Qazi Sattar was right in saying that communalism is a many-armed octopus. And just as an octopus, when attacked, squirts ink to obscure the vision of its assailant, the communalist spreads canards which put attackers off his trail and make his victims let down their guard. These canards are sometimes borrowed from die-hard Gandhians who often ignore hard reality. One such belief which the communalists use to their advantage is in Hindu-Muslim bhai-bhaism: we are all children of the one God who is both Ishwar and Allah, Ram and Rahim, ergo, Hindus and Muslims and Christians are brothers. The truth is that wherever people of different races, religions, languages and cultures have co-existed, instead of bhai-bhaism there is tension. And if land, property or business is involved, tension often explodes into violence. The other canard is that there were no communal riots before the British introduced their policy of divide and rule. In fact, Hindu-Muslim tensions have existed since Islam came to India. And before Islam there were conflicts between Hindus and Jains, Hindus and Buddhists, Dravidians and Aryans.
It is wrong and counter-productive to pretend that communalism is something the Sangh parivar invented in India. The Sangh’s genius was in creating a monster out of existing prejudices. The Congress, especially under Indira Gandhi, played its own dirty role. The BJP is only more dangerous because of its brazenness. It is more dangerous because it uses democracy to camouflage its fascist agenda. But everybody has blood on his hands. Every religious or ethnic group in India can and has been incited to kill and plunder. The most gruesome example of this was what happened at Nellie in Assam in 1983. There, over 3,000 men, women and children were slain in one long orgy of killing. Bangladeshi refugees killed Bengalis and Assamese, Assamese and Bengalis killed each other, tribals killed non-tribals, Muslims killed Hindus and Christians, and Christians killed Hindus. In short, it was just about everyone killing everyone else.
It would be naive to believe that communalism can be banished simply by voting the BJP out of power. The problem is much larger, and though it has assumed diabolical proportions today because of the BJP’s politics, it has been around for a very long time. We must not miss the wood for the trees.
A Brief History of Communalism
Over two thousand years ago, Buddhism was on the ascendant in India. Emperor Ashoka was the most famous convert to Buddhism. When Brahminical Hinduism gained favour again with ruling dynasties, especially in the ninth and tenth centuries, Buddhists were persecuted and their places of worship demolished. Later, in the reign of many Muslim rulers, Hindus were discriminated against and their temples destroyed.
The British followed a policy of divide and rule, but in India it was never difficult to divide. There were Hindu-Muslim riots every now and then and that suited the British fine as long as there was no threat to their empire. The Christians, naturally, felt more secure during British rule. But there was no religious persecution. The discrimination was based on race.
With Independence came Partition and the worst communal violence in India’s history. I was a witness to that madness, and I thought the nation was coming to an end. In the first week of August 1947, I was in Lahore. In the second half of the same month I was in Delhi. I did not know which country I belonged to—India or Pakistan. I was born in a village deep in the heart of what became Pakistan. I expected to live the rest of my life in Lahore. I sympathized with Muslims who wanted a separate state of their own, and had reconciled myself to living and prospering in that Muslim state. I was not given the choice. A week before I left Lahore, my neighbours on either side had declared their religious identities in large letters and symbols painted on their walls. The wall of the house on my left bore the legend in Urdu: Parsee ka makaan. The other wall had huge crosses painted on it to indicate that the residents were Christians. They need not have taken the trouble. Gangs from nearby Mozang had started marking out Hindu and Sikh homes for loot and forcible occupation. It was made abundantly clear to me that I was not wanted in Pakistan, for no other reason than that I was a Sikh.
On the other side of the new border, Hindus and Sikhs outdid their fellow goons of West Punjab. In the east, the prolonged Hindu-Muslim riots in Calcutta led to massacres of Muslims in Bihar, followed by massacres of Hindus in Noakhali in East Bengal. Waves of Hindus and Sikhs fled across the borders to safety. Many were butchered on the way.
For some time the shock of having been deprived of my home and belongings and the tragedy of civil strife that took thousands of lives and left millions homeless was forgotten in the euphoria of the newly won Independence. I was one of the vast crowd milling around Parliament House on the midnight of 14/15 August 1947. In rapt silence we heard Sucheta Kripalani sing Vande Mataram and Pandit Nehru’s ‘Tryst with destiny’ speech. We were there till the early hours of the morning, shouting ourselves hoarse with slogans like Bharat mata ki jai and Mahatma Gandhi ki jai. It was great to be alive.
When the moment passed, the truth slowly dawned on me. Was this the kind of Independence we were looking forward to? Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s lines written in August 1947 came to mind:
Yeh daagh daagh ujaala, yeh shab guzeeda seher
Voh jis ka intizaar tha ham ko, yeh voh seher to nahin;
Yeh voh seher to nahin jis kee aarzoo lay kar
Chaley thhey yaar ke mil jaaegee kaheen na kaheen
Falak kay dasht mein taaron kee aakhree manzil.
(This dawn dappled with shades of twilight;
This is not the dawn for which we waited all night;
This is not the dawn that we had hoped for
When we comrades set out on our march in the hope
That somewhere in the vast wilderness of the sky
We will find our final destination beyond the stars.)
I was luckier than most of the millions of refugees who had trekked out of Pakistan, having lost everything they owned, and many of whose relations had been murdered or their womenfolk kidnapped and raped. I had my parents’ home to come to. And soon I got a job with the Ministry of External Affairs. But memories of the Partition massacres continued to haunt me. I was reminded of Amrita Pritam’s immortal lament which invokes the spirit of Punjab’s most famous balladeer, Waris Shah, the author of the epic poem Heer Ranjah:
Aj aakhaan Warris Shah noo
Utth kabaraan vicchon bol;
Ik roee see dhee Punjab dee
Toun likh likh maarey vain,
Aj lakhaan dheeaan rondian
Tainee Warris Shah noon kehan
O, dardmandaan day dardeeya utth tak apna Punjab
Beyley laashaan vicchiyaan, lahoo da bharya Chenab.
(I ask Warris Shah, rise from your grave and speak!
When one daughter of the Punjab wept
You wrote a string of lamentations;
Today a hundred thousands are in tears
Plead with you as they cry
O, comforter of the suffering, come and see your Punjab
Corpses are strewn about the fields, blood flows in the Chenab.)
Independent India began limping back to health. I thought we had seen the worst and hoped that the one thing that would never happen again was Hindu-Muslim riots. The British had kept the communities apart to perpetuate their rule. Now that they were gone, we would evolve a common Indian identity overriding religious, linguistic and caste divisions. I hoped that the massive bloodletting of Partition would have taken all the venom of communal hatred out of our bodies.
Alas! After a lull of a few years, the communal virus erupted again in different parts of the country. Commissions of inquiry have stated in categorical terms that in all Hindu-Muslim riots after Independence, over seventy-five per cent of casualties—in terms of life and property—were Muslim. I have little faith in the impartiality of our police in quelling communal violence but I had hoped for better performance from the majority community. It has failed in its duty and politicians have taken advantage of this.
From the time Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister religion began to encroach on the p
olitical domain. Religion- and community-based political parties began to exploit religious and communal sentiments to gain political leverage. They succeeded beyond their own wildest dreams. We have come to such a pass that it would not be an exaggeration to describe Indian secularism as only notional—naam kay vaastey. During British rule communal violence was limited to Hindu-Muslim confrontations on religious holidays like Holi, Id-ul Zuha, the Ganapati festival. Riots occurred in a few riot-prone towns. Today, riots take place between Hindus and Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, Hindus and Christians, caste-Hindus and Harijans, tribals and non-tribals, Bengalis and Assamese, Maharashtrians and Kannadigas. The entire country has become riot-prone. Everyone’s hand rises against his neighbour because everyone wants what his neighbour has—his land, his job, or his business. Racial, religious and linguistic differences provide the excuse to do so. The instigation usually comes from the educated middle class of tradesmen (incidentally, the constituency of the BJP) and politicians (except perhaps the communists); their instruments are lumpen elements and the educated-unemployed and, as Gujarat showed us in 2002, the dispossessed who can be swayed by a dangerous cocktail of passionate rhetoric, attractive lies, and plain hard cash.
The Punjab Example
For anyone interested in understanding the persistence of communal feelings among Indians and the tragic results of letting them grow unchecked or encouraging them, Punjab makes for a good case study. I use Punjab as an example because it is home to the community I know best. Also because through history, Punjab has suffered more than any other Indian state due to religious conflict.
The Punjabis of today are what they are because of the legacy their forefathers left them. They had to face invasions by tribesmen of Central Asia and beyond. Recorded in history are the invasions by Greeks under Alexander. From AD 1000 onwards, came invaders like Ghazni, Ghauri, and the conquering dynasties—the Tughlaqs, the Lodhis and then the Mughals. When the Mughal empire began to totter, came Nadir Shah and his Afghan successor, Ahmed Shah Abdali, who invaded India nine times in quick succession, laying bare the countryside and Delhi. Punjabis bore the brunt of these invasions and the humiliations which followed in their wake. It took centuries of periodic depredations for the people of Punjab to realize that they must stand together in order to be able to resist and, if possible, repel invaders.
Although by this time more than half of the people of the region had converted to Islam, they were willing to join hands with Hindus and Sikhs. An important factor in this was the new Sikh religion, born of the need to bring the Hindu and Muslim communities together. The new faith borrowed elements from both Hinduism and Islam—an edifice built as it were with Hindu bricks and Muslim mortar. The founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak (14691539), came to be acclaimed by both communities. A popular couplet describes him as:
Guru Nanak Shah Fakir
Hindu ka Guru, Mussalman ka Pir.
(Guru Nanak, the King of Fakirs,
To the Hindu a Guru, to the Muslim a Pir.)
The spirit of Punjabi nationality, Punjabiyat, was thus born. It did not, of course, resolve all conflict. Sikhs, in fact, soon found themselves the target of Mughal anger. The Mughal empire was naturally concerned by the growing popularity of the Sikh Gurus, whom they saw as leaders of a cult with political ambitions. Punjab was too important a region for them. The Sikh gurus and their followers were persecuted. The reason was clearly more political than religious. The fifth Guru, Arjun, was executed by the Muslim rulers in Lahore. With this began the transformation of the Sikhs into a militant sect. Under the last Guru, Gobind Singh, whose father, Guru Tegh Bahadur, was executed in Delhi, this transformation was complete.
There was tension between the Hindu Brahmin order and the Sikhs too. Many of Guru Nanak’s teachings went against entrenched Hindu beliefs and attitudes, like idol-worship, religious ritual and the caste system. Hindu rulers of the hill kingdoms in and around Punjab perceived the Sikhs, sometimes rightly, as a threat and often colluded with Mughal forces in their campaigns against them. Sikh historians maintain that among the tormentors of Guru Arjun, who was executed by the Mughals, was a Hindu banker whose daughter’s hand Arjun had refused to accept for his son. There are also historical records that say that Guru Gobind Singh’s sons, who were captured and killed by Mughal forces, were betrayed by their Brahmin servant.
Despite this, there was no serious rift between the Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs in Punjab. The spirit of Punjabi nationalism survived. It took the genius of Maharaja Ranjit Singh to harness this emotion and create a truly Punjabi kingdom. Among his principal advisers were Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. Likewise, his army, trained by Europeans, comprised all three: his artillery was commanded by General Elahi Baksh, his cavalry consisted mainly of Sikh horsemen, his infantry was a mix of Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims and Gurkhas. General Diwan Chand captured the fort of Multan for him. Hari Singh Nalwa and Akali Phula Singh reduced the turbulent tribesmen of the northwest frontier to submission. Punjabi Muslims fought shoulder to shoulder with their Punjabi brethren against Muslim Pathans and Afghans. It was a remarkable achievement. Ranjit Singh was the first Indian in a thousand years to stem the tides of invasions across the northwest frontier.
The year Ranjit Singh died, his Muslim troops, led by Colonel Shaikh Basawan, carried Ranjit Singh’s colours through the streets of Kabul in a victory parade. A couple of years later, Zoravar Singh, a Dogra Hindu, planted Ranjit Singh’s flag in the heart of Tibet. It is significant that the only person to make an attempt on Ranjit Singh’s life was a Sikh.
The British annexed the Sikh kingdom in 1849. They successfully split the three communities apart by giving preferential treatment to Punjabi Muslims and Sikhs (only the Khalsas) at the expense of the Punjabi Hindus. Special electorates and reservation of seats in elected bodies were given to Muslims and Sikhs in excess of their numbers. Punjabi Mussalmans and Khalsa Sikhs were declared ‘martial races’ for recruitment to the army or the police; only one small Hindu caste, the Mohyal Brahmins, qualified as martial. Seeds of division sowed by the British sprouted and split the three communities.
As the freedom movement picked up all over India, Punjabis lagged behind. Initially, the Punjab Congress consisted largely of urban Hindus. After the Akali agitation of the 1920s, Sikhs began to join it in larger numbers. With a few notable exceptions like Dr Alam and Saifuddin Kitchlu, Punjabi Muslims kept aloof. This was roughly the situation on the eve of Independence. Punjabi Muslims wanted the partition of the country and an independent state, Pakistan. Punjabi Hindus and Sikhs opposed it and were expelled. Punjab paid a very heavy price for Partition. Almost ten million people lost their lands, homes and belongings, while almost a million lost their lives in the communal strife that came with it.
India was able to accommodate five million Hindu and Sikh Punjabi refugees. Sikh farmers took over the small holdings of the Muslims who had fled East Punjab. These Sikh refugees had left behind large agricultural land irrigated by canals. What they got was no more than thirty acres irrigated by well water. They made the arid wastes of Ganganagar district of Rajasthan and swamplands of the Terai, the most prosperous regions of India. In East Punjab, which came in the Indian share, a few years after the setting up of the Punjab Agricultural University in 1962, the average yield of wheat and rice was three times the yield of all of Pakistan. The Green Revolution was largely the achievement of Sikh farmers. More remarkable was the fact that while Hindu and Sikh refugees who migrated from Pakistan were readily and painlessly integrated as Indians, Muslim refugees who migrated from India to Pakistan are still referred to as Mohajirs and locals do not intermingle with them. Yet more remarkable was the fact that though migrating Punjabis were reduced to penury, it was rare to see a Punjabi beg for alms.
Despite the prosperity, post-Partition Punjab has a wounded history. There came the serious rift between Hindus and Sikhs, two communities who had roti-beti ke rishte, who broke bread together and gave their daughters in marriage to each other’s famil
ies. When Sikhs demanded a Punjabi-speaking state, many Punjabi Hindus were persuaded by Hindu communal groups to declare to census officials that their mother tongue was Hindi. Sikhs who clamoured for the new state in reality wanted a Sikh-majority state and used the linguistic argument as a sugar-coating. But logic was on their side and after prolonged agitation, their demand was conceded. Himachal and Haryana were separated from old Punjab and a purely Punjabi-speaking state came into being. Sixty per cent of the Punjabi-speaking population of present-day Punjab is Sikh, forty per cent Hindu.
Hindu-Sikh tensions continued to bedevil the Punjab. They came to a head with the rise of Sikh fundamentalism under Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who led terrorist activities aimed against Punjabi Hindus in the early 1980s. The Bhindranwale chapter in Indian history is a perfect illustration of the disastrous results of not keeping politics separate from religion. Bhindranwale was a creation of the Congress and the Akalis. Indira Gandhi was advised by Zail Singh that this small-time kattar (hardline) Sikh preacher should be built up as a leader to counter the ruling Akalis in Punjab. Later, the Akalis tried to woo Bhindranwale away from their rivals and propped him up. Sant Longowal once described him as saadda danda (our stick) to beat the Congress government with. In time he became a monster who would turn around and destroy the very people who created him and plunge Punjab and much of the country into chaos.
Bhindranwale’s popularity among the Sikhs has an interesting lesson for our times, when Hindu fundamentalists are becoming increasingly popular among middle-class Hindus who are materially better off now than they have ever been. Believe it or not, one main reason for the rise of Bhindranwale was the prosperity that came to Punjab with the Green Revolution. With prosperity came sudden changes, Western influences, a crisis of identity, and degeneration—alcoholism, smoking, drug addiction, gambling, blue films, fornication. The worst sufferers were women and children, wives and offspring of peasants who could not digest their sudden prosperity. On this scene came Bhindranwale preaching against these evils and carried on a vigorous campaign of ‘Amritprachar’.
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