Muzaffarnagar and the law of diminishing returns

For 7 years, WhatsApp groups have incited Hindus to 'be Hindu, buy Hindu', but if such relentless goading hasn't succeeded even in UP, we have hope

Remember the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013, which left 62 dead? They made headlines for weeks. That violence was one of the reasons for the subsequent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) victories in UP in the 2014, 2017 and 2019 elections. Union Minister of State Sanjeev Balyan, an accused in those riots, who continues making provocative speeches, represents Muzaffarnagar in Parliament.

Much before the 2013 riots were the 1988 riots in the district during the Ayodhya movement, which saw more people dead. The last two generations of Muzaffarnagar have therefore seen animosity between Hindus and Muslims reach extreme levels.

The same can be said of Indore. Those who were children when 23 persons were killed in the 1989 riots, triggered by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP)'s Ayodhya yatras saw their city erupt again in 2008 over a VHP bandh that Muslim shopkeepers resisted. Seven persons died then. Late last year, villages around Indore saw communal violence, again set off by VHP yatras for the Ayodhya's Ram Temple.

Indore has been under uninterrupted BJP rule for the last 16 years, except for a 15-month interval between 2018-2020. Earlier, in 1990-92, under then BJP chief minister Sunderlal Patwa, Bhopal railway station was adorned with a banner welcoming travellers to the "capital of the Hindu Rashtra". So Indore's residents have long been familiar with the Ayodhya movement and the bitter divisions it has bred.

But this recurrent communal violence has apparently not resulted in the deep-seated hatred one would expect. Ordinary Hindus and Muslims carry on with their routine dealings with each other without any trace of animosity. In Muzaffarnagar, Hindu women routinely get their hands decorated with mehndi on the festival of Teej by Muslim men skilled in the art.

Indore's Hindu women think nothing of having bangles put on their hands by Muslim bangle sellers.

That these practices are routine came to light when self-styled protectors of Hindu women recently tried to put an end to them. Ironically, their self-publicised threats and attacks last month revealed that the age-old shared culture that India is famous for continues to exist even in these "sensitive" towns.

Mathura, known as Lord Krishna's birthplace, has always been part of the slogans of the Ayodhya campaign. New pleas against the Shahi Idgah mosque adjacent to the Ram Janmasthan are pending in the city's courts. But this dispute seems not to have impacted everyday interactions between Hindus and Muslims. The Muslims who ran the Srinath Dosa Stall, which was vandalised last week, had sold their stall to a Hindu, who had allowed them to continue operating it.

Such intermingling is intolerable for Hindutvawadis. It is not enough for them that Muslims are kept out of Hindu-dominated residential colonies in cities. They want them out of sight, restricted to their ghettos, summoned only when required. The commonplace sight of Hindus patronising Muslim sellers as well as Muslim artistes (remember stand-up artiste Munnawar Faroqui in Indore) enrages Hindutvawadis.

Their goal is an economic boycott of Muslims. Post-riots, cashing in on heightened communal feelings, they've given calls to this effect, as happened in Mumbai 1993 and Gujarat 2002. These never worked; interdependence between the two communities is too deep. A Sindhi trader in Godhra told this reporter after the burning of the Sabarmati Express there in 2002 that it would be self-destructive for his fraternity to obey the BJP's directive to boycott Muslims economically.

But the interdependence is not just monetary. Muzaffarnagar's shopkeepers were bewildered by the Kranti Sena's threat not to employ Muslim mehndi artistes for Teej. Our customers have never asked about the artiste's religion, they said.

When a bunch of Hindu men were thrashing bangle seller Tasleem Ali in Indore, local Hindu women objected, and it was a Hindu whose intervention stopped the attack. Ali's former village Pradhan in Uttar Pradesh said it was common for Muslims to have Hindu names in the village; no one thought it odd.

In Mathura, Hindu customers were back at the Muslim-run dosa stall the day after the highly publicised attack; apart from the fanatical Bajrang Dal, no one was surprised that Muslims had named their stall after the city's reigning deity. None of these Hindus stood to gain financially from their dealings with Muslims. If asked, none of them would say they were doing anything out of the ordinary.

Perhaps that's the "secularism" lamented every day in WhatsApp groups that claim to support the BJP. For seven years, these groups have incited Hindus to stop "foolishly practising `bhaichara'" and start aggressively "protecting" their religion; to "be Hindu, buy Hindu." If such relentless goading hasn't succeeded even in Yogi Adityanath's UP, we have hope.

(The writer is a journalist)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.