Making friends and enemies generally takes time, but sometimes recent animus can brush against older or gathering resentments and light a fire quickly. In 2013, in Muzaffarnagar, western Uttar Pradesh, a series of events—the stalking of a Jat girl by a Muslim youth, his stabbing by two of her cousins who were then killed, and the subsequent release of the accused due to perceptions of ruling-party patronage—was enough to tear to shreds the 50-year-old Jat-Muslim socio-economic interdependence that bound families in village after village across the region.
The over 20-day rampage led to 62 deaths, over 90 injured, and nearly 50,000 displaced. Meanwhile, the then Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party government played ‘Nero’ as Muzaffarnagar burnt; and the Bharatiya Janata Party fanned the flames. According to a report by The Caravan, mahapanchayats initially called by the Bharatiya Kisan Union were taken over by the BJP and one of its MLAs was found to have posted a fake video on his Facebook page that supposedly showed the brutal killings of the two cousins.
Author of Palestine and many other graphic novels on sectarian conflicts around the world, graphic novelist Joe Sacco has just published a new book, The Once and Future Riot (Leftword), on the Muzaffarnagar riots.
He says it was another way to understand how democracy works in India, now a global player, and where violence is resorted to for electoral gains. With the upcoming Uttar Pradesh elections, which come in the wake of the rather controversial large-scale deletion of names from voter rolls nationwide, the book asks pertinent questions about electoral cynicism of the ruling elite at all levels – from local power centres such as the panchayats, to the police and the bureaucracy, and right up to the chief minister’s office – reflecting the actual equations of the communal power struggle.
Sacco credits local journalists for his navigation and understanding of the terrain. In the book, Muzaffarnagar’s version of the Wild West’s frontier justice in the days of the riot, the unfolding chaos and the way the administration doled out and withheld relief selectively, leaving some of its people in a permanent state of illegitimacy and drift, finds echoes in the recent "detect, delete, and deport" campaigns of disenfranchising citizens, being reported from elsewhere in India. And in other parts of the world. Excerpts from a conversation:
Does the title of your book on the 2013 Muzzaffarnagar Jat-Muslim riots in Uttar Pradesh, indicate a space of continuous riotousness in the region, a space of permanent sectarianism between the two communities that were not traditionally antagonistic? Or are you indicating something more amorphous?
A bit of both. Whatever tensions that exist between communities need not break out into ruthless violence, but politicians seem to rise in electoral politics not by searching for our common goals and aspirations but by dividing us and consolidating a voter bloc. You see this in relief in India, and the conditions for future riots haven’t changed.
The Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt said that politics needs an enemy, and I think that is an equation many politicians live by. But this is a problem with electoral regimes everywhere — I hesitate to use the word “democracies”. You see politicians in Europe and the United States more than willing to play the same game. Turning people against each other is their ticket to the top.
The Nellie Massacre of 1983, the Bhagalpur violence of 1989…. Post-independence India has also seen riots under Congress regimes. Why did the Muzaffarnagar riots that happened 14 years ago draw you?
In some ways, my investigation of the Muzaffarnagar riots was a chance thing. I wanted to do another story in India, a country that will become more prominent as the West’s fortunes wane. I have been writing and drawing about conflict for most of my career, and I’ve been looking for something more, for the psychological reasons why we turn so readily upon each other. It occurred to me that by looking at one localised riot I could perhaps gain an insight into riots in general.
My initial idea was to understand how people justify their actions in violent episodes and what stories they tell themselves and others about what they did. It was only while I was doing this research that the theme of the uses of violence in electoral politics began to jump out at me.
You have covered the Bosnian conflict in Safe Area Gorazde and Fixer, narratives of domination by the Serbian Orthodox Christians over Bosnian Muslims. Is there a difference in the way religious polarisation and sectarian aggression have played out in our part of the world from what you have seen in Gaza or Bosnia?
Many things seem to divide us, but, yes, religion often plays a large part in determining who can be the potential lightning rod for our rage and fear. I don’t blame religion itself for this. Unfortunately, though, religion, like skin colour, is a very convenient way of categorising people as not just different in their beliefs and manners but as threatening.
In Bosnia, neighbours who had got along just fine turned on each other at the instigation of politicians and retreated into their ready-made categories. These people weren’t particularly religious, by the way — not overtly so, certainly, but circumstances forced them to identify with their large group for protection. I think the religious aspect is more prominent in India, where cultural differences are used as wedges to divide one group from the other. The same is now true in the United States where the evangelical wing of Christianity is playing the victim and overt Islamophobia is now acceptable in public discourse.
What are the one or two conversations from meeting the people affected by the Muzaffarnagar riots that you will not forget?
I met a couple of young Muslim women — teenagers — who had watched their parents being butchered in front of them. My guides and I found them in a displacement camp, and we met them as the sky darkened into night and, unfortunately, with many people listening in. It felt like a now-or-never moment to get the sort of witness testimony I’d been in search of for days.
Unlike most of my interviews, which can be longish, I did the interview as quickly as possible to spare the girls a lengthy recounting in front of a lot of people of what they had endured. They answered my questions directly and forcefully and with as much dignity as they could muster. I did not feel good about how indelicately the interview was conducted. The unease will stick with me, as it should.
What do you think are the lessons the two affected communities have learnt from the apparently leader-less, very ‘local’ and mob-led Muzaffarnagar riots – even as in the upcoming elections, the Samajwadi Party and the BJP are the main contenders?
I think nothing will change until people begin to interrogate what is really wrong with their lives. Are other communities with other beliefs and dietary strictures to blame for their ills, or is it the system that has calcified around them, a system that rewards politicians whose main concern is hanging on to power by highlighting or manufacturing communal grievances? I believe it is the latter.
What were your foolproof bullshit detectors during this experience?
There is probably no foolproof bullshit detector. There may have been times I’ve been “had” by false statements. But some claims are so outlandish that are clearly lies. The idea that children and women attacked convoys of men and killed them may not be entirely out of the realm of possibility, but it should certainly raise an eyebrow. Or the idea that no one was killed in a village when all the circumstantial evidence points in a different direction. But journalistically speaking, it’s one thing to sense something is bullshit, and another to prove it, so my colleagues and I made every effort to find reliable witnesses and get as close to the truth as we could.
This was your first India book. Are you planning more books on India?
I had done a shorter story about Dalits in rural Uttar Pradesh, but, yes, this was my first book about India. I don’t think I will do another book about India, but I am moving away from journalism in general, so it’s “nothing personal”. Actually, I really enjoy being in India and, despite everything I’ve said here, I am very impressed with the basic democratic impulse of most Indians I have met. The farmer’s strike and the “cockroaches” and other grassroots movements assure me that India’s authoritarians are still fighting against the wind. I hope the wind prevails.