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.”
Open collusion
“Culpable amnesia” is the term of art invoked, derived from a judicial commission of inquiry into the Bhagalpur riots which claimed up to a thousand lives in 1989. What is different now is that incompetence is not required as alibi. Where “plausible deniability” was once maintained, local administrations are now in open collusion with riotous mobs.
Violence is the overt intent as processionists carry exposed weapons, and march to the accompaniment of high-decibel music and provocative slogans. Yet, violence is not inevitable since extreme restraint is usually maintained by the other side.
Two incident-free years have passed in Nuh, which has witnessed the birth of an entirely novel religious observance called the Brajmandal Jalabhishek Yatra. This year was different because of the declared participation of a notorious cow vigilante, wanted in neighbouring Rajasthan since February for the murder of two cattle-traders, but moving around with impunity under the active protection of Haryana’s police.
In May 1924, close to a century ago, Mahatma Gandhi wrote a pamphlet on Hindu-Muslim tensions, an issue that for him was gaining almost obsessive importance. He was focused as always on inner essences, but devoted great attention to their overt expressions. Just as cow slaughter had become something of a “sore point” for Hindus, music before mosques had become one for Muslims. Neither side could reasonably expect to coerce the other into compliance, though deliberate provocations could cease. “I have heard,” he continued, “that in some places, Hindus purposely, and with the deliberate intention of irritating Mussalmans, perform arati just when the Mussalman prayers commence.”
Cultural disdain
The nature of that cycle of mutual provocation has since changed dramatically. A cow slaughter ban is now a legislative fait accompli in most States. In States ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), these laws are enforced mainly by vigilantes granted the licence to kill on mere suspicion. And to underline the utter disempowerment of the religious minority, their places of worship are becoming focal points for a newly aggressive display of cultural disdain.
Nuh, and the Mewat region more generally, are an unlikely terrain for this display of aggression. Muslims in the region, referred to as the Meo, are a community that draws heavily from the lore of the Brindavan region, with traditions of veneration of a heterodox pantheon of gods. As India’s Independence approached last century and bitter communal antagonisms flared elsewhere, the Meo remained ecumenical in their identity and indifferent to the effort at mobilising numbers behind each faith. Dairying is a way of life for the Meo and cattle a revered source of livelihood.
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Administratively, the Mewat region was once part of the princely States of Alwar and Bharatpur, and became during the 1930s, the focus of the Congress party’s “Muslim mass contact” programme. Jawaharlal Nehru and his associates within the left-wing of the Congress sought a strategy to deal with the embitterment between faiths, by creating identities of shared material interests between peasants, workers and the poor.
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Numerous other demands surfaced in this atmosphere of ferment, including better representation for the Meo in the administration, equity in land ownership, and decentralised governance. Though far from the epicentres of Partition, the Meo region witnessed a harsh retribution from its rulers, little else than a “mass extermination campaign”, as the social scientist Shail Mayaram has documented.
The statistics about these campaigns have long since sunk into the memory hole. In her book, Resisting Regimes, Professor Mayaram attempts a retrieval and finds numbers that are staggering, though the greater significance is in the suppression of memories themselves. The consolidation of a nationalist sentiment required a sense of “sociability” and after violence on the scale the Meo witnessed, it imposed “silences from the victim”.
Mewat lies in an arc southwards of the national capital, though the spillovers of modernity halt at its borders. Millennium city was the appellation that Gurgaon bestowed upon itself when both the millennium and the India growth story were relative novelties. In 2007, Gurgaon rid itself of an unwanted appendage with the formation of Mewat district, subsequently renamed Nuh. Since then, Gurgaon has flourished from a real estate boom, while Nuh has stagnated.
The fifth round of the National Family Health Survey, carried out 2019-21, presents the essential figures. To take just two rather telling indicators: of the female population above age six, only 51.2% in Nuh district have ever been to school, against 80.9% in Gurgaon and 73.8% in the State as a whole. Female literacy in Mewat is 41.9% of the relevant age group of 15 to 49 years, against 85.4% in Gurgaon and 79.7% in the State.
Nuh is Haryana’s only Muslim-majority district, with close to 80% of its 1.08 million population in 2011 identifying with the faith. Perhaps that is sufficient reason why it is likely to languish forever in the backwaters of official inattention.
Why would such unpromising terrain become the battleground of faiths today? Partly because the emboldened Hindutva forces think they can do what they want. Even where numbers are not in their favour, it is about establishing the authority of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), as spearhead of Hindutva, to legislate on religious practice all over the country. If the VHP should now pronounce it an essential element of Hindu belief that Nuh is where Lord Krishna grazed his cows, that the region is home to three Shaivite shrines from the Mahabharata era, all others in the Hindu Rashtra have no option but to accept these as undisputed truth.
Hindutva as ideology expresses its expansionist intent in the religious procession, adorned with a symbolism that is under constant invention. State power is now an accessory to its programme, rather than a countervailing force that upholds constitutional principles.
Vigilantism in the scholarly understanding is an ensemble of coercive practices that seek to impose a moral order, an alternate system of legitimacy. This could work in defiance of the writ of the state, but the situation in India is ominously different. Hindutva vigilantism here appropriates and subverts the state’s monopoly of legitimate coercion. And in that lies great danger for the constitutional order.
Sukumar Muralidharan is an independent writer and researcher based in the Delhi region
