fueling of tensions by politicians. And finally, as the girl said in an interview, the building of a road, that would have made her journey to school an easier one. Sometimes it really is that simple.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-2423842/The-tragedy-Muzaffarnagar-green-saffron.html
