From Economic and Political Weekly, December 01, 2012
Editorial
Witches' Brew in Hyderabad
The Sangh Parivar is assiduously working towards a major communal conflagration
in Hyderabad.
Hyderabad is the only metropolitan city in India where two
out of five citizens are Muslims and the Member of Parliament elected since
1984 has been from an avowedly Muslim party, the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen
(MIM). It is a city where the Muslims are not just numerically strong but are
also culturally and politically assertive. While Hyderabad has had a long history of
Hindu-Muslim violence, what has been unique about the city is that the Muslim
community has organised itself around the MIM. This has resulted in the
violence and aggressive identity politics of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
(RSS) and its affiliates being matched by a similar politics by the MIM. The
last major incident of communal violence in Hyderabad was in 1990 in the aftermath of L K
Advani’s Rath Yatra, where a gruesome “scoreboard” was kept and the number of
Muslims and Hindus killed was equalled as the MIM cadre matched the muscle
power and bloodlust of the RSS.
A combination of strong action by the governments in power (mainly of the
Telugu Desam Party) and the matching of the muscle power of the Sangh Parivar
and the MIM, along with the large-scale transformation of Hyderabad’s economic
and social networks in the last two decades has resulted in a period of
relative communal calm. The MIM strategy seems to be to use its power, both on
the street as well as in the legislature, to provide protection to the Muslim
community to pursue their lives and livelihoods. The RSS and its affiliates,
mainly the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP),
have tried to consolidate the Hindu community behind it to match the MIM while
trying to weaken its political base. They have largely been unsuccessful in
this. Till now.
There has been a gradual build-up of tension in recent years. The RSS, VHP and
BJP have begun Hindu public festivals to often push demands that have led to
communal tensions. New festivals, like “Hanuman Jayanti”, have been suddenly
foisted on Hyderabad
with a large-scale use of saffron buntings and motorcycle rallies by young men
waving saffron flags and shouting Hindutva slogans, mainly in mixed
Hindu-Muslim residential localities. The MIM has retaliated by organising
unprecedented public celebrations of previously private Islamic festivals with
similar aggressive public displays. In 2010, there were small riots over street
buntings of saffron and green and last year during Bakrid there were attacks
where the necks of some Muslim men were slit. The ensuing violence in both
cases was thankfully controlled through police action and the intervention of
locality elders. More recently, the city has witnessed a series of, apparently
unrelated, low-intensity incidents of communal violence and mischief. Some
months back beef was found to have been thrown, in quick succession, in a few
temples. Soon it was discovered that it was the cadre of the Hindutva
organisations who were responsible for this outrage. As this issue subsided,
new trouble started with serial thefts of the ornaments of deities in Hyderabad’s old city. In
cases which have still not been solved, at least five temples were “burgled”
leading to more tension. This was followed by the very open attempt to enlarge
the illegal temple which has been built adjacent to the Charminar with the help
of VHP and BJP leaders who claimed it was an “ancient” Bhagyalaxmi temple. (A recent
set of photographs published in The Hindu shows that there was no such temple
in the 1950s/1960s.) Over and above this, there have been frequent instances of
arson targeting individual shops, businesses and vehicles, mainly of Muslims,
not just in Hyderabad
but in other towns of the Telangana region.
This new strategy of low-key incidents kills few but is effective in achieving
the political aims of the Sangh Parivar. They spread fear and terror among
residents, particularly the Muslims, increase the communal divide and create an
atmosphere of distrust among communities, and disrupt the lives and livelihoods
of people, both Hindu and Muslim. These lead to frequent, yet sudden, curfews
and police blockades and the shutdown of schools and shops. Together these help
create an atmosphere where any small incident can blow up into a major communal
conflagration. While the MIM has, as yet, not fallen for the bait and generally
kept its cadres on the leash, it is a matter of time before either this leash
snaps or the MIM leadership itself decides that there is need for some
counteraction. Any such action from the MIM or other Muslim organisations would
provide an opportunity for the Hindutva forces to “retaliate” and end the
fragile communal peace in Hyderabad.
This Hindutva strategy needs to be contextualised in the unsettled political
and social conditions in Telangana. The two main political parties – Congress
and Telugu Desam – are in crisis and deeply divided. Their respective alliances
of castes, communities and social interest groups have unravelled, but there is
not yet any clear pole around which they can coalesce. It appears that the
Hindutva strategy is to work towards a communal conflagration of such
proportions which would sear the social fabric of the region and lead to a
polarisation of caste and community alliances along the communal divide,
cementing the political ascendence of the BJP in the region, which everyone
expects will sooner, rather than later, become a separate state. The ruling
Congress, always known for using Hyderabad’s communal divisions for short-term
political gains, seems to be deliberately giving space to the RSS, VHP and BJP
to stoke the flames, leading to the MIM withdrawing support to the state and
central governments. It is unclear what or who in the Congress hopes to benefit
from this, but the real danger is that there is as yet no voice, outside of the
Muslim community, which is ready to recognise the threat of the Sangh Parivar’s
strategy and work towards foiling it.