From the editor- in- chief
Asinister undercurrent of communal tension is building up across India. It began in Assam in late July when tribal Bodo militant groups rioted against Muslims in the western Assam district of Kokrajhar. The alleged grievance of the Bodo militants was the usurping of land and assets that they perceive as rightfully theirs by immigrants from Bangladesh. This was not the first time that violence erupted in Assam on this issue. It was, however, the first time that events in Assam had reverberations across the rest of India.
In Bangalore, people from the North- east began to receive physical threats to their safety, through mobile phones and social media. The threats were an apparent retaliation from radical Islamist groups seeking to launch a counteroffensive to the murder of Muslims in Assam. What followed was an unprecedented mass exodus of people of North- east origin who had made Bangalore their home. They fled to the North- east, cramped in special trains.
The air of communal tension has since spread to cosmopolitan Mumbai, which became the volatile epicentre of Hindu- Muslim communal tension after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and the Bombay blasts in 1993, or in 2002 after the horrific Gujarat riots. Assam has rekindled the fires of communal hatred after several years of relative harmony. Technology has played a catalytic role in bringing distant Assam into the mainstream. The angry crowd of 50,000 Muslims who descended on Mumbai’s Azad Maidan to protest against atrocities on Muslims in Assam and Myanmar were reported to have seen incendiary MMS video clips apparently depicting gruesome images of murdered persons. Video clips and images were also circulated on social media. The clips and images, probably doctored, were almost certainly the work of mischief- making fundamentalists, whether in Pakistan as the Government claims, or in India. They did much damage as protesters, mostly ordinary Muslim youth with no background in fundamentalist activity, clashed with the police in Azad Maidan, leaving several policemen injured and a couple of protesters dead. The Mumbai Police and Maharasthra government misread the anger. The number of policemen present was too few. There were a few in the crowd who had come prepared for violence, carrying kerosene and petrol in soft drink bottles. The ineptness of the government only inflamed the tension. Days later, MNS chief Raj Thackeray polarised the atmosphere further by rallying with 60,000 people to express solidarity with nervous Hindus.
Our cover story, written by Deputy Editor Sandeep Unnithan and Assistant Editor Kiran Tare, goes into the city’s underbelly and reports the simmering anger of Mumbai’s Muslims. The perceived atrocities against Muslims in distant places, brought home by technology, threatens to radicalise even the moderates. A reverse polarisation of Hindus— aided by opportunistic politicians— would make things much worse. Assistant Editor Kaushik Deka in Guwahati spoke to the people who fled Bangalore and Mumbai to get a real sense of the fear factor that has been built up.
Even if the MMS clips are fake, there is obviously enough pent- up grievance to unleash such polarisation. That is bad news for India, which ought to have left such grievances behind with rapid, inclusive economic growth. The ruling UPA must shoulder the blame for letting the tension grow and not nipping it in the bud. Such mass migration and communal flashpoints strike at the core of our nationhood. India should be a country where people can work and live anywhere regardless of caste, creed or religion. Sadly, this is becoming increasingly difficult.