The recent violence in Nuh district of Haryana, not far from the national capital, has followed a familiar template. Religious events may once have been occasion for affirming a sense of community through shared piety. They are now incomplete without a brazen display of aggression.
Early this year, a group of independent professionals published a report with a self-explanatory title, “Routes of Wrath, Weaponising Religious Processions”. With a wealth of documentation, it put in context the violence that spread across nine States like a contagion during Ram Navami and Hanuman Jayanti last year. Neither the first spark, nor the means through which the flames were fanned, were obscure.
Indeed, as senior advocate Chander Uday Singh put it, the “catalysts” of the violence were the same across the geography of India: “religious processions ... followed by targeted attacks on Muslim-owned properties, businesses and places of worship.”
