Religious based conflict in India, Comparative Understanding of Gujarat riot in 2002 and the Ayodhya conflict

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International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 7(3): 209–218 (2010) Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/aps.256

Politics of Exclusion and Social Marginalization of Muslims in India: Case Study of Gujarat

MANASI KUMAR

ABSTRACT

The paper offers a socio-psychological understanding of the phenomenon called ethnic riots and the various indigenous theories of violence discussed here suggest how complex and multidimensional human aggression and communal violence are. In light of this, the marginalized Muslim identity in Gujarat becomes the backdrop against which the problematic of Hindu-Muslim violence is developed. Psychoanalytic ideas on group psychology, phallic aggression, rumors and religious rituals are discussed in this context. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Key words: Gujarat, Muslim identity, riots, phallic aggression, violence and its otherness

Widespread religious or communal riots have not been uncommon in Gujarat, or in other parts of India for that matter. Ethnic riots, most extensively studied recently by renowned political scientist Donald Horowitz (2001), are an intense, sudden and not necessarily unplanned lethal attack by civilian members of another ethnic group, the victims chosen because of their membership (p. 1). Also synonymous are terms such as communal riots, racial, religious, linguistic, or tribal violence or disturbance.1 The particular riots under focus here are the 2002 Gujarat riots that started in the town of Godhra with the burning of the Sabarmati express train. The riots continued from February 27, 2002 until mid-April 2002, enfl aming the entire city of Ahmedabad and its adjoining districts.

A CHRONICLE OF THE 2002 VIOLENCE IN GUJARAT

On February 27, 2002 around 8:15 a.m., coach S-6 of the Ahmedabad-bound Sabarmati Express was attacked and set on fi re by a mob in Godhra. The coach,

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which was carrying a large number of Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP, a right wing Hindu organization) activists and supporters returning from Ayodhya2 was stoned and set on fi re. Fifty-eight passengers were burnt alive. Thus, from the time the coach was set on fi re until March 3, 2002, Gujarat saw one of the worst forms of violence and narsanghar (manslaughter) in the history of communal violence in India. By March 3, over 600 Muslims had been killed (the unoffi cial estimate being 2000) in retaliation, more than 200,000 had been displaced because of looting and burning of property and home, and Muslim property worth several millions had been destroyed (Varadarajan, 2002; Purwani, 2002). All this was done with the connivance of the police and state administration. The organized nature and well-planned leadership of the mobs in unison with the local politicians indicated that the state machinery provided a defi nitive method for the madness that gripped Hindus across Gujarat. Organized mobs, systematic deployment of youth and women, meticulous data on Muslim house- holds and systematic collection of information about the precise whereabouts of Muslims; alongside the regular supply of weapons such as trishuls (armory of Hindu God Shiva), swords, lathis (wooden sticks), LPG gas cylinders, locally- made bombs, supplies of kerosene, petrol, chemicals, etc., shaped the holocaust fully. The mobs operated in three groups. The fi rst group consisted of the local Sangh Parivar (right wing Hindu faction) leaders who coordinated the attacks on their cellular phones. The second group supplied arms. The Adivasis (tribals) comprising the third group provided the mass to the mob but their activities were largely confi ned to looting and burning (Varadarajan, 2002; Purwani, 2002; Sharma, 2003).

In the history of violence in Ahmedabad city,3 one entry point of violence was the transformation of small cities into metropolis, where urban leadership and power moved from the hands of patrician business elites to the organizers of mass politics. Soon in this process, the decision-making bodies infl uenced the socialization of the city as power increasingly passed from groups within the city to outsiders. Besides this, violence also came to be associated with attended labor organization, political mobilization, and ethnic and racial competition (Spodek, 1989, p. 766). A careful examination of urban violence in the city’s recent history reveals that violence is exceptional and endemic rather than sporadic as one may be made to believe. Outbreaks in 1941, 1942, 1946, 1956, 1958, 1964, 1969, 1981, 1985, 1986, 1990, 1992–1993, and 2002 do not reveal that the violence was spontaneous. Since 1985, however, the array of interest groups indulging in violence has become increasingly complex and multilayered. In a careful analysis of the 1985 riots in the city, Spodek (1989, 2001) has delineated pertinent points for further thought and debate. According to him, there were fi ve forces of peace that characterized the city (especially during Gandhi’s tenure during 1915–1930) which are now conspicuous by their absence:

(1) A clear chain of political command and control. (2) Labor leadership calling for peace.

211Exclusion and social marginalization of Muslims in India

(3) Business leadership working for calm. (4) Citizen voluntary involvement in social control and pacifi cation. (5) Gandhi’s legacy of militant non-violence.

The erosion of the chain of political command as seen in the hands of shifting political interests and leadership (from the predominance of Congress-led gov- ernment towards the emergence of a right-wing political party), the state had not much relief to offer the poor, backward castes and tribes, and Muslims. Simultaneous penetration of illegal businesses such as bootlegging and drug peddling and the entry of strong-arm goondas into the political process, along with the politicization of the police and administration, and biased, infl ammatory press added to the woes of the city (Spodek, 2001). Known for its labor organiza- tions of the textile mills, for a considerable period of time in the 1920s through the early 1960s Ahmedabad city saw egalitarian working alliances. Since then discrimination and self-assertion of religious blocs within the labor organizations and their frequent, violent antagonism towards others has become an all-India phenomenon. Similarly, the business leadership worked to great extent for calm along with labor organizations during riots before 1985. Post-1985, Ahmedabad’s business community no longer comprised the local people. New, non-local busi- nessmen rose to power without integrating into the social structure of the city and its bania mahajan traditions (Hopkins, 1992, cited in Spodek, 1989).

This eventually led to the demise of the bania elite that had controlled the economic and sociopolitical fortune of the city with the result that the newcom- ers did not get socialized to the older value system of moderation in politics (Spodek, 1989). Citizens’ involvement in social control and pacifi cation had a history of bringing about social and ecological transformations in the city. Post- 1985, new forms of violence emerged in Ahmedabad, with the former local leaders and intellectual elites migrating from the old, walled city to new suburbs and the consequent vacancies being fi lled by heterogeneous groups of immi- grants, breaking the tight social control of the compact pol neighborhoods. “The consequent isolation of the academic and intellectual elites might have deprived Ahmedabad of the civic contributions of its most creative talents” (Spodek, 1989, p. 785, original emphasis) eroding the special immunity of the city-that was the privilege of working undisturbed within the swift mainstream of Ahmedabad’s prosperity (Spodek, 1989).

One crucial layer that a physical site of violence seems to lose is the possibility of representation of creativity, consequently, a connectedness with femininity, subjectivity. Gandhi’s non-violent movement guided the old ethos into more tolerant ambience and, according to Spodek, “the protest dimension of the Gandhian model of non-violent protest has fl ourished while the nonviolent dimension has become ever more remote” (1989, p. 788). Clearly, the process of urbanization that challenged the traditional system of distribution of wealth and power set in violence as a site of its own kind. Public rioting against the backdrop of Hindu–Muslim confl ict and caste-based violence became predominant from

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1985 onwards with the clear message of a growing perception that political violence pays. It is paradoxical that the metaphor of “Gujarat’s Asmita” (pride/ glory) (often a point of elaborate speech-making by the chief minister today) is used in a culture where a rape culture dehumanizing women dominates. Debating the question of how spontaneous the 2002 post-Godhra violence was, Baxi (2002) has opined (he does not defend for long thankfully!) that the infrastruc- ture of violence lies in unorganized spontaneity and, therefore, violence that appears organized on some reading of the events is in fact highly decentralized and chaotic, and quintessentially “pathological” (p. 3525). Violence also has a seismological character where the perpetrators and arbitrators are likely to lose their ground once the fi re spreads. It presents a homology that equates social disasters with natural disasters in the way these paralyze minds and pose a for- midable challenge for human rights and social activism. However, this alone cannot provide a satisfactory explanation for the events in Gujarat as violence in this case was exceptional because it was socially engineered.

VIOLENCE AND MARGINALIZED IDENTITIES: UNMETABOLIZED OTHERNESS

A critical question raised by Dalit (backward caste and tribe) rights activist Ganesh Devy is ascertaining “how much of the Muslim persecution in the tribal regions of Gujarat during 2002 March riots was tribal in character and how much of it a measure of the State success?” (cited in Varadarajan, 2002, p. 250). The adivasi’s (tribal) unique identity as both non-Hindu-as-well-as-non-Muslim was annihilated in the process of Hinduizing them and they fought a proxy war for the Hindus in the process. Interesting analyzes of the tribal psyche in decid- ing to actively participate in the violence against Muslim, in Devy’s own words:

The ultimate source of violence is the mind and not the weapon in one’s possession. The tribal mindset is not feudal, but it certainly is medieval. It is not feudal because of the tribal attitude to state formation in which the clan replaces the state. But precisely for reasons of preserving clan autonomy and purity, the attitude to women among the tribals is dictated by a limitless fear of women’s pollution by an external agency. There is invari- ably bloodshed when a tribal woman expresses the desire to marry a person outside the particular tribal clan. The social code, however, is increasingly coming under stress from the rapidly changing economic context. (Varadarajan, 2002, p. 258)

It becomes pertinent to inquire why any tribal would feel attracted by the concept of Hindutva, unless he has willingly decided to enter the Hindu caste fold, which in his case will invariably be at the lowest rung of hierarchy. The idea of Hindutva is understood to be conveying the sense that India has been primarily a Hindu state. It is not a religious philosophy or a social reform move- ment (Varadarajan, 2002, p. 262) but essentially entails a political philosophy based on cultural chauvinism that demands all non-Hindus to accept a “minor- ity” status living on the goodwill of the majority. In this fusion-defusion of tribal identity and its adoption of the Hindu mantle to derive a sense of authority, to

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legitimize their presence and existence through tribal participation in the vio- lence; almost 100,000 people were uprooted and many economically ruined. The tribals of Gujarat have been fed on politics of hatred and there is a poss- ibility that in the near future this could prove counter-productive to the non- Muslims (Sunder, 2002).

On February 28, 2002, in Ahmedabad, in the Naroda Gaon and Naroda Pattiya areas, an armed horde of several thousand people attacked Muslim houses and shops, killing 200. Six other neighborhoods in the city were subject to similar attacks though on a lesser scale. Three other districts, Vadodara, Gandhinagar and Sabarkhanta, were host to comparable violence. From the Ahmedabad city, Naroda Patiya, Naroda Gaon, and Chamanpura (especially Gulberg Society) were the worst affected areas. The districts of Anand, Dahod, Fatehpura, Mehsana, Panchmahals, and Sabarkantha witnessed ceaseless killings, looting and rapes and violence of all possible orders (Setalvad, 2002, p. 191). Vadodara city, which witnessed the Best Bakery killings, faced not only violence from Hindus but also tremendous police atrocities. Right from mass killings and burning alive of Muslims in Naroda Patiya and Naroda Gaon which killed at least 300–400 Muslims in one single incident, to the brutal killing of the former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri in Chamanpura along with the murder of 100 other Muslims by a frenzied mob of 20–22,000, to the threats given to the Muslim sitting Judge M.H. Kadri and another retired Judge of the Gujarat High Court in Ahmedabad city to the burnings and instances of rape and then hacking of women as seen in Best Bakery in Baroda, to the brutalities in Panchmahal, Mehsana, and Kheda, the story of violence in these riots seems endless.

In both rural and urban areas, it was a common sight to see Hindu houses, shops and even handcarts standing safe right next to, or, in between, Muslim establishments that had been completely gutted (Vardharajan, 2002, p. 93). There were also instances of Muslim retaliations on Hindus. The numbers of Hindus displaced were much lower, approximately 10,000 compared to perhaps as many as two lakh Muslims-almost all of them in Ahmedabad (Vardharajan, 2002, p. 119). Paul Brass (2006) has argued that the riots (or genocide as he terms these instances of violence) are primarily Hindu aggression towards the Muslims where the latter are damaged and destroyed in large numbers in proportion to the loss seen by Hindus. Other scholars studying violence have pointed to more complex dynamics operating between the two communities for instance, Varshney (2001) talks of the rupture of civic ties between the two communities.

Putting on psychoanalytic lenses shows that Hindu-Muslim violence is bound to be a repetitive and an unmetabolized trauma since the communal level dif- ferences and the politics of differential development between the two communi- ties have continually remained unaddressed in political and public domains. With time, riots between the two communities have become bloodier and more meticulously executed. Ahmedabad riots point to the high amount of organiza- tion and planning involved and politically orchestrated maneuvers which fuelled unjustifi ed feelings of angst, revenge and hatred towards the city’s Muslim minor-

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ity. It is only this planning that can explain the guilt free demeanor of instigators and participants of riots – the cool calculated spirit entails both rational- purposive behaviors (e.g. systematically destroying businesses, public property, drawing plans for mass murders, etc.) and irrational brutal behaviors such as rape and killings of small children (Varshney, 2003; Horowitz, 2001, p. 13). This also points to the sort of intergroup relations that developed between Hindus and Muslims. The riots need to be placed in context to see that intergroup relations between the two communities suffered enormously, distrust and lack of any real cultural, social or economic exchange has only further marginalized the Muslims of India. Akhtar (2005) has looked into prejudices and biases on both sides to explain how Hindus and Muslims contributed to the tensions, Hindus contrib- uted by not lending the other community a space to heal their pain and the “post-partition unresolved mourning” and the “post-Muslim domination trauma” of living under aegis of a large unsympathetic Hindu majority. “Pathological nostalgia” and “absence of progressive and secular leadership” have been Muslim contributions towards aggravating strains.

Stories of rape, sexual torture of women during the 1947 Partition of India (leading to the formation of Pakistan) and decades later revival of the same kind of brutality in 2002 Gujarat riots marked the beginning of a “pathological trend” and exposing sadistic tendencies in people who could cause enormous pain and hurt in the other community and remain guilt or remorse free. Whether violence of 2002 Gujarat riots and Partition violence in the kind of male vendetta and ferocious predating of women and children have something in common needs to be studied further. All in all the two events are similar in the sense that both point towards a progressive decline of intergroup relations and how riots seem patterned cross-sectionally (Horowitz, 2001, p. 14) where violence spreads seismi- cally after tensions escalate at one site. Violence of this kind provides a breeding ground for extremist factions and organizations to fl ourish and sequence of events leading upto Ahmedabad riots point to the divisive role played by these extremist Hindu organizations like Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Bajrang Dal, both collective passion and self interest along with highly charged albeit fl awed discourse around Hindu supremacy and exploitation by Muslims was used to ignite tempers.

In an evocative paper titled “Can Muslim be an Indian?” Pandey (1997, 1999) talks of the Hindu cultural imagination and its construction of Muslim as the other. Hindus have increasingly from 1940s through 1980s to date; been more clear about demarcations between the “Hindu nationalists” and secular (or Indian) nationalists. However in case of Muslims, the label of “nationalist Muslims” does not imply the same nationalistic fervor in terms of political affi li- ation or identity, as the label of “Hindu nationalists” does (Pandey, 1999; also see, Pandey, 1992, 1994). “Minority” and “majority” have therefore become terms of contention; where “Hindu” or “Indian” is used interchangeably and the distinc- tion has become irrelevant or at the least blurred, the “minorities” here connotes a problematic status as they are viewed mainly as second-rate citizens.

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PHALLIC AGGRESSION, RUMORS AND RELIGIOUS RITUALS

There is a need to analyze masculine psyche – particularly the relation between religion, violence and male identity. Does the root of India’s recent bloodshed – perhaps all bloodshed – lie in male insecurity, itself an inevitable product of the very construction of “manhood”?

Kakar (1996, 2001) discusses the morality judgments of both Hindus and Muslims in his study on Hyderabad riots. His point elaborates the ideas proposed by Stein (2003) as well as Akhtar (2005) in their reading of fundamentalism and its linkage with violence, particularly anxious-ambivalent appraisal of women. There are signifi cant differences in the approaches of morality between Hindus and Muslims and according to Kakar (1996, p. 317) these can be seen as a con- sequence of the “difference between humanist and authoritarian religions (Fromm) or between precept-based and prophetic religions (Obeyesekere)”.

In another of his studies on the role of rumors, Kakar (2005) found that riots serve an important role in perpetuating violence. Most of these rumors center around food and rumors of poisoning. He calls them fundamental rumors that shake a basic trust and sense of safety and disturbing the sense of empathic attunement one has with primordial image of the mother [food = nourishment = good breast = good mother equation]. Using Kleinian nosology of the paranoid- schizoid position where persecution anxiety and projection are to repudiate the bad feelings on to the other then become predominant modes of functioning. As these rumors permeate in the public domain feelings of toxicity emanating from external nourishment increases to phobic avoidance to anything of con- sumption [food] that relates to the Muslims.

Other category of rumors center on sexual violence. Hence, inextricably charged emotions are experienced where “the self-representations of the com- munity become identifi ed with the woman’s sexual stance in its more servile aspect, with images of being ‘fucked’ – not in a joyful but in a contemptuous sense” (Kakar, 1996, p. 319). Rumors of sexual violence during a riot, and the mixture of horror or relish, with which they are recounted, also release a shame- ful excitement that bespeaks instinctual desire in its rawer form (Kakar, 2005). In the case of Gujarat, these rumors were directly translated into action where what one (minority) community feared and projected (as rumors) actually came true. Rakesh Sharma’s documentary on Gujarat riots titled Final Solution has detailed the transformation of perceived threat of destruction of the Hindus by the Muslims into an abominable reality – where the latter were actively sought and exterminated.

PRIMACY OF ETHNIC IDENTITY OVER GENDER IDENTITY

The abominable manner in which women are sought to be the “site” and “dumping ground” of all violence, disrespect and injustice is compelling. The “repudiation of the maternal-feminine” (an idea originally proposed by Freud and

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developed in the Indian context by Kakar as he sought to analyze the Hindu male psyche) seems the prevalent mode of reacting towards women especially in the larger Hindu imagination that is the attitude towards the Muslim women or Other’s woman in this ongoing violence of otherness. On another level, women also became a “symptomatic” symbol igniting these religious riots. In Gujarat women marched along with men, and participated in all kinds of brutal killings, lootings and vandalization and even helped men to target women and children of the other community. What prevented women from coming together and fi ght- ing against injustice and male violence and abuse of power? Why and how did the ethnic identity prevail over the gender identity? Do we need to deconstruct the sanitized image of women as arbiters and gatekeepers of morality, peace and justice? The irony is that “the sexuality of a woman’s body is merely a medium through which religion; territory, honor, etc. are violated and defended by men” (Mukhia, 1995, p. 1365). Invoking violence in shaming those Hindus who did not resort to arson, looting, rape of the other community members, phallic aggression was evoked by politicians and Hindu religious heads; constantly alluding to Hindu male’s impotence in Gujarat. It is in this context that Martha Nussbaum (2004) and Tanika Sarkar (2002) argue that violence against women especially violence directed against women’s body, as seen in Gujarat riots, could be inter- preted as phallic violence against the mother’s body and motherland (Sarkar has connected women’s bodies and the fate meted out to them with the idea of the state of Indian nation as such). The larger consolidation of ethnic identity further narrows the discourse of gender/sexual differences. Ethnic identity/male politics subverts gender identity discourse in such a way that women like perfect masoch- ists work in the service of patriarchy, unleashing more otherness and greater vio- lence. The embeddedness of Gujarat carnage in the discourse of religious rights calls for a careful contextualization of violence in transnational and national spaces. Arjun Appadurai (1996, 1998) suggests that a particular violent act – a torture, a killing, a rape, also a “verbal” violence such as prison interrogation – is always a transactional bodily practice between the perpetrator and the victim.

There is a certain otherness to violence as the body becomes the repository of “vulnerability, agency, and mortality”, as it exposes us to the other in all possible sensorial and symbolic manners, thus carrying an indomitable public dimension. The body becomes the crucible of public life. Violence in the bodily sense is:

a touch of the worst order, a way a primary human vulnerability to other humans is exposed in its most terrifying way, a way in which we are given over, without control, to the will of the another, a way in which life itself can be expunged by the willful action of another. (Butler, 2003, p. 18)

For Butler, “mindfulness of this vulnerability can become the basis of claims for non-military political solutions” (2003, p. 18). In an apt manner (quite Gandhian in its quality), she suggests that just as for Freud melancholy was the repudiation of mourning, similarly violence in modern times is also a kind of repudiation of mourning. Further, when Butler suggests that “mourning has to do with agreeing4

217Exclusion and social marginalization of Muslims in India

to undergo a transformation. . . .”, she is alluding to the “transformative effect of the loss” that entails mourning as well as a peculiar experience of transformation that deconstitutes choice: “by which one acknowledges that something is larger than one’s own deliberate plan, one’s own project, one’s own knowing and choos- ing” (Butler, 2003, p. 11). Thus she poses “is there something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief, from remaining exposed to its unbearability and not endeavoring to seek a resolution for grief through violence?” For Butler, “to grieve, and to make grief itself into a resource for politics, is not to be resigned to inaction, but it may be understood as the slow process by which we develop a point of identifi cation with suffering itself” (2003, p. 19).5 In this sense if a preoccupation with melancholia could facilitate (an agreement to transform), it would lead towards a greater consideration of the vulnerability of others.6

NOTES

1 These terms are used interchangeably here. 2 An ancient city currently the site of great political dispute over a historical Babri mosque

that was demolished by Hindu activists (or Karsevaks) in 1990 who claim it was built over Ram temple.

3 Despite the State’s administrative capital being Gandhinagar, Ahmedabad remains most signifi cant being a cultural-commercial center of Gujarat.

4 Agreeing here implicates a certain choice one has made in seeking a transformation. 5 See, Veena Das’s The Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia

(1990) and Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (1995) in which she articulates similar sentiments and explores the relationship between individual agency, violence, responsibility, politics and social suffering.

6 Butler’s paper “Violence, mourning and politics” makes for compelling reading. Her preoc- cupation is with the attack America carried out on Iraq, fate of Palestinians and about lives of many (international) others that the United States had sought to negate. One can consider the Hindu collective unconscious especially in the way it manifested in the Gujarat violence, where the purpose of pogroms planned time and again fails as the violence done against those who are unreal (potentially non-existent in the way delirious Hindus view Muslim lives), then, from “the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives already stand negated” (2003, p. 22).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Prof Peter Fonagy for his support and encouragement. The paper is part of my PhD research on Gujarat child survivors of earthquake and riots which was carried out at UCL under Prof Fonagy’s supervision.

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