Ipsita Chakravarty - Who needs a polarisation panel in Gujarat anymore?
Minorities are
still forced into ghettos, but they have faded from the public conversation.
Gujarat’s polarisation panel has died as it lived, quietly. Set up in 2009 by
the state government headed by Narendra Modi, it was a one-man judicial
commission meant to investigate the “polarisation of the population on the
basis of different religions”. Six years later, it wound up after no hearings
and one affidavit, declaring nothing to report.
In retrospect, it
seems less like a real panel, more like a Dickensian conceit: a judge wielding
a gavel and declaring a population polarised or not polarised. The one-man
judicial commission, in the person of Justice BJ Sethna, had reportedly
gathered data from 24 districts. But such facts could not be turned into
incontrovertible truths without hearings, testimonies, verdicts. No one, Sethna
Said, was willing to testify.
Commission as conceit
is a popular feature of political life, especially when it comes to communal
friction. The Liberhan Commission, set up after the demolition of the Babri
Masjid, took 17 years to indict the Uttar Pradesh government for caving in to
the diktats of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, senior Bharatiya Janata Party
leaders for failing to prevent the violence and other BJP politicians for
directly encouraging the mob. The Mehta-Nanavati Commission, appointed by the
Gujarat government to look into the 2002 violence, took six years to establish
that the Godhra train burning was no accident. Commissions of inquiry, dragging
on for years, keep the truths of an incident suspended in a half life. But they
do create the illusion of governmental action.
Even in the
caricaturish world of commissions, the polarisation panel was an audacious
experiment. First, because of the political circumstances surrounding its
creation. Second, in the terms of reference that it adopted. Finally, because
of the painfully evident realities that it could not establish.
Modi’s makeover
The panel was set up
during Modi’s second term as chief minister of Gujarat, the years when he was
making the transition from a state leader to a politically acceptable national
leader. It was a careful and exhaustive makeover. The politician who achieved
landslide victories through communal mobilisation was to become the face of
development and Vibrant Gujarat.
The memories of 2002
were fading, and Modi helped the process along. In 2008, the Mehta-Nanavati
Commission had given him and his government a clean chit in the Godhra
violence. In 2009, the same year the polarisation panel was set up, the state
assembly passed amendments to the Gujarat Prohibition of Transfer of Immovable
Property and Provision for Protection of Tenants from Eviction from Premises in
Disturbed Areas Act, 1991, apparently to prevent “ghettoisation”. It would
culminate in the Sadbhavana fast of 2011, when the public was treated to images
of Modi fasting for communal harmony and accepting gifts from Muslim clerics,
though he famously refused to wear a skull cap.
The polarisation panel
was seen by many as a means to absolve his government, once and for all, of the
accusations that had hounded it since the communal violence of 2002. The man
for the job, the Gujarat government decided, was Sethna. He had shot to fame,
previously, for acquitting all 21 accused in the Best Bakery case, later
reopened by the Supreme Court, and for assaulting a colleague. The government’s
choice of Sethna as inquisitor opened the panel up to attacks from activists
and detractors.
Poles of a magnet
But the “scientific
study” of polarisation was a dubious project in more ways than one. The panel
was to find out “the area in square metres covered by the people following
different religions in Gujarat as on August 15, 1947”, “the polarisation and
migration” of such people every 10 years since then, the “names and sizes of
such areas” and the “area-wise proportion of people following different
religions” in localities that came into being after Independence.
The terms of reference
seem to imagine polarisation as a physical process, as though people were
naturally drawn to different poles of a magnet over time. Moreover, while
notifying the commission, the government had spoken of the need to look at the
problem in the context of “social and economic development”. By shifting
emphasis to developmental factors, it drew attention away from the trauma of
forced migration, which took place after every incident of communal violence.
It also ignores the politics that enabled and deepened the communalisation
which forced minorities into ghettos of deprivation.
Historian DL Sheth describes how, for many decades, influential Gujaratis
projected an image of the state that suppressed the “complex realities of
Gujarati society”. “Gandhi’s Gujarat”, populated by non-violent, vegetarian
teetotallers, merged seamlessly into the Jain-Vaishnav ethos that dominated the
political culture of the state post Independence, Sheth says. But Gandhi’s
Gujarat was also the home state of Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League
was a significant presence in Ahmedabad before 1947. A large section of its
population, consisting of Muslims, tribal communities and other backward
classes, ate meat. Many tribal and OBC communities also drank liquor, a
practice suddenly criminalised by the state’s prohibition laws.
Girish Patel, a human
rights lawyer based in Gujarat, remembers a society that was always divided by
religion and daily habits. He also recalls a riot as far back as 1941. At the
time of Partition, Gujarat did not see the mass violence that convulsed other
parts of the country. But there were isolated incidents, in Godhra, among other
places. There was always a bitterness, Patel says, but it did not lead to
large-scale communal violence.
And in spite of the
social separation, there were mixed localities. Some of these grew around
economic factors. The thriving textile mills of Gujarat, for instance, drew
migrants from all communities and were skirted by mixed settlements. The
process of ghettoisation sped up, Patel says, after the communal riots of 1969,
Gujarat’s first brush with mass violence.
The riots started in
Ahmedabad and spread to other places, killing an estimated 660 people and
injuring more than 1,000. The fragmentation of the Congress and the rise of the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh formed the political backdrop to the riots. Rival
speeches by Hindu nationalist and Muslim leaders are said to have catalysed
tensions. In the months before the riots, Golwalkar had visited the state and
mounted an appeal for a “Hindu rashtra”. Bharatiya Jana Sangh leaders had also
toured Ahmedabad, making inflammatory speeches.
But most people moved
temporarily, Patel says, taking refuge in a relative’s home and waiting for
tempers to cool. Besides, the 1970s saw a period of relative calm and migration
to urban centres led to a political reconfiguration. For a while, the upper
caste political elite was challenged by the KHAM (Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi,
Muslim) alliance forged by the Congress.
This coalition was
broken after the anti-reservation agitation of the 1985, Sheth argues.
Upper-caste, middle class Gujaratis took to the streets protesting against
reservation for Dalits and tribal communities, but the protests soon turned
into communal riots that targeted Muslims. This was because the Bharatiya
Janata Party was able to co-opt Dalits and tribal groups into the Hindutva
fold, eroding the old KHAM solidarity. The politics of the 1990s was dominated
by the idea of “Hindu ekta”, or Hindu unity against non-Hindus.
Gujarat saw frequent
communal riots after 1985, and that was when the polarisation of communities
began to harden into a permanent separation. This period saw the growth of
Juhapura, once a Hindu hamlet on the outskirts of Ahmedabad. Muslims fleeing
the riots started pouring into the area post-1985 and continued to do so over
the next couple of decades.
The state evidently
recognised this rapid rise in ghettoisation and passed the Disturbed Areas Act
in 1991. It was a well-intentioned law, which identified communally sensitive
areas and aimed to prevent distress sale of property by threatened minorities.
A district collector was meant to oversee property transactions between members
of two different communities. It suffered in implementation, Patel says.
Muslims in disturbed areas continued to sell property, often by giving Hindus
power of attorney, and there was massive corruption in the collector’s office.
The urban geographies
of Gujarat changed dramatically between 1969 and 2002. And all accounts suggest
these changes could be mapped against political shifts, wrought largely by
Hindu nationalist mobilisations. These political factors lay outside the ambit
of the polarisation panel’s study. But then communal violence, like
polarisation, is often seen as a force of nature in Gujarat. The violence of
2002 is remembered as the “toofan”, a storm that rose out of nowhere and spent
its furies on the state’s population.
After the toofan
When the storm
cleared, it left behind a population rearranged on religious lines. These
realities have been recorded in several reports and studies since 2002, but
they escaped the processes of a judicial commission of inquiry.
Many of the Muslims displaced by the violence and forced to take shelter
in relief camps were never able to return to their original homes. Muslims
previously scattered across the city of Ahmedabad were forced to huddle
together in ghettos, and new settlements cropped up on the outskirts of the
city. Juhapura, which had a population of 2.5 lakh before 2002, burgeoned into
a ghetto of nearly 7 lakh people. Even affluent, influential Muslims, including
judges and civil servants, were forced to take shelter there, while the few
remaining Hindus moved out. In many cases, the roads dividing Hindu and Muslim
settlements came to be known as the “border”.
Middle-class
residential areas were drained of minorities. Till 2002, Patel says, there were
a few Muslims in the locality of Naranpura, where he lives. They have all left.
Stories abound of Hindu landlords refusing to rent houses to Muslim tenants.
Over time, the differences in Hindu and Muslim colonies became evident in
living conditions. Squalid, overcrowded Muslim ghettos contrasted sharply with
neater Hindu localities.
A panel studying
polarisation post 2002 would also have to confront the state's role in
deepening these differences. Sanjeevani Badigar Lokhande notes that while the government provided relief to
riot victims, it failed to guarantee security, forcing minorities to migrate to
ghettos. Moreover, the state never entered the ghettos, which still lack basic
infrastructure like roads, sanitation, hospitals, schools. In relatively
affluent Juhapura, residents have pooled resources together to lay roads and gutters
inside the colony. Patel said he petitioned the local municipal body for water
and sanitation facilities, only to be told there was a long-term plan in place
so it would take a while.
Today these “borders”
have congealed, and Modi has moved out of Gujarat. The apotheosis that began
with the Sadbhavana fast of 2011 ended with the victory of the 2014 Lok Sabha
elections. The conversation on polarisation in Gujarat is over, so who needs a
polarisation panel anymore?
