Pathology of Riots- II

Three days before the Nellie massacre the message of the police officer about the gathering of the marauders for imminent attack on the minority people was not acted upon. Looking forward to 2002 Gujarat the Faizabad collector and intelligence officers there and elsewhere in the BJP administered state of UP under Chief Minister Rajnath Singh did not comply with the rules and file any report on the movement of the karsevaks of the Sabarmati express train while IGP (Intelligence) Sreekumar did his part honestly. He was not only ignored but snubbed and demoted. In the aftermath of the Nellie massacre the National Police Commission in a report on April 4, 1983 stated that the police were wont to shirk their duty vis-à-vis the minority in dealing with a communal riot. Even the political leaders have by and large shown indifference. The defence minister George Fernandes dismissed the rape and murder of Muslim women in Gujarat 2002 as casual. About the Nellie massacre Mathu Dandvate, Finance Minister in the Janta party government of yore, did not say anything to condemn the bloodbath. He rather made a joke. Railway Minister Ghani Khan had dismissed or transferred many officials on March 4th 1983. Professor Dandvate described the dismissal and transfers as “carnage in the Railway Bhavan.” Many people were shocked by the shameful silence of Dandvate on the massacre and sudden saturnine humour.

What is wry humour is often so macabre that the victims brutalized and demonized in riots also have to bear the brunt of carrying the load of blame for what others have done to them. A regular columnist in a Sunday edition of a national daily imputed the Muslims for feeling proud that their killers in 2002 pogroms were more important than the killers of Sikh in 1984. Why did not he look beyond?

Amitav Ghosh calls the trading of charges as “pathological inversion”. As this is typical of our political leaders within the country, it also follows in international arena. India and Pakistan traded charges during the disturbances and riots that took place across the borders when the holy relic of the prophet’s hair was stolen from the Hazratbal mosque on December 27, 1963 and was mysteriously restored on January 4, 1964. However, Maulana Masoodi it was who had asked the people not to carry green flags but black to protest the theft. The Kashmiris of all religions took to the streets to express their outrage. There was no violence while scores were killed in Calcutta, Khulna and Dhaka. That kind of solidarity was sorely missing in the rest of the country.

Malegaon and Bhiwandi have been sensitive towns in Maharashtra on account of a consciously nurtured pathological culture of riots. The 1965 aggression of Pakistan was a handy cause for the communalists and they used it as manure. As Justice Madan Mohan Commission noted: “In April 1969 these extremist Hindu leaders, finding that they were unable to have their way, walked out of the Shiv Jayanti Utsav Samiti and resigned from it, with the result that by their absence the procession that year became a model of what such a procession should be, though these persons and their associates met the procession at various points, threw excessive gulal at it, especially at the Muslim leaders, and raised objectionable slogans. Communalism breeds communalism and the inflexible attitude adopted by some of the Hindu extremist youths was matched by a section of the extremist Muslim youths who became equally adamant that the procession should not pass by the Nizampura Jumma Mosque.”

June 26th 1983 riot of Malegaon would be the first in history which would simmer for months and engulf neighbouring villages and towns like Satana. It had heavy toll of innocent being killed and injured. In one incident a woman was suckling her baby child of 9 months when the police bullet hit the cranium and scattered the brain in the hair of the mother. The same bullet entered another hut where it broke the arm bone of a girl and hung her arm in an angular shape. The town was witness to periodic communal violence and some kind of patronage of the trouble makers was evident. Sharad Pawar was in political wilderness. In the third week of February 1983 he allegedly accompanied Bal Thackeray and G.M. Puntamberkar to the mantralaya. Puntamberkar pleaded for the repeal of the extradition order of Ashok Chaudhary, owner of Bajrang tea shop. Puntamberkar was also indicted by Justice Madan for making communally inciting speeches in Bhiwandi. Some people wanted to give communal colour to what was ordinary incident. On July 7th Suresh Avadoot wrote in the Marathi Deshdoot that the attack on one Shellar had nothing to do with riot and yet it was made out to be a communal incident. Thus the society was in a pathological situation without nationalist minded people with holistic view present on the scene.

Since then the pathological condition has so degenerated that in the late 1980s women were singled out to suffer from the worst crimes humans can perpetrate on them. I was traveling through Ahmedabad in 1986 for a world conference in Udaipur marking centenary of publication of Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn. I had stopped over in Ahemdabad and what I saw and heard was soul wrenching. The reservation agitation had degenerated into worst communal riots of that time. Women were attacked and killed; patients were thrown down from fourth or fifth floors of hospitals! This did not stop there but rose in a crescendo as women were used to demonstrate the macho nature of what Babu (Patel) Bajrangi calls khitchi eating males who could perform so well on Muslim women. Many were raped and murdered in 2002 but a few like Bilkis Yakub survived the ordeal.


After ascertaining the pathological condition of riots what cure is there? There is a great need to establish truth first of all. Reconciling the people comes next. The law of the land must not only be respected but also allowed to take its course. Every human life is possible only because of civil society or else we lapse into primitive life of the jungle where laws of the jungle prevail.