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A strange fireAshutosh VarshneyPosted onl ine: Fri Sep 20 2013, 03:30 hrs

Why the Muzaffarnagar riots were a departure from past trends.

In several respects, the recent communal violence in Muzaffarnagar had the classic featuresof a riot. The

immediate cause appeared to be the stalking or harassment of a girl by young men of another community, a

common tropein riots. There is a dispute about whether this harassment, or a motorbike collision between

individuals of two different communities, led to the killings. Contesting narratives of this sort are also a recurrent

feature of riots. Finally, it is said, local politicians made provocative speeches, and loud music blared in front of a

mosque at the time of prayer. Music before mosques (or cow slaughter) and inflammatory speeches by political or

religious leaders, too, are routinely associated with riots.

But, fundamentally, the Muzaffarnagar riots departed from our existing script of understanding. Over the last 15 to

20 years, ethnic conflict in different parts of the world, including India, has been studied extensively. We know a

lot, but no theory could have confidently predicted the Muzaffarnagar riots. We should, of course, note that

predictive accuracy is not a good way to judge social science theories. As in biology, social science theories tend

to be probabilistic, indicating the odds, not proposing certainties. Just as not everybody who smokes cigarettes

would get cancer, though a lot would, social science theories are better at explaining central tendencies, not

departures from them. We just cant get the precision of physics.

Nonetheless, we need to understand why the Muzaffarnagar riotswere unusual and examine their largerimplications. Why were these riots surprising?

First, the Muzaffarnagar riots were mostly rural. While civil wars tend to be rural, riots are primarily urban. Why

this is so is aptly summarised by a modern-day classic, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, by Stathis Kalyvas. In

civil wars, the insurgents generally attack the sovereignty of the state. They need to hide from the might of the

state to attack it well; villages, mountains and forests provide better hideouts for planning and protection than

cities. In comparison, rioters attack communities, not the sovereignty of the state. Rioters are armed with lesser

weapons, and houses in urban bylanes are a good enough cover.

Second, prejudice of various sorts might be widely prevalent in Indian villages, but the countryside tends to havecaste violence, not Hindu-Muslim riots. And when they do take place, rural riots tend to be small. In the period,

1950-1995, for which Steven Wilkinsonand I constructed a dataset, rural deaths accounted for a mere 4-8 per

cent of the total deaths in Hindu-Muslim riots (goo.gl/c1MkvZ). Killing anywhere between 40-50 people, if not

more, the Muzaffarnagar riots were big. India has had big rural riots before in Bhagalpur (1989), Gujarat (2002)

and a few in the Northeast. But these were exceptions to the larger reality of urban riots. The Muzaffarnagar riots

belong to this exceptional category.

Third, riots also affected the city of Muzaffarnagar. Hindu-Muslim relations in Muzaffarnagar town have historically

been calm. For communal violence, Aligarh and Meerut were the two worst cities in western Uttar Pradesh during

1950-95. But as I demonstrated in my book, Ethnic Conflictand Civic Life: Hindusand Muslims in India,

neighbouring towns often continue to maintain their divergent characteristics. Next to the riot-prone Aligarh is the

peaceful Bulandshahr; adjacent to Meerut are Saharanpur and Muzaffarnagar, both customarily tranquil. The

Muzaffarnagar riots departed from the historical trend.
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Fourth, while my own book was about urban, not rural, riots, there is a major argument in the field, by Wilkinson,

which applies to rural settings as well. In Votes and Violence, Wilkinson argues that communal riots are unlikely

to break out in a state where the government is heavily based on minority support. To keep the minority vote

intact, the government would use its might to stop or contain riots. The Samajwadi Partyruns UPs government; it

depends heavily on Muslim support, yet riots took place, killing a large number of Muslims. One big exception, of

course, does not invalidate a probabilistic theory, but it should be noted that ever since the SP government came

to power, small riots have been occurring in UP with considerable regularity. A minority-dependent government

seems unwilling, or unable, to stop them.

Finally, another piece of scholarly wisdom is partly breached. At higher levels of income, riots decline in frequency

and intensity. France did have riots in 2005, and the US in the 1960s and again in 1992 in Los Angeles, but such

rioting is episodic. In contrast, riots can be endemic at low levels of income. At higher levels of income, communal

or racial prejudice may continue, but resentments, when violent, take the form of terror or hate crimes (which are

individual acts of violence), not riots. As the Indian economy grew at high rates over the last decade and as big

riots also disappeared after Gujarat 2002, India seemed to follow the larger comparative script.

One big riot, again, does not undermine the larger income-based argument, but why did Muzaffarnagar burn?

Might that happen again?

Press reports are normally the first drafts of history. These drafts suggest a hypothesis and that is all we have

at present. As national elections come closer, political parties might have, yet again, begun to think of riots as an

attempt to create winning coalitions. During the late 1980s through 2002, communal polarisation was used to

enlarge political constituencies. Is such polarisation under way in UP today? Is it of any use, especially to the SP

and BJP?

The Muslim vote has always been central to the SPs electoral performance. Press analysis suggests that the

SPs strategy is to allow riots to take place and then present itself as a saviour of Muslims. If true, this diabolical

chessboard strategy can go horribly wrong on the ground. Once riots begin, they dont necessarily stay small. If

too many Muslim lives are lost, insecure Muslims are unlikely to view the SP as a protective shield against larger

threats. They can easily desert the SP, blaming it for administrative failures, even malevolent intentionality. A

large proportion of UP Muslims, after all, left the Congress in the late 1980s, when it could not stop riots.

What about the BJP? We know that UP is critical to the national ambitions of the BJP. The BJP under Modi

would like to go from 116 seats (2009) to 180-190 (in 2014). Otherwise, it cant attract post-election allies and

form the government. Without a tripling or quadrupling of BJP seats in UP, such an increase is virtually

inconceivable.

With only 10 out of 80 seats, the BJP finished fourth in UP in 2009, but both in 1996 and 1998, it had more than

50 seats. The 50-plus performance was due considerably if not wholly to a communal polarisation of the

electorate that the Ayodhya movement had made possible.

With or without Ayodhya, is that the BJP strategy in UP again? Amit Shahs appointment has led to widespread

speculation that that is indeed the case. But it is hard to believe that while economic growth and governance will

constitute Modis election campaign for India, there will be a reversion to the 1980s and 1990s in UP (and/ or

Bihar). This is not a paradox but a flat contradiction. Communal polarisation will almost certainly be accompanied

by violence; riding the communal tiger never allows full control over the dangerous beast. While the BJP may

attract many Hindu votes in UP this way, it will also lose a substantial number of those attracted to Modi for non-

communal, governance reasons, both in UP and beyond. The net seat gain may well turn out to be small, while

the ghosts of Gujarat 2002 will return to haunt Modis future even more vigorously.

It is best to hope that as he wishes to scale national heights, Modi will not take a gamble of this magnitude. At


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present, one should believe that, if true, the BJPs involvement in Muzaffarnagar was orchestrated not by the party

principals at the top, but by their local agents. If this hypothesis is wrong, India may well be poised for a reversal

of the decade-long communal peace. Self-defeating politics can, of course, prove all theories wrong, but it would

be facile to assume that, given its desire for power, the BJP will devise a strategy that is likely to lead to defeat

again.

The writer is Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences at Brown University, where

he also directs the India Initiative at the Watson Institute. He is a contributing editor for The Indian [email protected]

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