Rhetoric and reaction

A violent public discourse stokes civil unrest

From Manipur to Kashmir, Uttarakhand to West Bengal, and also Tamil Nadu, social harmony appears to be under serious threat. The proximate cause in each case has been the extreme rhetoric deployed and normalised by politicians and politico-social groupings —from accusations of Indian citizens being “outsiders” and “infiltrators” to such phobic terms as “love jihad”. Such violent language, freely bandied about during election campaigns, is inevitably amplified on social media into unverified claims and accusations that ultimately lead to a breakdown of civil society.

This story is being played out in Manipur, where simmering tensions between the valley-dwelling Meiteis, mainly Hindu, and hill-dwelling Kuki tribes, many of them Christian, have escalated into a spiral of uncontrolled violence. The problems began on May 3, when a peaceful protest by a tribal students’ union against the grant of Scheduled Tribe status to the Meiteis was disrupted by unidentified miscreants attacking tribal properties. Since then, the attention of the Union home minister and central security forces has been brought to bear on the state but without much impact. Instead, each side has set up vigilante groups, which see fit to attack their opponents and security personnel at will. Though neither the Meiteis nor the Kukis are innocent of freelance violence, the fact is that political references to the Kukis as “outsiders”, and “drug smugglers” have done much to inflame local passions.

No surprise, the accusations are misplaced. The “outsider” label for the Kukis is a naïve simplification of a complicated history rooted in arbitrary colonial decisions to divide the indigenous Kuki populations between Manipur in India and Burma (both British colonies) in the 19th century. As for opium smuggling, official police records show that both groups are equally involved in this crime, which has done much to destabilise Manipur all these years. It is unclear how the state government, which has been associated with overtly favouring the Meiteis over the Kukis and tacitly promoting this vocabulary, will restore peace since distrust of it runs high. Any political solution will be unacceptable to one or other of the combatants. Manipur, thus, has become a state where vicious rhetoric has stoked simmering social tensions into dangerous escalatory aggression.

A similar story is playing out in Uttarakhand, where violence against the Muslims, who account for about 14 per cent of the state’s population, escalated after the state passed stringent anti-conversion laws and Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami deployed the provocative term “mazar jihad”, a reference to the alleged illegal construction of mausoleums on forest land. The upshot of this generated unrest has been that Muslim shopkeepers in a small town in Uttarkashi have been reportedly forced to vacate their shops after two men attempted to abduct a minor Hindu girl. Vishva Hindu Parishad leaders have decreed Muslim scrap dealers and ice cream sellers a threat to Hindu girls. The controversy forced a ruling party leader to call off his daughter’s marriage to a Muslim boy. In West Bengal, communal tensions have flared to a point where events that barely registered on the cultural calendar before have become the focus of communal riots. In Kashmir, habitual references to Muslims as terrorists have escalated attacks on Hindu Pandits. Divisive rhetoric may be useful for winning votes, but when it wilfully incites Indians against Indians, it does not promote an idea of India that works for anyone.