The large-scale communal conflagration has not revisited India since the early 1990s, with the major exception of Gujarat 2002 and, to an extent, Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh 2013. But the slow simmer of communal conflict, which is defused before it erupts into a full-fledged riot, is still with us. An Indian Express investigation has found that this sapping phenomenon is on the rise in poll-bound Bihar since the break-up of the ruling JD(U)-BJP alliance in June 2013. An examination of police records from the state’s 38 districts and a journey criss-crossing the 18 districts that account for more than 70 per cent of these “communal incidents” have revealed a three-fold surge — from 226 between January 2010 and
June 2013 to 667 between June 2013 and June 2015. An incident of eve-teasing, a minor road accident, a cricket match between two local teams, a dispute over a kite or a theft of a buffalo is increasingly likely to become the trigger for a clash between communities in areas where deliberate attempts have also been made earlier to stoke communal
faultlines — by dumping carcasses of pigs and pieces of beef inside places of worship, defacing idols, tweaking procession routes and exhuming old disputes over the use of common land.
A return of communalism in Bihar will not just jeopardise the hard-won gains in a state where the fervent identity politics of old is being smudged and overtaken by newer political mobilisations of rising aspirations in an increasingly young electorate. It will also have diminishing returns for the “communal” and “secular” players, both of whom have benefited, in different ways, from the politics of polarisation in the past.
