Bahirhat urges truth-telling. Truth sets a people by facilitating understanding. The only anti-dote to communal riots –this hell-broth of calculated, unconscionable criminality- is knowing the truth about what they hinge on, and why they are manufactured.

First thing first, no riot is spontaneous. No riot ever was. History has never known such a thing. Just as there aren’t spontaneous harvests, or spontaneous births or spontaneous masala dosas. Not even a lottery windfall is spontaneous. You bought a ticket before you got in line for winning it. Every riot is assiduously worked towards, elaborately planned and callously wire-pulled from a safe distance. When houses burn, and people die, there is covert calculations of electoral gains elsewhere.

No riot is gratuitous. Riots yield mega returns. Look at it this way. No one repeats what is roguish and unprofitable, especially when it is heinous and inhuman. Given the massive effort it takes to unleash a riot, it should be clear even to a child that riots are matchless in the profit it proffers to their progenitors. It is a million times more profitable than drug-peddling and needs to be deemed a worse crime against humanity than drug peddling is.

Profits and gains, in the balance sheet of riots, are grotesquely asymmetrical. The gains are all on one side; the losses are borne by the other. “The other” is invariably the people. They include participants from both sides – tools and victims. Those who allowed themselves to be used as weapons and instruments in the Gujarat riots (2002) continue to pay for it even today. Their instigators thrive on the bonanza of bloodshed by proxy. Does anyone know a riot in which the rioters gained anything and their instigators’ did not gain everything? A day’s wage, a bottle of liquor: that is the price tag they put on the hired rioters whose souls are darkened forever. At the time the diabolic delight of killing, looting and raping takes place, and civilization is thrown back by centuries, the rioters are blissfully unaware of the cynical calculations within which they are entrapped and the arm of law already at their throat.

All riots are terribly effective. Effective for what? Well, that is what needs to be seen through. We have to take a little –not much, but a wee-bit- trouble over it. But it’s worth the bother.

From the beginning of history individuals and groups realized themselves who they are in terms of otherness, or what others were not. Consider the most primeval instance: male and female. Man cannot realize or, know himself all by himself. He can know who he is only in relation, and in contrast, to woman. Now, the perverse trick begins!

But where does riot come into this picture?

Political otherness, unlike biological otherness as the case of the man-woman binary is an artificial construct. It is not in-born or natural. No human being is born a Hindu, Muslim, Christian or whatever. A babe is global. It has no labels. All identity labels are man-made and arbitrarily ascribed ‘objects.’ No religion can avoid the ‘objectification’ of its community members. We are all conditioned into solidarity with one religious tradition or the other. We came with our bodies, but utterly without our beliefs.

Ideological identities are far more unstable than religious identities; especially ideological identities erected on religious identities. The erection of one unstable thing on another even more unstable, increases instability exponentially. To make matters even worse, a third factor namely, cultural instability has crept in of late, the acuteness of which Alvin Toffler named extravagantly as future shock. “Ease” -especially ease of mobility is a prime value in modern culture; otherwise the ‘Ease’ of doing business would not have overpowered the license Raj. Fixed entities exist in tension with the genius of this culture. This renders ideological-and-identity-loyalties unstable. (The youth, for example, are less seduced by it, as proved in Delhi elections of 2015). This aggravates the need to brutally assert divisive communal identities and loyalties.

There is yet another subtle twist that this scenario has acquired of late for the BJP. For reasons of expediency, the party showcases Muslims among its public faces. Assuredly, there have never been as many Muslim faces among the spokespersons of the party. This is de facto appeasement of a community that is, going by the UP experiment, being eliminated from the pantheon of power.
For a short while, even as Muslims are alienated from power-sharing, their ornamental visibility vis-a-vis the party will continue. This has a flip-side. It can blunt the cutting edges of the party’s identity politics, which it so vehemently disowns! This aggravates the need to keep the blurring edges of the communal divide sharpened and clearly etched.

Nothing helps this cause as much as communal polarization does. Communal riots are, vis-à-vis electoral politics, what A-Bombs are to warfare. It is the ultimate weapon; nothing else compares with it. So talks for strategic reduction of nuclear arms, and the enhancement of the destructive power of each warhead, are maintained side-by-side. For the very same reason, a privileged group at whose gates we are now knocking must have monopoly over these coveted weapons of mass destruction! It is evil for anyone else North Korea, Iran etc. to have it. The logic of this hypocritical stratification rests on brute force.

As for the human beings whose lives are derailed by the Bahirhat riots Hindus and Muslims alike all are tragic losers. They will take years to overcome its trauma, its devastation, its toxicity. Mocking the spiritual genius of both religions, the riot-victims will remain polarized and the tapestry of their social life shredded by hate, suspicion and anxiety.

There is an offence, friends, worse than insulting prophets and saints. It is poisoning our humanity. All prophets and spiritual lights came into this world as lights to illumine the path to the nobility of our humanity. And we mock them by defeating the very purpose of their mission with our misguided religious zeal, which we neither know nor gain from. Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) was an enlightened soul with a winsome streak of humour. Being superior in understanding to his detractors, he laughed away their perversities and saw through their stratagems. Doing the same, would be a good way of honouring the Prophet?