Mumbai violence, Teesta and India's one-eyed secularism

Teesta Setalvad, that indefatigable champion of Gujarat’s victims and self-defined secularist, appears to have got it in spades from Madhu Trehan, content director at newslaundry.com, a mediawatch site. A week ago, Setalvad had sung her praises for the Mumbai police, and Police Commissioner Arup Patnaik, in particular, for defusing a dangerous situation where one group of Muslims had turned violent and ended up injuring scores of policemen. Among other things, Patnaik emerged on the dais and spoke of the situation in 1992, when similar mob incitement had led to firings and enormous tragedy. Setalvad, no fan of the police force in general, wrote a condescending piece along with Javed Anand in The Indian Express to note the “despicable” behaviour of the Muslim mob and compliment the police in these words: “But do allow for the possibility that responding in a most unpolice-like fashion to extreme provocation… Patnaik may have opened a happy chapter in the otherwise unhappy Muslim-police relationship in the metropolis.” But she hastens to add: “Those inclined to think this is too charitable an interpretation of the role of the police may wish to recall that whenever under attack, the police themselves tend to run riot. Every human life is precious and the tragic loss of two Muslim lives is not to be ignored. But nor must we forget that the mob was entirely responsible for the provocation and the overwhelming majority of those injured were policemen and policewomen, not to mention the unpardonable molestation of the latter. Peace was restored in about 30 minutes and mercifully the situation in the city is under control.” Trehan rubbishes this kind of argument as flawed in the Express today: “Let’s replace some of the words in the first paragraph with substitutes and see how it plays. Replace Muslim with Hindu. Would the authors have written the first paragraph if the mobs were Hindu? Is the law to be adjusted according to the religion of the miscreant?” [caption id=“attachment_426033” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Teesta cannot have one argument for Mumbai and another for Gujarat – unless we get into specific cases of dereliction of duty. PTI[/caption] Let’s leave both Hindu and Muslim out of the sentence, and the argument becomes something like this: Teesta is essentially saying that when mobs are running riot, the police have to be more diplomatic and not trigger-happy. Trehan may be saying that the police should not be responding based on which religion the mob subscribes to. Now, transpose this to the Gujarat 2002 case, where the common accusation is of the police’s failure to fire on Hindu mobs to prevent a toll of Muslims. There, too, the police behaved in a “unpolice-like” fashion and did not go all out to control the situation – at least in some places. The question is: did this prevent more loss of lives, or increase it? Teesta cannot have one argument for Mumbai and another for Gujarat – unless we get into specific cases of dereliction of duty. Trehan also blasts Teesta’s claim that “the Mumbai police are the injured party” and that Muslims have been forced to apologise, with this counter: “The authors seem to believe that there is high moral ground to becoming the “injured party’, possibly from the habit of victim self-righteous politics.” This, of course, has been the themesong of minority politics in India, where all so-called secular parties have managed to paint Muslims (and other minorities) as the victims – whether it is Assam, or Kashmir or anywhere else. This is why successive governments have done nothing to acknowledge the sheer weight of immigrants in the north-east – a major causative factor in the current violence. Teesta has, arguably, been a standard-bearer in this kind of politics, as her obsessive interest in Gujarat – to the exclusion of other human rights issues involving 1984, Kashmiri Pandits, and Hindu minorities in Pakistan and Bangladesh who are now seeking shelter in India – shows. But that’s another story. Trehan, in fact, goes on to another piece of footage showing Arup Patnaik asking a DCP to not act against a rioter he had got hold of. Apparently, this video shows Patnaik as screaming at the DCP thus: “Tumhala koni hyala pakdayala sangitla? (Who has told you to catch him?)… You take directions from the commissioner. You are not SP of Sangli. You are DCP here. You will not fall out of line or you will be suspended, stupid.” Assuming this attribution to Patnaik is correct, it seems that Patnaik was under orders – or took it upon himself - to not do anything to deter the mob through tougher action. Hence the order to let even apprehended thugs go free on 11 August, the day of the violence, is suspect. Now, let’s cut to Raj Thackeray and his morcha yesterday (21 August), where he not only berated Patnaik for not doing his duty and sapping the morale of his manhandled force, but also took the police to task for not fighting back when they were at the receiving end. Thackeray said he would not allow any member of the public to assault a policeman, and then blamed outsiders (and Bangladeshis) for creating trouble on 11 August. Raja managed to say or do contradictory things. While saying he would not encourage anyone to lay their hands on policemen, his verbal assault on Patnaik’s handling of the mob situation did not do anything to confirm his respect for men in uniform. Moreover, he himself encouraged a form of indiscipline in the Mumbai police by accepting a flower from a policeman in uniform. The latter now faces action for indulging in political opportunism. Raj also defied the Mumbai police’s ban on starting a procession from Mumbai Chowpatty to Azad maidan. This writer also happened to listen to what Arup Patnaik himself had to say on an NTDV programme yesterday. According to him, he was not at the spot when the rioting began. But when he heard about it, he turned up and went to the dais. He also said that the rioting lasted around seven minutes, and the reports about alleged molestation of women cops was false — at best one or two may have been pushed or manhandled, but probably not molested. He said that he intervened because when he arrived on the scene, angry policemen were holding their SLRs and may have been about to take on the mobs – with possible unexpected consequences. But I was also shocked to hear him say another thing: that unlike other times, when the tendency was to catch 10 people from this community and 10 from another whenever such violence happened, this time they were going by strong video evidence and not making random arrests. Clearly, if by this Patnaik is suggesting that arrests and detention are often a random response to political pressures to “do something”, fair policing has a long, long way to go. This writer’s conclusions from the Teesta-Trehan exchange, and the Patnaik-Raj Thackeray brouhaha, are the following: On balance, Patnaik did the right thing this time. But it is an open question whether his tactic would have worked elsewhere, where passions were higher. Let’s remember, the Muslims were protesting something far, far away – in Assam and Myanmar, and about possibly illegal migrants – and we still had a near crisis in policing. If this was the case with this minor incident, it is difficult to believe that the job was any easier in Gujarat, or Assam – where the passions were more direct and real. Second, there is clearly need to insulate the police force from political pressures so that they can do their jobs. Maharashtra has not implemented any police reform even after 26/11. Arup Patnaik’s calming role this time, assuming it was not under political pressure, may be the exception rather than the rule. All states should create police service commissions and top cops should be appointed for professional reasons, not political. Third, Indian secularism is often a load of bull. We have a situation where self-appointed guardians of secularism will issue certificates on who is or is not secular without reference to reality. It is easy to blame the “communal” parties for taking up the cause of the Pandits or protesting against illegal Bangladeshi immigrants – but when did secular parties take these issues up? If the Congress will not tackle illegal immigration, why blame the BJP for it? If Teesta will not take up the cause of Sikhs killed in 1984, why blame the “communal” Akalis or BJP for doing so? The Times of India today notes a confidential report by the Assam police which says that the local cops were afraid to act to prevent the Bodo-Muslim violence in Kokrajhar as they feared political reprisals and lacked adequate force and equipment. Particularly startling is the report’s candid confession that the Muslim population had come pretty close to the Bodo level over the last 10 years. Says the newspaper: “The report gives a demographic break-up that shows Bodos at 3.10 lakh (30 percent) and Muslims at 2.36 lakh (25.15 percent): something the tribals have been repeatedly pointing out as a cause for worry and evidence that illegal migration from Bangladesh into Bodo areas are happening unabated.” A Bodo leader is quoted as saying that the Bengali Muslim population in 2011 was 15 percent – it has risen 10 percent in 10 years. The newspaper notes: “But this is so sensitive and can have such political repercussions that the Assam government steadfastly chooses to maintain silence over it, refusing to go into any details.” People calling themselves secular are also squeamish about acknowledging this. They don’t even want a proper census or headcount to see if the allegation of illegal migration is real. When secularism means keeping quiet on issues inconvenient to the minorities, it is no secularism at all.