Trilokpuri is back in the news. Exactly 30 years ago, it had burst into the public eye when hundreds of Sikhs were massacred by largely Hindu mobs led by local Congressmen keen to ‘avenge’ the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. This time, the sectarian violence was more traditional – it was between Hindus and Muslims, it was about religious sites and rumoured desecration, about thrusting communal discord on the poorest, weakest and most disempowered, making neighbours fight each other.
Thankfully, the Trilokpuri riots of 2014 did not take on the ferocious proportions of the Trilokpuri riots of 1984. The trouble that started last week, on the festive occasion of Diwali, has left several injured over three days of rioting. Rumours of three deaths are not confirmed. In contrast, in 1984, about 400 people had been slaughtered in a savage dance of death over two days. The police was a silent witness, effectively a collaborator.
This time, too, the police has been blamed for not doing its job. But repeated appeals to the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi and to Delhi’s Police Commissioner by concerned citizens, academics, activists and Muslim leaders made sure that the violence was contained and a curfew finally imposed on the third day.
Trilokpuri is a working class neighbourhood, a resettlement colony of the urban poor, most of whom were uprooted from various Delhi slums by Sanjay Gandhi’s Delhi beautification drive and tossed into this space, which was then the eastern outskirts of Delhi. After the 1984 massacre, the traumatised Sikhs – mostly women and children – who had escaped the killer mobs were moved out and relocated elsewhere. Today, the demography of Trilokpuri has changed, new immigrants have moved in, and it is a hub of domestic and casual workers who keep east Delhi alive and ticking.
Trilokpuri may be the lifeline of east Delhi, but it is enormously vulnerable, given that it is a neighbourhood of the disempowered and uprooted.
Apparently, the trouble began when a temporary ‘Mata ki chowki’ built on common ground opposite a mosque was not dismantled as promised after the pujas and jagarans continued. Reportedly, the local BJP leader and former MLA Sunil Kumar Vaidya called upon the neighbourhood Hindus to build a temple there. Curiously, this ‘mandir’ was to be set up where the local garbage dump used to be, where the common toilets once stood. Unlikely spot for a temple.
According to one version, a Muslim boy urinated near the Mata ki chowki; according to another version, a group of local boys – consisting of both Hindu and Muslim teenagers – got drunk near it. Either way, it was a provocation and one thing led to another, rumours spread like wildfire, and there was stone pelting and brickbats. The police came in to stop the fights, and took away Muslim boys to lockup. No curfew was imposed. Two schoolboys – both Hindu – were hit by bullets. Their families insist they were shot by the police. The police accuse the goons. Sectarian tension grows.
The Trilokpuri riots, though minor in terms of the toll in our country of furious riots and terrible mass murders, are important because the Delhi Police, the largest and best-equipped metropolitan force in the country, report to the Union Home Ministry. That is, they report to Rajnath Singh.
This is a political embarrassment. It must be said, though, that Singh has prevailed upon the Delhi Police to clean up their act this week. Not by keeping the peace in volatile neighbourhoods but by clearing out the derelict seized vehicles and wrecked cars which have accumulated in the capital’s police stations over generations of bad driving.
On August 15 this year, Narendra Modi had reimagined the Prime Minsiter’s August 15 address from the Red Fort. What used to be an unremarkable ritual, whose message was lost within hours of the live telecast, was turned into an opportunity to broadcast big ideas to the people. The overarching theme was inclusiveness, and under its aegis, Narendra Modi had proposed the stirring idea of a 10-year moratorium on communal and caste violence. In a country tired of divisive politics, it had sounded like a fine idea.
But it was just good advertising. A moratorium is contractual, legal. Who were the contracting parties here? Modi and the public? Who constitutes the public? Such a contract could not last because it was never established in the first place. If it had been, then the central government would have moved immediately to contain the violence in Trilokpuri.
In May, India essentially voted to replace an otherwise excellent man who suffered from the vice of silence with another man who was otherwise vocal but refused to directly address the problem of sectarianism, which has been intrinsic to the politics of the BJP. The electorate had expected him to replace the sectarian agenda with a focus on growth. But focus cannot be changed unless the previous agenda is forcefully rejected. From Muzaffarnagar to Trilokpuri, Narendra Modi has had ample opportunities for a specific abjuration of communal violence. It will be difficult, since it must include an acknowledgement of his party’s – and extended family’s – unsavoury politics in the past. But until he works up the courage to do it, Modi will have to remain as silent on communalism as his predecessor was on corruption. And the talk of 10-year moratoriums will sound like a nice jingle, and nothing more.
(Antara Dev Sen is Editor, The Little Magazine)
Antara Dev Sen
