OK, agreed. The statement that " there is a pervasive effort to denigrate minorities" is a very different one to the original highly inflammatory and patently false " studies show that all communal riots are provoked by the majority community to dominate the minority community".
I would agree that there is an element of casual discrimination in India and perhaps even some concerted effort to denigrate the good name of minorities. However, might I also add, like much else in our country, we don't do the denigration part all that well either. We neither have the finesse or sophistication of the Danish or French anti-Muslim bigot nor the aggressive ruthlessness our neighbors in Africa and the near east display to their own minorities.
Thanks and regards.
I am sorry, but where exactly was it said that "....studies show that ALL (emphasis added) communal riots are provoked by the majority community to dominate the minority community...."? This is disingenuous. There was no such statement.
Even a cursory glance at the original wording will show you that there was
no proposition made by any study that I can recall, or that I reported, to the effect that
each and every riot was a deliberate act of aggression. That would be a charge-sheet, a part of a criminal investigation, not an academic study's conclusions. The difference is quite clear, and there is no contradiction between the original statement that studies showed that communal riots were used to dominate the minority community, and what we have arrived at, that, inter alia, while we look at the communal riots as a phenomenon, it is clear that there was a concerted effort at denigrating the minority communities.
Can we legally draw a straight line between this effort and a hypothetical, centralised policy-driven and planned effort at staging specific communal riots, and can it be said that each and every communal riot was staged by the majority community? Can it be said that there was a clearly defined attempt at, first, staging a riot, second, using the riot's aftermath, the governmental attitude and the actions of governmental agencies to create a particular atmosphere of fear, and of minority domination by the majority?
No. Legally, as far as the judicial system is concerned, we cannot; strictly speaking. Nobody has succeeded in doing so, so far. Not for lack of effort. One of the reasons for the concerted effort at 'getting at' Teesta Setalvad seems to be - again, not legally provable - that she and her associates have been most dogged and persistent in exploring and exposing the links between riots that occurred, and the governmental attitude, and the actions of governmental agencies to create an atmosphere of fear and thereby achieve domination.
That only proves that given the hostility and unwillingness to cooperate of official agencies, it is difficult for unofficial agencies to make either a criminal case or the much greater effort needed to bring individuals to book in criminal proceedings stemming from an established crime. But short of a legal proof, is there a case?
These riots have in fact been used, both by the Sangh Parivar and by their nominee governments, to dominate the minority community; both Gujarat 2002 and Muzaffarnagar are specific cases, exemplars selected by me, in point, without going through a roll-call of each and every communal riot that has occurred since 1947. The question raised
BY YOU is
whether or not the studies mentioned stated that these were centrally instigated by an institution, and whether this was a premeditated outcome. The answer was that
none of the studies that I have read or even read about have said so in their academic conclusions.
What we do have is sufficient narrative short of a legal procedure. We have BJP MLAs and MPs, sectoral party workers, and members of the front organisations of the Sangh Parivar, the VHP, the Bajrang Dal in particular, all implicated by eye witnesses, very often not recorded by police accounts, in agitation and instigation of hostile emotional feeling immediately before the riots. We have these, and many other persons of the same background and affiliation, then making statements and actively continuing to mobilise the local population in a manner that makes it clear that there will be no legal repercussions, in fact, that there will be an active glossing over of the riots, or of individual killings.
It is not difficult to see how this fierce refusal to acknowledge that anything criminal has occurred, by the same people who staged the riots is an active ingredient in creating fear in the minds of the minorities. This has nothing to do with the tensions and provocations incidental in leading a life on the margins of society, or on the margins of survival.
