Even by the sordid culture of lawlessness that prevails in and around Delhi, the killing of Mohammed Akhlaq, 50, of Basehara village on the outskirts of the capital by his neighbours stands out as a singular act of evil.
Ravish Kumar, the NDTV anchor who visited the village, says the mob smashed the door, made the victim run to the farthest corner of the room and battered him with a sewing machine and the bricks that raised the heavy wooden bed he was sleeping on. Such was the mob’s savagery that it even twisted the iron grills of the top-floor window.
The call for murder came from the temple past dinner time, when Akhlaq had retired for the night. A few hundred people responded to the call in no time. Kumar says the Rajput settlement does not have people with criminal history. But criminal intent overwhelmed them in no time.
People are quick to anger in this part of the country. Neighbours will growl and snarl like feral beasts as if they have never known each other. Trivial incidents flare up in lethal violence. People tend to hunt in packs. They stick to their kind even through wrong. The khap mentality is ingrained in certain communities.
Earlier in May, Pravin, a Delhi police constable was killed by his neighbours over the installation of an electric pole in Greater Noida, not far from Dadri. News agency PTI reports that his brother and he were beaten with iron rods following which both succumbed to injuries.
Last November, a motorcyclist driving in the wrong lane in Gurgaon, rammed into an autorickshaw. Yet he beat up the rickshaw driver, and summoned his brother to further rough him up, and the two even got into an altercation with policemen and tore up their uniforms.
In ‘secular’ incidents of violence like these, there is a possibility of punishment. But when communities are involved, the chances of justice are close to nil.
Over the next few days, we will see the UP administration offering compensation to Akhlaq’s family, a few people being apprehended, an investigation being ordered, the victim being blamed for inviting his own death, village folk clamming up and even getting violent if arrests are made, Muslims fleeing to safety, neighbours grabbing their land, if any, and a weak case being eventually dismissed for lack of evidence.
It is this culture of impunity that encourages the Hindutva-vadis. They work to a plan. Even the response to the outcry is managed. The various outfits of the Sangh Parivar will speak in different voices, some clucking sympathy, others digging in, and all of them calibrating their frequencies to the antennae of their audiences. Muzaffarnagar, Atali, Dadri…. after an interval there will be another incident and the cycle will continue.
With a sympathetic government at the centre, the process of polarisation is well underway.
A few months back, I went to the neighbourhood office of the municipal corporation of Delhi to complain about clogged open drains and found an RSS ‘worker’ there. He said he was engaged in community service. I figured out what it was when the assistant sanitary inspector blamed ‘Muslim’ fruit sellers for the mess and made disparaging remarks about them.
Earlier this year, on the way from Patna to Samastipur our Muslim driver told me he was a BJP worker and he had learnt from party colleagues that his ancestors were invaders. I told him that he was a free citizen of a free country and he should not think he was less than any other.
Ishtiaq Ahmed, author of a 2011 book on Partition based on first-hand experiences, says the atmosphere in Punjab got vitiated in less than two years. The Lahore-born but Stockholm resident author says he was intrigued that ‘pre-colonial Punjab had a rich tradition of liberal and pluralist interpretations of the three major religions ? Islam, Hindusim and Sikhism – as they interacted with Sufi, Bhakti and Sant movements which preached harmony rather than confrontation.’
Despite the three communities invoking a long list of grievances against each other, with all of them deploying their ‘historical memory’ selectively, Ahmed says, ‘the evidence is overwhelming that most Punjabis, till almost before the end of colonial rule, lived in peace.’ But the glue of common Punjabi cultural identity proved too weak in the face of divisive forces. The Punjab administration began reporting from 1945 onwards the establishment of ‘private armies’ by the three communities.
There is a similar tectonic shift happening around Delhi.
It is time for the Congress, the Communists and other left-secular parties to take on the communal forces frontally and expose the rhetoric of ‘development’ that masks the Sangh Parivar’s social engineering project. Seventy years of living together as a nation can still come unstuck, if the foundations of justice are chipped away as in Dadri.
About the author
(Vivian Fernandes is a Delhi-based journalist)
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of Newskarnataka.com and Newskarnataka.com does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same
