[ The riots have been driven by a ruling party intent on painting
its largely peaceful opponents as seditious sectarians]
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ANTI-MUSLIM VIOLENCE IN DELHI SERVES MODI WELL  
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Mukul Kesavan
February 26, 2020
The Guardian
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_ The riots have been driven by a ruling party intent on painting its
largely peaceful opponents as seditious sectarians _

Congress party supporters in Amritsar burn an effigy of Narendra Modi
during a demonstration to protest against the violence occurring in
Delhi., Photograph: Narinder Nanu/AFP via Getty Images

 

Since Sunday violent mobs in north-east Delhi have killed 
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people
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a police constable, injured hundreds of others, burned motor
vehicles, set fire to shops and homes
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assaulted journalists, vandalised places of worship and destroyed a
shrine.

The time-honoured convention for reporting on communal violence
in India [[link removed]] is to not name
names. In news reports it is always “violent members of one
religious community” attacking violent members of another. This
anonymising ritual has the distorting effect of turning unequal
violence into a symmetrical tug of war.

It is important, then, to specify that the places of worship
vandalised were two mosques and a sufi shrine, that the majority of
identified dead people were Muslims, that the thugs frisking
reporters, confiscating their phones and beating them up were in every
instance Hindu 
[[link removed]]supremacist
goons
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and that the shops and homes burned nearly always belonged to Muslims.

There were occasions when Muslims burned cars, there is video evidence
of a man identified as Muslim who fired a gun, and several instances
of stone-throwing by Muslims. But the organising impresarios of this
devastation were local politicians affiliated to the Bharatiya Janata
party (BJP), India’s ruling party.

They made the incendiary speeches that triggered the violence. Their
vigilante auxiliaries attacked Muslims with impunity, and the Delhi
police, which reports to the home minister (and Prime Minister
Narendra Modi’s right-hand man), Amit Shah, either looked on as
goons rioted, arrived after Muslims had been attacked, or actually
participated in the violence against people demonstrating against
Modi’s discriminatory citizenship law.

Delhi has not seen this kind of violence for decades – but it has
been worse: in 1984 the Indian National Congress party used the
assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguard as an excuse for
organising a pogrom in which thousands of Sikhs were murdered
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The violence in Delhi is not yet a pogrom but a pattern of police
complicity, and the political patronage extended to vigilante mobs
suggests a continuing public-private partnership designed to violently
subdue opposition to the BJP’s Hindu supremacist project.

The cutting edge of this majoritarian project is a radical two-pronged
assault on Indian citizenship. First, the Citizenship Amendment Act
(CAA)
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which is designed to fast-track non-Muslim migrants from carefully
chosen Muslim majority countries into citizenship, has created, by
implication, a religious test for citizenship.

This new law is to be followed by the compilation of a national
register of citizens (NRC) that will compel Indians to document their
Indianness. Non-Muslims who fail to satisfy the NRC’s tribunals
might be able to use the loophole created by the amended citizenship
law to find a path to citizenship. Muslims who fail the test will have
no recourse: they will be cast into the kind of limbo that
the Rohingya experienced in Rakhine
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they were violently purged from that province.

This statutory, institutional subversion of Muslim citizenship would
be a great prize for a majoritarian party like the BJP. It would be,
if you like, a halfway house between the voter suppression tactics of
the Republican party
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the US and the Nuremberg laws of Nazi Germany: less covert than the
first but less explicitly bigoted than the second.

 Deadly clashes in India as protests take place across country –
video

The CAA/NRC two-step is an existential threat to both Muslim
citizenship and India’s now threadbare claim to being a secular,
pluralist state. It has provoked an extraordinary pan-Indian campaign
of civil disobedience led by Muslims, specifically Muslim women,
and university students
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After winning a second parliamentary majority in 2019
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Modi’s BJP government had seemed unstoppable. The reduction of the
state of Jammu and Kashmir into federally governed territories, by
stripping it of its constitutionally enshrined autonomy
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the supreme court’s judgment
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that the site of a mosque razed by a Hindu mob in 1992 in Ayodhya
could be rebuilt as a Hindu temple, encouraged Modi and Shah to
believe that they could spring their citizenship trap without
opposition. To be publicly thwarted by a nonviolent movement fronted
by Muslims that refuses to use a religious idiom, that invokes
India’s constitution and its secular guarantees as holy writ, that
wraps itself in the national flag and affirms Bhimrao Ambedkar, the
Dalit architect of India’s constitution as its inspiration, has been
intensely frustrating for this government.

The violent standoff in Delhi between the supporters of the new
citizenship law and its opponents has been misleadingly described as a
religious clash for a simple reason. The burden of defending secular
citizenship has been shouldered disproportionately by Muslims. At the
heart of all the sit-ins are Muslim women,
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they are mostly located in Muslim neighbourhoods. These sit-ins have
become rallying points for a large, vibrant movement in which
non-Muslims participate enthusiastically but there are no mainly
non-Muslim sit-ins. The BJP government and India’s pliant television
news channels have battened on this to paint the protestors as
seditious sectarians determined to thwart Modi’s electoral mandate.
There’s nothing this government wants more than to clear these
demonstrations. Hence the violence.

[Indian Muslim women look out of a window as security officers patrol
a street in Delhi]
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 Indian Muslim women look out of a window as security officers patrol
a street in Delhi. Photograph: Altaf Qadri/AP

There’s an urgency to this because the resistance to the citizenship
law – as symbolised by the sit-ins in the Delhi neighbourhoods of
Shaheen Bagh and Jafrabad – has begun to win significant victories.
On Tuesday, the government of Bihar, where the BJP rules in coalition
with a provincial party, declared that it wouldn’t implement the new
National Population Register, a necessary preliminary to compiling the
NRC. This might encourage other state governments, especially those
ruled by opposition parties, to follow suit.

Without the cooperation of state governments the BJP’s carefully
plotted citizenship scheme might come to nothing. This is why the
violence in north-east Delhi is both significant and potentially
ominous; it might presage something worse, as a thwarted Hindu
supremacist government tries to provoke nonviolent protestors, the
better to clear them with brute force.

•_ Mukul Kesavan is an essayist and author who teaches history at
Jamia Millia Islamia university in Delhi_

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