EDITORIAL
The situation in UP's Muzzafarnagar has turned grave. As we go to press the number of those killed in communal clashes in the area has risen to 48.
Since the Samajwadi Party came to power in the State eighteen months ago in March 2012, UP has witnessed about a hundred communal clashes. However, as noted scholar Dr Sudha Pai has observed in her article in The Indian Express,
…the recent spate of violence in Muzaffarnagar district has particularly shaken people. With a toll reported to be around 50, the Muzaffarnagar clashes displayed some disturbing new features. The number of those killed in a single incident was very high and the riots spread to rural areas, with many villages swept up in it. Finally, the violence was so intense—a place of worship, shops and vehicles were burned, people fled their villages—that the Army had to be called in after 21 years.
But what is most alarming is that the clashes this time were between Jats and Muslims whose social ties remained intact through all the ups and downs over the years. What Dr Pai explained in her detailed analysis is highly significant.
The emergence of communal faultiness between the Jats and Muslims will affect the Congress-RLD alliance, which is dependent on the support of these communities. But it could help the BJP in western UP in the 2014 national elections. The Congress has been muted in its criticism of its ally, the SP, but it has been alleged that the latter joined forces with the BJP to foment trouble and consolidate their respective Muslim and Hindu vote-banks….An angry Muslim community could now reconsider its political alignments, particularly with the rise of autonomous Muslim parties. At the RSS-BJP meeting held on September 9, it was made clear that the BJP would bring back its core Hindutva agenda—Ram temple, uniform civil code, Article 370—for the general elections. Despite urgent issues such as corruption, inflation, an economic slowdown and low levels of industrial investment, it seems that the old spectre of communal discord will return to haunt UP in 2014.
This is indeed worrisome as the net consequence would be a severe blow to our democratic edifice. While the BJP continues to attack its political adversaries of playing vote-bank politics, the fact is that it is itself actually implementing an overt communal agenda. Other parties, notably the SP, instead of effectively fighting this pernicious agenda emanating from the Hindutvavadis' nefarious policies, are failing prey to it discarding their commitment to unalloyed secularism.
Unless civil society, rooted in the secular values enshrined in the Constitution, resolves to frontally target this agenda with the aim of eradicating the communal virus which is fast spreading far and wide, such incidents, as those that happened in Muzaffarnagar, are bound to proliferate, the apprehension of which has been expressed by several observers. [The entry of Narendra Modi into the electoral fray as the officially anointed Prime Ministerial candidate of the BJP for the 2014 polls will doubtless assist, promote and further this process with deadly effect.]
The time has thus come for secular forces of all hues to join hands and defeat this diabolic design in the days ahead. For that to happen no sectarian consideration, based primarily on policy differences, must be allowed to blur one's perspective—for fighting communalism needs to be taken up as the supreme task at this critical juncture of our post-independence history.
September 12 S.C.