The role of the state in communal riots has yet again attracted enormous attention. But, after all is said and done, we need to re-examine our standard view of the state. We should certainly critique the state for its failings. However, we should also more realistically ask whether our critique, even if strident and persistent, would force the state to change its behaviour.
The Gujarat riots were not the first large-scale riots of independent India, nor was it the first time the state machinery looked the other way, as mobs burned, killed, hacked, and torched. It is often said that if the state were communally neutral, or scrupulous enough to protect the lives of all its citizens, there would be no large-scale communal violence. Whenever major communal violence has taken place in independent India — Ahmedabad 1969 and 1984-5; Aligarh 1978, 1980, 1990; Hyderabad 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, etc — academics, activists, legal experts and journalists have been intensely critical of the state.
Inquiry commissions have also been periodically instituted, though not usually before enough citizen pressure on the state has been exerted. All inquiry commissions have thus far focused on riots and violent towns, not on towns that did not explode, even while other cities were burning. Bulandshahr, next to Aligarh, and Saharanpur, next to Meerut, were rarely infected by the communal orgy of their neighbouring towns. If the researchers and judges only investigate violence, the failure of state organs in preventing riots is bound to be a foregone conclusion. There is no mystery to be unravelled here.
Equally, no amount of critique has yet brought about durable changes in the behaviour of the state on Hindu-Muslim relations. Even if Modi were to fall tomorrow — in any civilised setup, he should — the bigger questions of Indian politics on Hindu-Muslim relations would remain. Can we be sure that the next government, when faced with the same situation, would do any better? Can we confidently say that our critiques — morally charged as they inevitably are and should be, expressing anger, revulsion and disgust — would really bring about permanent changes in the state’s conduct?
On how to prevent riots in the future, the past inquiry commissions, researchers, journalists have typically presented the following conclusions, all focusing on what the government should do: state governments should not undermine, or interfere with, local law enforcement; speedy and firm action to control rioters should be taken at the first sign of trouble; prosecutions of offenders should not be withdrawn by the state for political reasons; communal political parties should be banned or regulated by the state; civil and police officers in service should be transferred only on professional grounds; the police force should be made professional, etc. This exhortative reasoning begs an analytical as well as practical question: why is the state, which so often fails in riot-prone cities, effective in preventing riots in peaceful cities, even when the times are rough and tensions reach alarming heights, as they did in 1947-8, 1992-3, and recently in Gujarat? Despite the provocation, many towns and cities, even in Gujarat, did not have riots, despite having substantial populations of both Hindus and Muslims. Gujarat was able to protect lives in Surat, but not in Ahmedabad. It will be hard to claim that Surat’s police is ‘‘secular’’, and Ahmedabad’s ‘‘communal’’.
The real reason, my research shows, is different. The kinds of systematic business links that exist between Hindus and Muslims in Surat leave no option for the local police and administration but to perform its duties. The police force behaves better because it has to, not because it dearly wants to. What is true of Surat’s old city not shanty towns, which did burn in 1992-3 is also true of so many other peaceful cities of India. They have extensive Hindu-Muslim links in local businesses, political parties, unions, professional associations etc. After more than 50 years of experience with state complicity or inaction during Hindu-Muslim riots, we should revise our view of how to make the state behave better. Here are four revisionist proposals:
First, on major fault-lines of a polity, as the Hindu-Muslim relations are in India, the state tends to act in a politically strategic, not a legally correct, manner. This is true in much of the world. Consider the Sri Lankan state on Sinhalese-Tamil relations, the Malaysian state on Malay-Chinese relations, and the US on race relations, though the US is beginning to come out of its racial bind. States should not act in this manner, but they do, combining legality, morality and political calculations in an unpredictable way. The state in Gujarat acted in a primarily strategic manner.
Secondly, this more realistic understanding of how states function neither means that citizens should cease to criticise and pressure the state when it fails to protect lives in riots, nor that they should stop trying every constitutional means of punishing the state. But, while making every attempt to put pressure on the state, they should not bet on it to rectify its behaviour any time soon. If the state corrects itself on major fault-lines, it should be viewed as a happy temporary outcome of such activism, not something one can bet on.
Thirdly, working on, and building, integrated civic networks is a better bet. Towns where Hindus and Muslims continue to be integrated — in businesses, political parties, unions, professional associations of lawyers, teachers, doctors and students, and clubs — riots remain either absent or rare. An integrated organisational and civic life makes the state behave much better than intellectual and political exhortations that it do so.
Fourthly, and most important of all, it follows that citizen action in India has to take two forms: a while continuing to pressure the state for its dereliction of constitutional duty, it should b focus on building integrated civic structures. The first has been the primary strategy for citizen action in India thus far. Such action is necessary, but not sufficient. We need a two-track strategy. The state, otherwise, will continue to get away with its utter misconduct and gross disrespect for human lives.
The author directs the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His recent book, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India Yale University Press, 2002 will be published shortly by Oxford in India
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