Who benefits from communal violence?

BJP occupies the high moral ground, pushing the narrative of good governance and development, while VHP and Bajrang Dal are free to propagate religious polarisation.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) used to claim that there are no communal riots when it is in power. With the communal rioting in Manipur and Haryana, both run by the BJP, that claim lies exposed.

The Manipur violence initiated between ‘ethnic’ communities has fast acquired the colour of a Hindu-Christian confrontation. The Muslims of Nuh in the Mewat region of Haryana where the violence started do not have a sterling reputation — with the violent criminals among them having graduated from cattle thievery to cybercrime. They claim to have been provoked by two videos released by cow-vigilante and Bajrang Dal activists. The videos called upon Hindus to join a religious procession on Monday in Nuh and visit temples in Mewat in large numbers. The videos, according to the police, infuriated the Muslim community, and they gathered in large numbers on July 31 to disrupt the procession.

Only a detailed enquiry will show who lit the communal fuse, but who does a surcharged communal atmosphere help? The question is as relevant in Manipur as it is in Haryana.

The conflict in Manipur has made BJP Chief Minister N Biren Singh virtually unassailable despite the utter failure of law and order in the state. He has consolidated the Meitei Hindus behind him. Prime Minister Narendra Modi cannot find it in himself to caution Singh to follow ‘Raj Dharma’, as he himself was advised by former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 2002.

In Haryana, the BJP is faced with declining popularity. After the 2019 state legislative election, it had to rely on Dushyant Chautala’s Jannayak Janta Party to form a government. Then with the farmers’ agitation in 2020-21 the Jat farmers turned their back on the BJP. The Jats form 27 per cent of the population and dominate 40 of the 90 assembly constituencies. Their disproportionate influence in Haryana politics is evident from the fact that in 33 out of 57 years of its existence, Haryana has been ruled by Jat chief ministers. The non-Jat chief ministers who have together ruled the state for 22 years, have had short tenures. Khattar will be only the second non-Jat Chief Minister other than Bhajan Lal to complete a 10-year tenure next year.

Elections to the Haryana legislature are due in October 2024. The state sends 10 MPs to the Lok Sabha. The BJP had won all 10 seats in the 2019 general election. It is unlikely to repeat the feat in April-May 2024, without the consolidation of Hindu votes. To achieve that, the hostile Jat farmer will have to be mobilised through their Hindu identity rather than through their caste and economic status. Communal polarisation will do that.

That is why the communal violence in Nuh has significance beyond Mewat. It has already spread to the adjoining areas of Gurugram, Faridabad, and Palwal. Nor is it likely to be limited to the boundaries of Haryana. Already, sister Hindutva organisations of the BJP — the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Bajrang Dal — have organised protests on August 2 in Delhi stopping traffic on the Faridabad-Delhi highway and protesting in RK Puram-I, Nirman Vihar, and Ghonda in Delhi. There were VHP protests in adjoining Noida in Uttar Pradesh as well.

Could it be that the BJP has governance as its priority and the communal incidents are the handiwork of autonomous Hindutva militants? Modi recently advised party MPs to let the government’s work for the poor take precedence in the 2024 general election over the Ram temple at Ayodhya and the abrogation of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir. This seems to suggest that the governance train is on a different track than the communal one.

Far from there being an airgap between the BJP and the Hindutva militants, they are in fact two strands of the same DNA — one prepares the ground for the other’s climb to power. Polarisation on made up communal issues such as wearing the hijab, refusal to sing or shout ‘Vande Mataram’, ‘love jihad’, reclaiming mosques as Hindu temples, etc. help to heat up the atmospherics before the BJP enters an electoral battle.

The pattern is clear. When in power the BJP occupies the high moral ground, pushing the narrative of good governance and development and the militias of VHP and Bajrang Dal are left free to propagate religious polarisation on the ground. This collaboration was evident earlier also in the Ram temple agitation, the destruction of the Babri masjid, the Gujarat riots, and now in incidents of Ram navami violence in March, and now in Nuh. Ethnic militias like Arambai Tenggol and Meitiei Leepun play a somewhat similar role in Manipur.

In Haryana, the VHP and the Bajrang Dal are being resuscitated because the BJP needs every Lok Sabha seat it won in the state in 2024, and Khattar is also unsure of winning a third term for the BJP. Already he has promised to use the Recovery of Damages to Property During Disturbance to Public Order Act against the ‘rioters’. There are no prizes for guessing who might face the State’s wrath. It is likely that communal tension justified as ‘Hindu anger’ against the Nuh violence will spread to Delhi (where the BJP won all seven Lok Sabha seats in 2019). It will not be a surprise if in the coming months communal poison is injected into other north Indian states where Hindutva forces need to strengthen the BJP’s electoral position.

The election-going states are under the greatest threat of communal polarisation. The BJP had won 24 out of 25 Lok Sabha seats in Rajasthan, 28 out of 29 in Madhya Pradesh and nine out of 11 in Chhattisgarh. These states will have assembly elections in December. The BJP would like to build the momentum for the 2024 general election by winning all of them. It will need more than the rhetoric of good governance to do that. These states might also see new life being breathed into the VHP and the Bajrang Dal.

(Bharat Bhushan is a Delhi-based journalist.)

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