The riots in Uttar Pradesh following the killing of two Jats sharpen the communal polarisation in western Uttar Pradesh.
One of the largest villages in Muzaffarnagar district, divided into two distinct halves, in western Uttar Pradesh. The land-holding Jats in the north are separated from the affluent Muslim households in the south by a cluster of houses belonging to Dalit and Muslim agricultural workers. Kawal, had earned the reputation of being a harmonious and business-friendly village.
In the first week of September, however, high tension following clashes in the village snowballed into a major communal riot, claiming 36 lives and injuring many. Many Muslims have fled the village. The village, which was populated by Muslims and Hindus in equal numbers, was now a Hindu-majority village. In fact, Kawal is not the only village in Muzaffarnagar to have witnessed such communal polarisation and a resulting demographic transformation. In most of the riot-affected villages, these two facets of the riots that continued for two days are visible. In all the villages where the Hindus were predominant, the Muslims have left their homes. And the reverse has happened in Muslim-majority villages.
On August 27, a Muslim mob lynched the two Jat men. The Jats of the region rallied in thousands for the cremation of the two community members. On their way back from the cremation, the Jats entered the Muslim colony of Kawal in tractors and motorbikes and allegedly looted and vandalised Muslim houses and shops. A Muslim resident of Kawal told : “the whole episod started after killing of two innocent Hindu boys. The police too mishandled the entire things. The police should have arrested those who were involved in killing of two Jats and could have averted the entire riots. I agree the Jat boys should not have been killed. The culprit should be booked and convicted. We got entrapped in the whole fight. And now we have nowhere to go except to live in fear.”
Clearly, the Jat rally was spontaneous and it was reactionary, the administration must have handled efficiently intead took instructions from a very influencial Samajwadi Party Leader. On August 29, a video circulating among the Hindus showed two men being beaten to death by a Muslim mob, creating the impression that it was the recording of the killing of the two Jats in Kawal. The police claimed that it was a two-year-old video from Pakistan available on Youtube.
According to the locals, the incident is the result of the Muslim boy teasing the minor sister of the two slain Jats. Muslims of Kawal agree to this. Some in the village, however, told that the boy and the Jat girl were in a relationship and that the Jats tried to prevent him from meeting her. It could be a case of honour killing, they say. However, at the mahapanchayat, the leaders called the Jats to defend the honour of “their women”. The mahapanchayat came to be known as Bahu, Beti Bachao Mahasammelan (Save your daughter-in law and daughter). After the meeting, the dispersing crowd attacked Muslim homes en route to their respective villages. The violence gradually spread to Muzaffarnagar town and other villages. The Muslim leadership, in response, organised its own panchayats to counter the violence and to organise themselves.
In the aftermath of the riots, the people in the region are clearly divided on communal lines. Taking advantage of the demographic transformation, the Samajwadi Party (S.P.), in order to consolidate its image as a pro-Muslim party, has been organising relief camps for the displaced Muslims. As many as nine concentrated relief camps organised by Muslim leaders of the S.P. are functioning in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts. Yadavs are not predominant in the western districts of Uttar Pradesh, including Shaamli, Meerut, Baghpat, and Sahranpur. The S.P., which is generally seen as a party dominated by Yadavs, is hawkish to consolidate the 40 per cent Muslim vote in the region in its favour, with an eye to the next parliamentary elections.
“Narendra Modi is the only leader in India who can show the Muslims their place. We are determined to put up a united fight or our women will not be able to step out,” a Jat in Muzaffarnagar said. This sentiment was reflected in almost all the villages visited. “The Hindus have come together. We do not believe in caste identities such as Jat and Harijan,” a local in Kawal said. The BJP, clearly, is trying to forge caste unity aggressively within an overarching Hindu identity. Since it already has the traditional support of the trader communities and upper castes, it is trying to win over the other backward classes and Dalits. Since western U.P. is a non-Yadav belt, it will not face any direct clash with the S.P.
The Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), headed by Ajit Singh and traditionally considered a Jat party, has lost much of its steam. It had to contend with 10 seats in the 2012 Assembly elections. It could win only one of the three seats even in its stronghold, Baghpat. “Ajit Singh has evidently parted ways with Muslims. The first instance of it was when he allied with the BJP in 2001 and kept shifting sides since then. Over the last few years, the Jats have been drifting towards the BJP.
Following a tiff between a Valmiki and Muslims in Shamli on September 4, a few Valmikis were arrested. A few members of the Valmiki community beat up some Muslims. After the incident, the traders of the area, on the BJP's diktat, downed shutters demanding the release of the arrested Valmikis and sought the transfer of the Shamli Superintendent of Police, who was a Muslim. A few months ago, BJP leader Hukum Singh organised a massive dharna when a Valmiki minor girl was raped, and demanded the police officer's transfer saying that he was partial towards Muslims. Fearing another backlash, the government transferred the officer on September 10.
According to many Muslim locals “The leader of the riots was Hazi Yaqoub Qureshi in Sardhana near Muzaffarnagar. He is the one who issued a fatwa against the Danish cartoonist who had shown the Prophet in a bad light and had also announced a reward of Rs.50 crore for anyone who could get his head. The recent riots were different from the earlier ones in that almost all of them were triggered in rural areas and advanced to cities and nearby towns. In the history of riots in independent India, riots have been known to advance from cities to villages. In western U.P, the BJP has institutionalised two aspects of its communal programme centred on the honour of rural Jats. It is a general saying that good-looking Muslim young men are identified and trained in madrassas to woo Hindu women. They are given mobile phones and motorbikes, which they can use to pursue Hindu women who eventually fall for them as they are also trained to be modern. If the Hindu woman resists, the Muslim youth will indulge in rape, molestation or eve-teasing, the locals claim.
Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) leader Ashok Singhal, in a press statement, reiterated this hypothesis while justifying the riot: “The stalking and felonious behaviour of the 'love jehadis' with a Hindu girl student returning from Kisaan Inter-College was the immediate provocation for the grave incidents that took place in Kawal on August 27. The root cause is the 'lust jehad' being conducted under the garb of Muslim religion. This incident gave birth to the convening of the Bahu, Beti Bachao Mahapanchayat. When society could no longer bear the 'love jehadists' outraging the modesty and dignity of Hindu women and girls in rural and urban areas of U.P., the corrective movement in the form of the Bahu, Beti Bachao Mahapanchayat came into being.”
Most Jats in Kawal knew that the population of Muslims, who were fewer than the Hindus during the 2007 parliamentary elections, had increased now. “In Kawal, there are 7,300 voters now and Muslims have 900 votes more than the Hindus,” one Jat woman said. This fact was supported by other Jat and Muslim households. A closer look at the riots also reveals that most rioting happened where Muslims and Hindus are almost equal in numbers, and not in villages where one community is in a clear majority. The people are now looking the S.P government as a namazwadi sarkar, that is anti-Hindu government. The destruction of property and loss of lives has irked many Muslims and most of them feel the previous BSP government was better in terms of providing security. Darul Uloom Deoband has criticised the State government for failing to check the violence in Muzaffarnagar. It said that the administration allowed the tensions to simmer and that conditions were created for a full-scale riot.
Communal Violence
Communalism cannot be fought without acknowledging caste, class and patriarchal oppressions.
The communal violence in Muzaffarnagar and neighbouring areas is a warning of the days to come. Uttar Pradesh (UP) is crucial to all as all the parties are chasing their votes, the Congress, the BJP, Samajwadi Party Chief Minister was seen addressing the press conference wearing Muslim Cap. The electoral fortunes of many Azam Khan, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Salman Khursid and many other largely depends. There has been a rise in incidents of communal violence since the Samajwadi Party (SP) government was elected to office last year, but the “riot” earlier this month – when close to 50 people were killed, a few hundred injured and tens of thousands fled from their homes – stands distinct in its scale and is clear evidence of what has termed the “institutionalised riot system”. The model of using the terror of communal violence to forge communal unity among “Muslims” to build an invincible vote bank appears to be the strategy that has been employed.
There have been analyses of the political calculations of the Congress, BJP and the SP in these riots, and of the break-up of the political alliance between Jats and Muslims in western UP and what impact this will have on the Congress and the Rashtriya Lok Dal. In all this there have been calls to expose the communal games, book the guilty and provide relief and rehabilitation to the victims. It was good that the prime minister and the chief minister visited the violence-affected areas and promised justice and a return to normalcy. Hopefully, the governments at the centre and in the state will not forget these promises; perhaps the impending elections will help them remember.
However, viewing this violence only in terms of religious communities may not help us to either fully understand what has happened or enable political and administrative interventions which can prevent repetitions. That the “Hindus” in this riot are largely Jats has been acknowledged. However, Muslims too have caste and class markers. Some reports talk about Muslims being farm labourers, carpenters and blacksmiths to the landowning Jats. That clearly indicates a subservient relation with the dominant caste. In fact, one report quotes a Hindu Jat villager, “There will be no peace until the balance of power is sorted out. One community in each village will remain dominant.” This then raises the question of why the dominant agricultural caste would want to drive out farm labour at the very time when agricultural operations are at their peak and the harvest is only weeks away. There have been reports of Hindus protecting Muslims and asking them to return, but some reports suggest that this was among Hindu Jats and Muslim Jats, which would indicate a certain caste solidarity more than an attempt at building communal harmony.
The shifting of communal violence to rural areas perhaps cannot be understood without understanding the major changes in agriculture over the last few decades and there seems insufficient work on that, both in newspaper reports and academic research. At present, media and fact-finding reports do not provide a clear picture of the caste, class and property issues involved. But it is equally clear that after the Nellie and Bhagalpur killings of the 1980s, this is perhaps the first large-scale rural communal violence and a warning about the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's new strategy of breaking out of its urban enclaves.
The whole episod started when two hindu boys were brutally killed by other community people and resulted into trajectory of reactionary politics in the region. 2014 Parliamentary elections may be fuelling Hindu-Muslim violence in Uttar Pradesh. Those who ran were Muslims, mostly field labourers. Those who remain are Hindus, wealthier landowners of the Jat group. Both lots prospered, if unequally, over the past decade. Nobody recalls violence of this sort before.
