Communal riot and inter-ethnic tapestry of cities

Arvind Kejriwal’s politics; “Jai Sri Ram” politics cannot be countered with sparkling schools and Hanuman Chalisa. Home minister Amit Shah should have resigned, he did not. When and how did the anti-citizenship (Amendment) Act protests spiral to a communal riot or, as political scientist Prof Ashutosh Varshney commented on social media, begin to look like a pogrom? There is, he remarked, “enough evidence” of the police looking on instead of acting neutrally as mobs went on a rampage and sometimes aiding violent mobs for it to be called a pogrom. Can the state be shamed into action? This state, Varshney argued, cannot be shamed into action because “it is unambiguously anti-muslim”.

His observations apart, it is his decade-long depth study of Hindu-muslim riots turned into the ground-breaking book “Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life” more than 15 years ago that offers a perspective to urban communal violence. Varshney draws on research of three pairs of cities — one in each pair a communally volatile and riot-prone while the other relatively peaceful — to arrive at his central argument that communal violence — or peace — is largely determined by the civic life of communities in question; that if civic engagement was inter-ethnic rather than intra-ethnic, conflicts are less likely to spiral into widespread violence.

Increasingly, Hindus and Muslims in the same city or same area of a city lead different, silo-like and often mutually antagonistic and ghettoised lives. The many stresses of urban life make these antagonisms worse. And politicians then play on them, mine the insecurities and plant red flags. Inter-ethnicity is what the BJP has assiduously tried to damage.

What’s worse is that after such vicious violence, civic engagements suffer. There’s more — not less —ghettoisation. This means the ground has been laid for another round of communal strife, riot or pogrom in the future when politicians seek to profit from it. A city is never the same after a communal riot or pogrom; it does not completely heal, it does not go back to being quite the tapestry it used to be.