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Malda violence is Mamata channelling the Muzaffarnagar 2013 template

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Angshukanta Chakraborty
Angshukanta ChakrabortyJan 08, 2016 | 20:50

Malda violence is Mamata channelling the Muzaffarnagar 2013 template

The mirror image is often terrifying.

And, it's a truth by now acknowledged that an Indian state that is poll-bound must be in search of a riot. Preferably, religious.

Malda 2016, a New Year gift from the generous Mamata Banerjee government, is really old whine in new bottlenecks. That hallowed formula, debunked much but clearly not discarded yet, of catchment agitation along predictable lines, thoroughly artificial but over time - naturalised, is back again. Look, look, we have a riot. Let's bank on the votes now, shall we?

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What happened on the first Sunday of this year, when a mob of 2.5 lakh Muslims led by the Edara-e-Sharia, a Patna-based hardline organisation, ran amok in Malda, ostensibly to protest against derogatory remarks on Prophet Mohammad by an Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha member called Kamlesh Tiwari, is, effectively, a cold fusion of two continually practised and circulated templates.

One: create critical chaos by sustaining low-level but seamless paranoia over the "Other".

Two: strike big to confirm the paranoia when an election nears.

The "Other" is obviously a variable, depending on the state, its demography and useful particulars such as literacy, per capita income, economic segregation, you name it. But systematic "Othering" has its fringe benefits which spring up in contexts slightly removed.  

India has become a country of multiple semi-theocratic pockets where reciprocal communal polarisation has taken such deep roots that nothing else seems more normal. Malda riots, wherein the raging  Edara-e-Sharia crowd set fire to ten or more police vehicles, a BSF jeep and a state bus, vandalising Kaliachak police station and the office of the Block Development Officer, is hardly an original theatre of orchestrated violence. It's a bad copy of several that have preceded it.

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Muzaffarnagar 2013, East Delhi 2014, Dadri 2015 - the chapter on recent communal violence is long, crystallising fear and paranoia stoked meticulously over months and years. Every time, it was a minor scuffle, a mere suspicion on the nature of a meat, or a strategically planted corpse of an animal arbitrarily proscribed by a particular faith, became the vector of a mob frenzy that resulted in bloodshed. Or bloodbath, as was the case in Muzaffarnagar.

However, just like Malda 2016, these annual riot surges didn't happen in a vacuum. Divisive manipulation was always at work, carefully micromanaged by those who stood to gain the most. The buildup took months to show results.

From 2013 onwards, murders of rationalists and arch critics of Hindu supremacy such as Narendra Dhabolkar, Govind Pansare and MM Kalburgi have peppered our national narrative, prompting the much heated "intolerance debate" on the one hand, while on the other, emboldening elements like Sadhvi Prachi, Swami Adityanath, Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, Giriraj Singh, who also happen to be elected members of Parliament representing the BJP.

Across India, premier educational institutions are being systematically beheaded by mass substitution of prominent, internationally acclaimed academics by pitifully substandard saffron hacks. Actors and artists, who are compelled to speak up against the "growing intolerance", are constantly facing the brunt, with ill-timed tax raids, boycott of their latest releases and exhibitions, as well as getting viciously trolled and intimidated on social media becoming a part and parcel of Indian public life.  

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The rise and rise of Narendra Modi was seen as India's comeuppance for toying with "pseudosecularism" practised by most, if not all, political parties who basically gave a free rein to every kind of religious extremism in order to gain votes. That is exactly the case with West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, who has taken vote bank politics to such a dangerous level that it's now a blatant threat to national security.

mamata2-embed-malda_010816084055.jpg
Scenes from Malda violence.

There is no doubt that Mamata's "policy of appeasement" does not benefit ordinary Muslims in need of education, jobs, social security, healthcare and other civic amenities. Instead, she shamelessly eggs on those very gatekeepers of extremism in the garb of faith on whose muscle power she relies to ferry her through the choppy waters of Assembly elections 2016.

As her "Ma, Mati, Manush" grassroot connect dissolves completely into a messy broth of communal stew, salted and spiced by entities with incontrovertible links to cross-border terrorism, as she's seen alongside the Jamaat-e-Ulema-i-Hind Urdu-speaking Muslims in Kolkata many of whom took out a massive rally when convicted war criminals of 1971 war were hanged in Bangladesh, Mamata's credibility hits rock bottom.

While those she's trying to piggyback ride to electoral triumph are actually getting bolstered, calling the shots and pushing her into ever darker, and eventually suicidal, political ignominy.

When Taslima Nasreen, whose telenovella Dwikhandito was banned by Mamata, says the latter has created a Frankenstein's monster by fuelling the rabidity of Islamic fundamentalists, she hits the bull's eye. However, when Salman "Satanic Verses" Rushdie, who too gets excluded from the Kolkata Literature Festival by a pusillanimous "Waste Bengal" government, calls out the "Modi toadies", he too makes a pertinent point.

Because what's happening or happened in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh were inverted images of the current crisis unfolding in West Bengal. Malda is Muzaffarnagar all over again, in a shade of green this time around.

If Sangeet Som, one of the key accused in Muzaffarnagar riots, and an MLA from Sardhana, UP, can go about declaring openly (in fact giving interviews to mainstream media) that cow slaughter is a worse crime than manslaughter, why are we surprised that Edara-e-Sharia men, as ideologically hardboiled as many from the illustrious Sangh Parivar, are torching police vehicles to protest a supposedly blasphemous comment by a Hindu Mahasabha member? A comment that was made more than a month back, hundreds of kilometres away from Malda, and for which he's already in custody?

How can you have one without the other? How can you have festering fantasies of Akhand Bharat (or creating a Hindu Israel) without corresponding dreadful dreams of Caliphate?

If you have the prime minister basing his refugee policy on an asylum seeker's religion (only for Bengali Hindus from Bangladesh in lieu of the extreme persecution they face at present in the country), wouldn't you also have an equally erroneous and dangerous counterpoint in someone who would encash the by-product - the new normal of wider Islamophobia?

Malda is not an aberration. Malda, like its alliterative antecedents, is now the rule. No surgical weeding out of Islamic fundamentalists would prevent one from happening if the bigger debate on equality and true secularism isn't held. And if the spirit of the Constitution isn't followed to the last letter.

Last updated: January 08, 2016 | 21:10
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