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“If history repeats itself endlessly anywhere, every time as a shameful tragedy, it is in India with its interminably recurring "communal riots." The history of independent India started off with bloody conflicts bearing this description, and the six decades and more that have passed by witnessed hundreds of such episodes.

-J.C. Raman, The Hindu dated 17.01.10

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1984: Anti-Sikh Riots

The 1984 anti-Sikh riots were a series of organised communal riots against Sikhs in India in response to the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguard. The then ruling party, Indian National Congress had been in active complicity with the mob in organisation of the riots.

The riots killed more than 3000 Sikhs in Delhi and an estimated 8000 across India. The wave of ethnic cleansing that consumed Delhi for 72 hours like a prairie fire within hours of Indira Gandhi's assassination was terrifying. During these three days, Sikhs were hunted down and killed. The city's entire law machinery had willfully collapsed at the behest of federal and local administrations, and the capital was besieged by mobs, including those led by bloodthirsty Congressmen, armed with voter's lists to target Sikh households. Policemen magically disappeared and a handful who were visible were simply unwilling, or under orders to open fire upon cowardly mobs that drew encouragement solely from their numbers and assurances of Immunity from prosecution.

This year the Delhi High Court sentenced Sajjan Kumar, former Congress MP to Life Imprisonment. Kumar’s life imprisonment is the first acknowledgement by the System that the System was culpable in killings of Sikhs in 1984.The High Court verdict is powerful because in indicting Kumar, it finally speaks of the crime that has not been fully named:” Targeting of minorities and attacks spearhead by the dominant political actors being facilitated by law enforcement agencies.”

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The Violent Legacy of Indian Partition

In August, 1947, when, after three hundred years in India, the British finally left, the subcontinent was partitioned into two independent nation states: Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Immediately, there began one of the greatest migrations in human history, as millions of Muslims trekked to West and East Pakistan (the latter now known as Bangladesh) while millions of Hindus and Sikhs headed in the opposite direction. Many hundreds of thousands never made it.

Across the Indian subcontinent, communities that had coexisted for almost a millennium attacked each other in a terrifying outbreak of sectarian violence, with Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims on the other—a mutual genocide as unexpected as it was unprecedented. In Punjab and Bengal—provinces abutting India’s borders with West and East Pakistan, respectively—the carnage was especially intense, with massacres, arson, forced conversions, mass abductions, and savage sexual violence. Some seventy-five thousand women were raped, and many of them were then disfigured or dismembered.

Nisid Hajari, in “Midnight’s Furies” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), his fast-paced new narrative history of Partition and its aftermath, writes, “Gangs of killers set whole villages aflame, hacking to death men and children and the aged while carrying off young women to be raped. Some British soldiers and journalists who had witnessed the Nazi death camps claimed Partition’s brutalities were worse: pregnant women had their breasts cut off and babies hacked out of their bellies; infants were found literally roasted on spits.”

Many writers persuasively blame the British for the gradual erosion of these shared traditions. As Alex von Tunzelmann observes in her history “Indian Summer,” when “the British started to define ‘communities’ based on religious identity and attach political representation to them, many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged.” Indeed, the British scholar Yasmin Khan, in her acclaimed history “The Great Partition,” judges that Partition “stands testament to the follies of empire, which ruptures community evolution, distorts historical trajectories and forces violent state formation from societies that would otherwise have taken different—and unknowable—paths.”

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1984:Anti-Sikh Riots

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Depiction in Literature

Midnight Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition

It presents a provocative evidence of British imperialists actively fanning flames of communal discord by paying Muslim clerics to preach against Congress Party

Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh

It is a place, Khushwant Singh goes on to tell us at the beginning of this classic novel, where Sikhs and Muslims have lived together in peace for hundreds of years. Then one day, at the end of the summer, the “ghost train” arrives, a silent, incredible funeral train loaded with the bodies of thousands of refugees, bringing the village its first taste of the horrors of the civil war. Train to Pakistan is the story of this isolated village that is plunged into the abyss of religious hate. It is also the story of a Sikh boy and a Muslim girl whose love endured and transcends the ravages of war.(excerpt from Goodreads)

Gujrat Files by Rana Ayyub

Gujarat Files is the account of an eight-month long undercover investigation by journalist Rana Ayyub into the Gujarat riots, fake encounters and the murder of state Home Minister Haren Pandya that brings to the fore startling revelations. Posing as Maithili Tyagi, a filmmaker from the American Film Institute Conservatory, Rana met bureaucrats and top cops in Gujarat who held pivotal positions in the state between 2001 and 2010. The transcripts of the sting operation reveal the complicity of the state and its officials in crimes against humanity.(excerpt from  Goodreads)

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Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)

When Congress chief Rahul Gandhi was asked that if the Congress feels it should fight the RSS’s beliefs. “People tell me they are scared. They feel there is a kind of power that is trying to control India”, said Rahul Gandhi. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or RSS is dividing the people and “to save the country we have to stay away from them”, the RSS creates a divide between us based on religion, cast. RSS is a POISION for our country because as the motive of RSS is to provide character training through Hindu discipline and to unite the Hindu community to form a Hindu Rashtra which is distrubing peace in one country and also brainwashing the people of India that must have to follow Hindu religion and people from other religions can not stay in India. And every person in this country has right to choose his or her religion on his own because India is a secular country, no one can force that if a baby takes birth in a Hindu family then he will have to follow Muslim religion and if a baby takes birth in a Hindu family he will have to follow Hindu religion, he has a right to choose his religion on his own. The agenda of RSS is to impose Hindi as the national language. But all the languages which are listed in the 8th schedule of the Constitution are our national languages. Hindi can be emerged as a language of communication but any effort to impose Hindi will only lead to a negative reaction as it happened in the past. RSS ideology is one nation, one language, and one culture which is not at all acceptable in India. And to maintain uniformity and peace in country we have to accept all languages.

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Hindutva

It is a danger to India’s composite culture. Hindutva as opposed to Hinduism is exclusive. It does not believe in equality and talks about one nation, one religion. It is a threat to our Constitution and constitutional morality. And there is a Hindu vote bank that is growing which isolates and discriminates against a community. And every year around 60,000 Muslims are denied scholarships just because of Hindutva which only wants to develop Hindu community but with this how will our country develop. Our country does not have one religion we have many, and when only one religion develops doesn’t mean that the whole country has developed, All the other cultures should be treated equally and should be developed equally there should not be discrimination on any basis this will help our   country in development. And it was also demanded that ‘Taj Mahal’ to be named ‘Ram Mahal’ but if these kind of things will goes on continuously in our country this will for sure disturb peace in our country and leads to conflict, which is not acceptable.

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Ayodhaya

In Ayodhaya there was a Mosque named Babri Masjid on which district court of Faizabad in February 1986 ordered that premises of this Mosque should be unlocked so that Hindus could offer prayers at the site which they considered a temple. And some Hindus believe that it was built after demolishing a temple for Lord Rama in what is believed to be his birth place. And after some time this dispute took the form of a court case and has continued for many decades. The mosque was locked up as the matter was with the court. And as soon as the locks of Babri Masjid were opened, Mobilisation began on both sides. And suddenly this local dispute became a major national question and led to command tensions. And this large scale mobilisation led to command tensions. And this large scale mobilisation led to surcharged atmosphere and many instances of communal violence. And as a result there was a heavy dispute between both the communities and from this kind of religious violence our country looses its peace and unity. So, we should please avoid these kind of religious violence and move ahead in unity.

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Cow vigilante violence

Cattle slaughter has been a controversial topic in India, and there has been a surge in the heated discussions around it, which has quite so often led to horrendous communal violence against the minority, as we have witnessed in the past ‘few years’, for perhaps such a trifle and imbecile reason, but the appalling violence inflicted over the minority can hardly be ignored.

Rather than to indulge ourselves in the debate of if Beef Ban is legitimate on the grounds of ‘Human Rights’, let us reflect on the fact of how it is congruous to the to all the religious extremism that has come to light, precisely to facilitate the political strengthening of the current ruling party, by uniting the majority religious groups and by alienating the others. According to Reuters Report 63 cow vigilante attacks have occurred between 2010 and 2017, and most of them when BJP came to power in 2014 and out of the 28 citizens that were killed 24 of them were Muslims. These all aren’t, of course any mere coincidences which can be neglected but ask for immediate actions, from the citizens against the surging Hindu Nationalism, and to reconsider our claim to be humans. India is a nation of ‘diversity’, as we all have been taught since the first grade, but ever since we have been freed from the shackles of imperial colonial British rule, we have been acutely struggling to embrace the abundant innate cultural differences of our nation, and paradoxically it is this this acute religious intolerance, precisely on which we have reflected.