Return of the Barbarians

Give them the credit. The political credit. The RSS calls itself a cultural organisation, but does nothing but politics, including having the gall to remove LK Advani as president of the BJP on his meaningful remarks on Jinnah. It also does culture politics, among other things such as hate politics or organising low intensity and big intensity communal polarisations, often with a great deal of sectarian strife and universal tragedy, as several enquiry commission reports have decisively proved, from Bhagalpur to Bhiwandi. Considering its sinister role, the outfit has been banned thrice, and the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi was alleged to have been linked with the RSS at one time.

It is largely invisible but operates through hundreds of fronts and backlane outfits in the social, educational and political sectors, including the brazenly violent and extremist outfits like the VHP and the lumpen Bajrang Dal, the latter particularly mindless and bloodthirsty, as those famous pictures from the Gujarat genocide show so transparently, so proudly, and so graphically.

Communal riots are different from organised pogroms, or State-sponsored pogroms, like the Holocaust in Germany and Europe, or what happened in the Balkans in the recent past. It is general anarchy and bloody madness let loose across the caste, class and religious spectrum in the case of riots, which are also instigated by vested interests, including political actors. Organised pogroms or the State-sponsored ones are inevitably backed by the status quo, the police, the bureaucracy and the ruling party, because no public violence can continue if the State wishes to clamp down and stop it to restore law and order. However, as the dismal record in terms of crime and punishment shows in India, everything becomes a part of the twilight zone once the killings and rapes are over and done with. Because this becomes a collective perversion, a mass enactment, socially sanctioned, almost like war. So even when it has faces, catalysts, protagonists and actors, often, no one gets punished. This helps communal organisations and fascists to attract legitimacy and consolidate. The Sangh Parivar is a classical example of this historical pattern of coincidences.

Witness whatever happened to the Srikrishna Commission report on the Bombay pogrom of 1992-93, where key police figures and Shiv Sena politicians were named by the judge with impeccable credentials. The BJP-Shiv Sena regime dumped it as "anti-Hindu"; the Congress never moved an inch. The Babri Masjid was demolished by the Sangh Parivar under the able leadership of LK Advani, Vinay Katiar (earlier, a Bajrang Dal leader), Uma Bharti and sundry BJP/VHP leaders, with effective intervention from Shiv Sena cadre. What followed was communal violence across the nation.

Almost 16 years later, the Liberhan Commission, instituted on the demolition, has got yet another extension, while Advani, 81 plus, is being pitch-forked as the PM-in-waiting. Ditto with the 1984 Maliana-Hashimpura massacre of Muslims in Meerut reportedly at the hands of the Provincial Armed Constabulary, often accused of being overtly communal in its law enforcement operations. Or the November 1984 organised massacre of Sikhs in Delhi and elsewhere, including the murder of some army soldiers on trains.

In a scenario whereby the killers can repeatedly go scot free, the political class turns tacit accomplice or blind and deaf, and no justice arrives even after decades, communal fascism of all varieties becomes an obsessive ritual, a part of the social consciousness, integral to norms and conventions, immersed in the sense and sensibilities of everyday life. Even while simmering wounds cry angry tears.