The gift of a sacrificial cow was no great thing for the great hide merchant Haji Nur Muhammad Zakaria, among the grandees of Kolkata—but the letter that arrived the week before Bakr Eid in 1896 from an obscure, small-town cleric opened up dangerous dilemmas. Local Muslim mill workers had long sacrificed cows out of sight of their Hindu neighbours. Labour tensions had been surging in the newly-industrialising belt, and Muslim migrants from the countryside had begun increasingly asserting their religious identity as a means of organisation.
English-owned mill managements—and notables like Zakaria—worried that riots would shut down business. The colonial authorities cracked down on the planned sacrifice. “Low-class Muslims” were denied railway tickets, historian Shubho Basu has recorded, and the military was deployed across mill towns. The mosque was surrounded by armed police on Bakr Eid: The imam never got his cow.
Forgotten anniversaries find ways to tear through wilful amnesia. The Kolkata suburb of Rishra, the site of the unremembered cow-slaughter crisis of a century-and-a-quarter ago, is now torn by violence that erupted after a Ram Navami procession on 27 March.
Like other conflicts of identity, communal conflict more closely resembles warfare than the kinds of problems police forces are designed to engage. Large organised forces use techniques of urban combat to assault the territorial frontiers of segregated communities, sometimes turning entire cities into battlegrounds. From late in the colonial period to the carnage that tore apart Gujarat in 2002, the Indian State has known that only the military can seize back control of cities once communal violence ignites.
The resurgence of communal violence is a political issue—but it is also an issue that illustrates the anaemia of India’s police and criminal justice infrastructure. The inability of police forces to control communal violence, even in states where governments are committed to doing so, should be setting off alarms in police and intelligence services nationwide.
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Processions, politics and police
Little is unknown about the new wave of riots erupting across India each Ram Navami. Lawyer Chander Uday Singh has shown religious processions are being turned into territorial assertions of Hindi nationalist power. This isn’t new, however. A government investigation of post-Independence riots conducted in 2007 noted that religious processions were “the single largest cause of communal conflagrations.” The report suggested banning processions not customary by 1990.
Former Supreme Court judge Dinshah Madon’s investigation of the 1970 riots in Bhiwandi—which claimed the lives of 42 Muslims, and one Hindu—found the violence began with a Shiv Jayanti procession, which insisted on passing by a mosque. Ever since 1963, Madon noted, Hindu-nationalist organisations had begun taking out Shiv Jayanti processions that played music and threw gulal (powdered red colour) while passing by mosques. The processions led to violence in 1967.
The Justice Raghubar Dayal Commission inquiry into the Sholapur riots of 1967 found a history of violence involving processions in the city, dating back to 1927.
Even though the colonial State understood the importance of policing, it lacked the resources to impose order through coercion—short of outright military force. The historian Erin Giuliani says that while the colonial State wanted to ensure control, it also sought to minimise expenses. As per Giuliani, there were just 532 police officers in all of Bhagalpur in 1862—each one responsible, on average, for a staggering 3,740 people.
The principal task of the colonial police, scholar Prashant Kidambi has written, was birthing the rise of an industrial order. The proletarian casual economy and culture of the streets, he notes, represented a threat. The police focused on regulating the world of the goonda (goon), the brothel, the unregulated street market, and liquor. “For a numerically challenged, over-worked and poorly-equipped force,” he notes, “petty street offences involving the poor provided an attractive alternative to the more strenuous task of chasing up serious crimes.”
Facing larger-scale violence, moreover, the police force simply collapsed. In 1893, a Hindu-Muslim confrontation near the Jama Masjid in Mumbai escalated into rioting that claimed 80 lives. Festivals like Muharram led to Shia-Sunni violence that forced authorities to make the—expensive—decision to call in the military.
“The apparatus of police built by the colonial state,” scholar Ranabir Samaddar has noted in a perceptive analysis, “was based fundamentally on the obedience of the individuals and individual subjection to the institution of law and order after it no longer required the feudal form of allegiance.” The communal riot marked the point where this relationship of obedience broke down: God commanded a more primal allegiance than the State, allowing subjugated populations to break the bonds of deference to their masters.
Late to the scene
The lesson from crises like Rishra was that communal tensions need to be tamped down before—not after—they ignited. The colonial authorities, however, proved remarkably reluctant to implement this learning. The historian Nariaki Nakazato has dissected the police response to the savage Kolkata killings of 1946, in which over 4,000 people were killed. Following the first reports of communal violence, which arrived early on the morning of 16 August 1946, it took colonial authorities almost 24 hours to initiate a response.
Fortress commander Brigadier JPC MacKinlay, responsible for the city’s security, flatly refused to deploy troops even after Indian police officials reported the killings were out of control. Even on the morning of 17 August, troops received orders not to fire on mobs. The police, acting on the basis of an emergency plan, retreated into their stations, knowing they had neither the numbers nor training to end the massacres.
The communications of Bengal Governor FJ Burrows help understand why: Imperial authorities simply did not care. The violence, Burrows assured his bosses, “so far have been markedly communal and not, repeat not, in any way anti-British.” The British authorities, however, pushed troops into the industrial suburbs, where the interests of English-owned businesses were implicated.
Less easy to understand is the response of India’s own police forces. The superintendent of police at Jalgaon, Justice Madon noted, simply ignored a crash message from his superiors about the communal clashes that began on 8 May 1970. Local police forces did nothing other than stage some ineffectual lathi-charges, the judge observed, and those only on Muslims. Fire was not used against rioters until the superintendent of police returned – 12 hours too late.
Enquiries conducted into subsequent communal riots—among them, Justice BN Srikrishna’s landmark probe into the 1992-1993 violence in Mumbai—have shown endemic communal bias at the level of the constabulary, mirroring those of the society around them. Efforts to stamp out those biases have proceeded fitfully.
Larger problems in the institutions of the police itself—key to its ability to function in spite of the bias of its rank-and-file—haven’t been addressed at all. A draft Uttar Pradesh government disaster-management plan for communal riots—drawn up in 2009 but never completed—noted that police resources are “often deployed unimaginatively and even frittered away on unauthorised duties.” The plan underlined the need to improve police training and capabilities and put in place a clear disaster-management protocol.
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A dangerous anaemia
Following the crisis in Rishra, the sub-divisional officer of Sreerampur tried to hammer out a compromise: The Muslims would be allowed to sacrifice a cow in a distant graveyard, far from the sight of Hindus. Local Muslims, he wrote, believed their religious rights to have been infringed and became “sulky”. The Hindus “would not agree to anything.” “I strongly advised both sections in order to avoid future disturbances and to come to some mutual understanding,” the officer recorded.
The unhappy compromise—or was it the presence of British troops?—kept Rishra out of the headlines for decades after. Then, the nightmare resurfaced.
Fixing India’s problems with communal violence will need many things, but one of them has to be effective police forces structured to respond to crises without political micro-management. The Ram Navami riots, some of which took place in states where the political executive has no evident interest in their perpetuation, have demonstrated deep institutional weaknesses. The failure of police forces to preempt and then end the Delhi riots of 2022—which deeply embarrassed India on the world stage—shows this crisis of policing has reached critical proportions.
The capabilities of police are indivisible: There is no such thing as a force with the competence to control terrorism and insurgencies or organised crime but not communal violence. Imagining the price that could be paid doesn’t need a lot of imagination.
The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)