Ek Raat Wali Masjid—so called because it had, once upon a time, a long time ago, been built during a single night—stood at the edge of Moradabad’s Eidgah, where a small city had conjured itself out of nothingness. There were brightly-lit stalls offering the tens of thousands of Eid congregants water and even paan, set up by various social organisations, the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party. There were posters for 788-brand Bidis, and bright banners for shops selling sweets and toys.
Then, in this communal Eden, arrived the snake: As the namaaz drew to a close, a rumour spread that a pig had entered the crowd. Elements of the crowd began tearing rocks off the wall of Ek Raat Wali Masjid to throw at police, then surged towards police outposts Gulshahid and the Barafkhana.
Eighty-four people—70 of them Muslim—died that Eid night of 13 August 1980. Additional District Magistrate DP Singh, who tried to restore order at the Eidgah, was beaten to death by a mob. Four police constables—Dhirendra Singh, Haridutt Pant, Magananand and Parsadi Lal—were murdered.
Forty-three years on, the Uttar Pradesh government has released the findings of the Justice MP Saxena committee of inquiry. The judge cleared police of the use of excessive force, saying 55 of the lives lost—and all 34 who died in the initial melée at the Eidgah—were crushed in a stampede, not shot. The riot itself, the judge concluded, was caused by rumours and inflammatory polemic used by leaders of the Muslim League, the Congress and the fringe Khakar organisation.
To some, the report is evidence that Muslims were responsible for the savage riot which ushered in the troubled decades leading up to 2002—but that isn’t the story Justice Saxena’s almost 500-page report actually tells. The report adds considerable detail to serious historical work on the Moradabad riots conducted since 1980, and casts new light on the conditions in which communalism grows.
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The tenacious politics of hate
Like many cities across India, Moradabad has a long history of communal violence. In 1840, the district Gazette recorded in 1911, 14 people were killed in a Hindu-Muslim clash, and there was Shia-Sunni violence in 1853. Ever since the mid-nineteenth century, the Gazette says, Moradabad had seen the rise of “propagandist work on similar lines vigorously pursued among both Hindus and Musalmans on to those adopted by Christian missionaries.”
Low-grade communal skirmishes broke out at regular intervals after independence. There were riots in 1978, after Muslim League leader Manzar Shafi protested the participation of two girls from the community in a beauty contest. Twenty-five people were killed.
The reasons for these tensions were embedded in pre-independence politics. The city, historian Venkat Dhulipala has noted, saw intense competition between the Congress and Muslim League in the build-up to Partition. In one 1937 by-election, League propagandists circulated cartoons of the Congress candidate, Maulvi Basheer Ahmad, portraying his bier being borne for Hindu cremation. The message was clear: A Muslim who joined the Congress was in fact an infidel.
Even though the Congress had a significant hold among Moradabad’s Muslims until 1937, it was routed in the critical election of 1946. League-linked lawyer Qazi Taslim Husain, working with the neo-fundamentalist Tablighi Jama’at, succeeded in organising migrant workers from Bihar living in the Musafirkhana neighbourhood into a powerful electoral bloc.
For their part, Hindu revivalist organisations, spearheaded by the Arya Samaj and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, organised vigorous conversion campaigns and mobilisations. They found support, scholars Satish Saberwal and Mushirul Hasan write, from a new class of Hindu traders, merchants and professionals, who resented Muslim dominance in the law courts and medicine.
After the Kolkata communal massacres of 1946, the stage was set for slaughter across northern India. From January 1948, communal carnage raged in Moradabad for months. Elite Muslims left for Pakistan—leaving behind the poor to their fate.
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Poverty and paranoia
Following Partition, large numbers of landlords who had left for Pakistan sold their properties to a new elite that emerged in Moradabad. Large numbers of Punjabi Hindu entrepreneurs arrived to make their fortune in the city’s brass industry—among them the family of Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi’s husband, Robert Vadra. Even though the city remained Muslim majority, the scholar Krishna Gandhi wrote soon after the riots, the names on homes in upper-class neighbourhoods like Civil Lines, Adarsh Nagar and Kothibal Nagar showed the changing milieu.
“After the anti-immigrant agitation in Assam,” Justice Saxena recorded, “the Punjabi migrants began to fear they might be similarly targeted by locals. To protect themselves against such a development, they started to sow the seeds of hatred in the minds of local Hindus against Muslims.”
To make things worse, the judicial report says, the resentments of the growing Muslim workforce were allowed to fester. The brass industry had long relied on day labour from surrounding villages, who would return home at night. Large numbers of Bihari Muslim migrant workers, however, arrived as the industry grew. Little effort was made to house and educate these workers, Justice Saxena says, creating backward communities vulnerable to radicalisation.
In the course of a visit to Moradabad, historians Saberwal and Hassan found Muslims largely chose not to attend secular state-run or private schools, sending their children to the city’s six big seminaries instead. “They are pathetically underrepresented in the degree colleges,” the scholars noted.
From 1975, moreover, large numbers of semi-skilled Muslim workers began to migrate to the Gulf. This, Justice Saxena says, led what he calls an “extremist-Fascist” element among the ethnic-Punjabi elite to spread rumours of a Middle-East funded plot to carve a Muslim-majority state out of Uttar Pradesh, with its capital in Moradabad.
Economic dysfunction, government apathy, poverty and paranoia had laid the ground for an explosion.
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The night of killing
The sun began to set on the fragile peace in Moradabad three weeks before the riots, the Justice Saxena investigation records. For decades, the local administration had sounded a siren to mark the sehri, when pious Muslims end their day-long fast during Ramzan. The timing of the siren clashed, on 24 July 1980, with wedding celebrations at the home of a local Dalit, Santosh Saran Balmiki. The two sides exchanged abuse and then began throwing stones.
The Saxena report says that Bharatiya Janata Party leaders Hariom Sharma and Hansraj Chopra stoked Dalit anger over the next several days, leading to another clash outside a mosque in Sarai Kishan Lal. Tensions between Dalits and Muslims flared. In his report, Justice Saxena is sharply critical of the police’s failure to act against those creating the tensions.
Exactly what happened on the night of Eid remains contested. The journalist MJ Akbar, who reported on the violence in Moradabad, said Muslims believed the police had deliberately let a pig loose in the congregation. Akbar recorded several eyewitnesses telling him they had asked the police to shoo away the pig. The police, however, refused, saying it was not their job.
From the account of eyewitnesses he examined, Justice Saxena concluded there was no pig. Local Muslim League leader Shamim Ahmad, he said, spread rumours about the presence of the pig, hoping to stoke Muslim anger.
In Assembly elections held in May, Ahmad had suffered a humiliating defeat against Congress leader Hafez Ahmed Siddiqui and had since been working to sharpen communal sentiments. Local volunteers of the Khasaran-e-haq—an anti-Pakistan group whose members carry a belcha, or spade—joined in the violence.
The slaughter raged on for weeks, fuelled by inflammatory rumours: A Muslim politician was said to be distributing arms; a Hindu girl had been kidnapped; police and Border Security Force personnel killed by traitors. Although the Saxena inquiry only examined the events of Eid day itself, government statistics published by police officer VN Rai show fatalities more than doubled as communal attacks and counter-attacks continued into September, claiming the lives of 142 Muslims and 18 Hindus.
Even though too many years have elapsed to punish the perpetrators of 1980, it’s not too late to learn lessons. Failure to address economic resentments and backwardness, communally-biased administration and toxic chauvinist politics all collaborated to tear down an economically-vibrant city. The truth-telling in the Saxena findings is just as painful today as 43 years ago, but hearing could be the beginning of healing.
The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)