The Riot Economy:
The Ganj Basoda case
Produced by The
Bhopal Group on Communalism
04 October, 2003
On
the 14th of January, 2003 "riots erupted" in Ganj Basoda,
a small town of Madhya Pradesh -the first tremors of a post Gujarat
Hindutva. The incident was swiftly attributed to the slaughter of a
cow. This article following the incident and its surroundings inverts
this modality to argue that the alleged cow-slaughter, far
from being a reason of the riots could only have been a necessary appendage
of the economy of the riot itself.
"The incident
happened at around nine in the morning. Near 11:30 the shops were on
fire. Within an hour, 132 out of the 144 muslim-owned shops in the town
had been gutted and burnt down. Soon the ash settled and the administration
took charge "Janpad panchayat president, Ganj Basoda
"According
to the police, the trouble began on Tuesday morning when the word spread
across the town that a cow was being slaughtered in the house of a rickshaw
puller, identified as Salim, 33, a resident of Choori mohalla. As the
word spread across the town, an angry mob gathered in the area and went
on the rampage, indulging in arson and stone pelting
.
Though the accused managed to escape, two carcass and 12 hides were
reportedly recovered from his house
. Police later arrested the
accused
..The accused was involved in such activities
in the past also and a similar incident was reported in 1999, a senior
state police official said"
Hindustan Times, Wednesday, January 15, 2003
"It was an
assemblage of about five hundred people, who divided into smaller groups
of 70-80. Each group responsible for a location and consisting largely
of people from that particular locality." An observer
Ganj Basoda, the
town that witnessed the riots -a classification, we shall
challenge in this article- on the 14th of january in which almost all
the muslim owned shops were selectively gutted and put on fire is a
small town of about eighty thousand people of whom a very small fraction
(about 5-6 percent) are muslims. The town is apparently not one of those
afflicted sites, where communal violence erupts habitually, echoing
the faintest, distant howls; like a mourning in which continence itself
may bear violent overtones, a mourning for which a violence had to be
self-inflicted.
"The trouble
began on Tuesday morning when the word spread around that a cow was
being slaughtered in the house of a rickshaw puller, Salim " [1].
What does the word trouble allude to here? What is the expanse
of events that it circumscribes? Is it a uniform sequence
of events to be put into a single box, engendered by a single event-
the first disturbance of a peace; the first disturbance on a still surface.
Let us broach the subject further. This disturbing event,
the alleged genesis of the trouble was: A cow had been killed.
To use a hackneyed phrase -which however on that account, should only
be more seriously taken, leave alone, trivialised- this hurt the
sensibilities of the majority community. The rest, was the revenge
of the hurt.
All empirical evidence,
as we will argue in this article, suggests that this alleged sparking
point -the slaughter of a cow- could only have been a fictional point
created as a lump to which reason is made to fall back upon - the sinful,
illegitimate, matricidal lump. But how could reason rest there. This
lump will need to be broken into minute parts, the event
into its component events. Where exactly did the ruckus
begin? Did somebody see a cow being slaughtered? Or did somebody see
a cow being taken inside a house, where the lone purpose could have
been to slaughter it? How did the news travel; who were the harbingers?
None of these and many such questions, the just demands of a logical
coherence, were followed. Logic, once it reached (leaping over obstacles)
to a comfortable end - the Event- was stubbed. These aspersions of fiction
on the Event are however not meant to make a positivistic statement
claiming an umbrella inculpability for Salim and his family. This is
only to say that there is little evidence to support the particular
charge against Salims family of having slaughtered a cow on that
particular moment, the trigger to the riots-The Event. In
fact, as the imbricated facts and interests are gradually unfolded,
one effortlessly shifts to the point, where one can see it strip into
an astute plot carefully timed and placed. That however does not mean
that this plot excluded every element of spontaneity. Far from it, it
harvested -a harvest perhaps provided for in its modality- deeply sown
seeds of hatred, a structurally misdirected organicity; an organicity
which is more akin to a malignant tumour than to a growth of life.
Salims family
of three included his wife and an adolescent daughter. They lived in
a rented house, a small kutcha house with a polythene sheet for a roof
with the landlords double storey building providing the backdrop.
Salim: a rickshaw-puller (what economy for a persons description!);
his wife: a housewife and by many accounts, an industrious woman who
used to trade in animal flesh, bringing it from Sagar and Sironj towns
which house licensed butcher houses; his daughter: a girl-child entering
that age (of marriage) when parents in many parts of the country anxiously
start scrambling for the tiniest bits of resources. In this poor familys
struggle for a living, the petty trade in animal flesh was an important
aspect.
Animal flesh is
an expensive commodity, often beyond the means of the working classes.
Among the different types of animal flesh, beef - meat of the buffalo
and cow family- for the simple demand-supply equation costs only a fraction
of the cost of meat and poultry. While beef, as most who have eaten
it say, has no particular palatal advantage -except may be the advantage
of difference, no mean advantage- it is no gross disadvantage either.
This skew, largely a creation of the partial ban on beef in the state,
carves a niche in the market for beef. Surprisingly, contrary to expectations
where a ban should have hopped up prices, beef rates remained more or
less stable -a clear indicator that the prices were being determined
not by discerning palates but the hungry needs of the masses, from whom
there was little to gain by bargain; the risk element could not be converted
into money, for there was just no surplus to appropriate; a cornered
dealer can do nothing but squirm. It was this market that Salims
wife, eager for avenues to augment the family income, was battling in.
Commuting to Sagar every few days by a local train, surreptitiously
carrying flesh in it, regularly bribing the railway police personnel
and the ticket checker, secretly bringing it home and selling it from
there -no mean labour for a small amount of money. And for all this
labour, Salim remained a rickshaw puller, pulling people twice his body
weight; his house, the rented shanty it was. This destitute family,
breaking its back in the struggle for life was however not even to be
spared to live its lot; after all, it had hurt sensibilities,
venomous sensibilities which like flying snakes in waiting, would hover
from all around to bite it.
While Salims
wife used to trade in animal flesh and also beef, there is little evidence
to suggest that she traded in cow-beef and none which points towards
their slaughtering of cows. Besides, even if for a moment
we were to disregard this dearth of evidence, a backward logical movement
from the embellished, smooth structure of the larger events (which are
blamed to have been engendered by the cow slaughter, The Event) that
followed, proves that The Event -or rather its fiction- fits in too
well, comfortably and organically with this structure to have been exterior
to it -and the structure too well laid out to be precariously built
on this tenuous foundation. It could only have been this structures
creation, its own necessary appendage. We need to discerningly follow
and disentangle these events, which left entwined are fiddles for the
dominants.
"The incident
happened at around nine in the morning. Near 11:30 the shops were on
fire. Within an hour, 132 out of the 144 muslim-owned shops in the town
had been gutted and burnt down". There are no hiccups between the
first and the second sentence, for those two and half hours. This is
the interregnum when the Event (whatever be its form) is transformed
into a riot: stone pelting, plundering and finally, burning of shops
-the culmination, the final vengeance, complete annihilation of the
symbol in the shop- after which the revenge, the thirst quenched, it
settles down. This is the period of the spreading of the word, the swarming
of people, the incitement of passions, the formation of the frenzy.
This period of transformation is the main culprit for which the tenuous
beginning (the Event) is a poor alibi. That beginning could only have
been the necessary elongation of this interregnum, the initiation of
the elements of the interregnum -a holy initiation.
This interregnum
is the breathing space that ideas shocked with the first brush of reality
need, to gather their appurtenances, reorganise their senses, to cast
one last look to see that everything is settled for the launch. As the
events to follow it would tell, it was during this interregnum that
the Basoda riots were infused with the rational core that
determined their fine method -an exacting strategy, precise targets
and a limit.
"Within an
hour, 132 out of the 144 muslim-owned shops in the town had been gutted
and burnt down". Ganj Basoda has a fairly spread market, in which
there is little to distinguish shops on the basis of their ownership.
There is no spatial or functional segregation -no concentration of muslim
shops. But for some convenient cases, it is difficult to make appellate
distinctions -identifications of shops are more often than not secular.
How then does it become possible to segregate every single of these
scattered muslim-owned shops -they constitute no more than 5-6% of the
total number of shops- plunder them and set them to fire, all within
an hour or a little more. Let us not forget that this is as precise
an exercise as any, an error of less than ten percent, that too not
human, but solely due to the swigs of fire. The few muslim shops that
remained, by most accounts belong to members of one or the other factions
of the right -the BJP, the RSS, the Bajrang dal, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad.
What informed this
method? Were they catalogues that had been astutely prepared, discerningly
studied, mnemonically memorised. Probably, yes. But that would still
be insufficient and not unfold itself as full-proof as the real act
suggests. It needed the aid of a method, organic and structurally located;
harnessing a raw and alive information.
"It was an
assemblage of about five hundred people, who divided into smaller groups
of 70-80. Each group responsible for a location and consisting largely
of people from that particular locality." The division of the mass
on neighbourhood lines, clusters of local people carrying minute details
-If the shop was rented by a muslim, only the ware had to be destroyed;
if it belonged to a muslim, the shop was to be put to flame- also perfect
foil to settle old scores, vengeance that may have long forgotten its
roots. Spreading over the town, these groups break into identified shops,
plunder and set fire. Within a period of about an hour, the project-
benefiting from the economy of decentralisation- is completed. These
groups never move to the residential areas or indulge in further damage.
The commotion ends at its very peak, when it has tasted victory,
a surrender of the adversary. Would a rabid crowd be satisfied with
a symbolic end -burnt shops? Would it not push itself straight into
the adversarys den -the residential areas- to lay the enemy prostrate
physically, in the real sense? Would it not at least, cross
the limit somewhere, for a moment, may be?
This divided mass
instead stops abruptly after the commercial areas, without a single
leap towards the residential areas, nor towards any other object. Its
consummate economy -precisely marked shops looted and burnt to order,
a finely defined finitude, an absolute lack of transgression- never
betrays the lack of a central rational control. There is no mass
here, no traces of disorder, no madness -no riots. This
was a project that had met its objective and its objective successfully
completed, it vanished living behind haunting traces. We however do
not mean that this project was devoid of all organic appendages, a glossy
ball that collected no dust. Far from it, it gained profusely from these
organic wastes. But its core, the movement defining element remained
till the end, in the anterior, the programmed instrumental rationality
which it inherited from the moment of conception. To understand the
conceptual constitution of this project, we need to cast a glance at
the surroundings, from where the seed was cast, or at least from where
it got the orders to finally erupt out of its shell -the portentous
shadows of which the teratogens actual birth was only a concretisation,
a cold condensation.
If Salims
family traded in beef (of any kind) there was nothing extra about the
14th of January. If it had exceeded legal limits, the excess continued
from years before and the VHP, Bajrang Dal etc. -by all accounts, the
executors of the project- with their extensive ruffian network could
not have been oblivious of it. Salims landlord (Soni) as also
the household opposite of the street (Yadav) are both active VHP and
Bajrang Dal activists (respectively). It is worth noting here that two
years back, the muslim community had disallowed Salim, a rented house
in their locality for his alleged indulgence in beef-like trade. For
whatever legal transgression Salim may be exposed to blame, he can not
be tried for making that moment, the moment of the Event (or rather,
the fiction of the Event) possible. And what dubious logical leap is
made to account for the transformation of this fiction into a violent
display in which the property of a particular community is selectively
put to fire, the hard-earned savings of a lifetimes labour reduced
to ash, a people converted into illegitimates in their own land -the
religious identity of the fictitious transgressor!
It was not Salims
excess that marked the 14th of January. The project -or its timing-
was a necessary congealing of the surroundings, the filling of a void,
the exuberant overbrimming of the void; a reckoning to be finally counted,
to be at last rewarded. A sign of the surroundings that hovered about
the project, anterior to its actualization, can be found in the events
that followed the project. The hoverings themselves came into overt
lustrous forms -public declarations, speeches with much fanfare, statements
of intent- culminating in threats of carry-over to the elections, the
final front. It is at this end, this constantly alluded final point
that this economy finally bares the aetiology of its projects, of the
project. It is the economy of the front i.e., the election-market, which
insinuates itself, back and forth, in all its projects.
We would do well
to take a view of some significant moments that surround
the events in Godhra. In February 2002, the Godhra carnage takes place
which, irrespective of its cause, is efficaciously used by the BJP regime
in Gujarat to allow a violent deluge against the muslim community. A
delirium is created. A delirium strong enough to wipe away the formations
of political rancour against the BJP, which had been steadily building
up for more than a year, and tenacious enough to yield a bumper harvest,
nine months later. The consummate economy of the frenzy could not but
vehemently push the case for its own repetition -even if a riot
had to be manufactured.
Following the Gujarat
results, members of the BJP and the VHP openly assumed menacing tones,
threatening repeats over the country: Hindutva had finally come of age;
the instrument had passed the acid test, it waited eagerly for another
prey -writhing against the tether to jump on the next passersby. It
could not have laid low long. Madhya Pradesh seemed to be the most convenient
and potentially rewarding spot to give it its bite of flesh. In late
December itself, Uma Bharati -Madhya Pradeshs potential Narendra
Modi - was handed over the reins and Narendra Modi -the beast himself-,
the stewardship. By early January, she had started camping in Bhopal,
travelling into the hinterland and building the tempo of
the party cadres. Not to be left behind, an upbeat VHP, asserted itself
in the form of a rally in Bhopal chaperoned by its version of Narendra
(Milosevic) Modi, Praveen Togadia. And there were many more marches
of the exuberant victors of Gujarat, uninitiated into restrain.
Togadia on the 11th
of January declared in a press conference in Bhopal [2.], "Not
only Madhya Pradesh but also other states would be painted in saffron
colours by the time the next assembly elections are held here".
There are no interludes in this exposition. The particular is precisely
located in the general, it is the later from which it derives its substantiality.
The period is defined by the given -project end. The instrument
is clear by its colour and the act clear in the continuity of its expanse
-paint. This statement however reflects a position that has moved far
ahead of its vacillating countenance a decade back. The Saffron
had dropped from being a supposedly ideological position to its real
place in the squalor of the election-market. It is this squalor, which
determines its forms and its moments of assertion.
It of course requires
no digging to locate the roots of the discourse on cow slaughter -or
the event of cow slaughter- in the election ground. And as cows are
everywhere, temples are everywhere too -scattered ready-to-harvest sacrednesses.
Be it the Ayodhya site or the recent case of Bhojshala in Dhar, the
archaeology of Hindu religious sites is well synchronised
with the movement of the election machine. So are other aspects of the
BJP (and its allies) propaganda: Swadeshi, Islamic terrorism,
Muslim population burst, Pakistan bashing etc.
But these phenomenon
are obvious enough not to warrant a reiteration. The relation that the
BJP has helped congeal between genocide and electoral fortunes in a
liberal democratic setup, the possibility of a (necessary) relation
between gross violence and a democratic sham, is finally on a vulgar
display. This forthrightness is obviously a result of the substantial
power and resources edifice that it has structurally established for
itself, specially in the last decade or so. While symbols like temple,
cow etc. have undoubtedly played an important role in its rise, it was
only a matter of time before the organisation outgrew these symbols.
It obviously still progresses stepping on symbols, but then with the
growth and establishment of the organisation, the scarcity of symbols
ceases to be a limiting factor. There it is important that the resistance
movement too move beyond a symbolic to a real contest; from
a contestation of symbols to a battle of organisation; from tolerating
a democratic chimera to a movement for substantive democracy.
In the cow, temple
etc. were traces that the sangh parivar fed, cultivated and harvested.
The selection was a shrewd one not only in terms of the potential of
their appeal but also in the inherent proclivities of the tendencies
so galvanised. In such a situation, the congress strategy of attempting
to appropriate the BJPs symbols, and therefore of feeding the
same tendencies is characteristic of its vulgar opportunism. While the
possibility of this providing a temporary strut to the congress cannot
be theoretically dismissed, it is more probable that in the sloughs
of the last vestiges of liberalism -once its very raison detre-
may finally be the appearance of its own disintegration. Cows and temples,
the BJPs steps of ascendance may well be the steps that the congress
uses to descend.
Endnotes:
1. Extract from
HT, quoted above
2. Press Trust of India, 11th January, 2003