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Notes
*This article is an abridged version of a chapter of the same title, in Paul R. Brass, Forms of Collective Violence: Riots, Pogroms, and Genocide in Modern India (Gurgaon: Three Essays Collective, forthcoming). Copyright and all rights to the full version remain with the author; reprinted with permission. Both versions have benefited from criticisms and suggestions provided by Steven I. Wilkinson and Gyanendra Pandey, for the final results of which, of course, they bear no responsibility.
1. See, for example, the description of curfew restrictions in Bethlehem in November-December 2002 in Letter of Protest (January 25, 2003).
2. While this article was under review for publication in this journal, country wide curfews were imposed in the urban areas of France directed at control over the Muslim population of the country in the aftermath of the accidental death of two Muslim youths in fear and hiding from the police.
3. The feelings of ordinary people, their expectations, and their preparations for enduring the inevitable curfews are described dramatically in a Hindi novel (CitationRai 1991 [1988]). The novel was translated into English by C. M. Naim (CitationRai 1998b). The description is authentic and can be taken as good as fact because the author is an Indian Police Service (IPS) officer with considerable riot experience and the novel is based on his personal experiences in the city of Allahabad as the Senior Superintendent of Police during the riot there in 1980, as noted by Naim in the Foreword to his translation. The very first lines of the novel convey this local knowledge of impending curfew, as follows: Shahar meN karphyu achanak nahiN laga tha. Pichhle ek hafte se shahar ka wah bhag, jahaN har dusre-tisre sal karphyu lag jaya karta hai, iske liye jismani aur mansik taur par apne ko taiyar kar raha tha. Puri phiza meN ek khas tarah ki sanasani thi aur sanasani ki suNdhkar pahchanne wale tajubeNkar jante the ki jaldi hi shahar meN karphyu lag jaega. UnheN sirf is bat se hairat thi ki akhir picchle ek hafte se karphyu talta kaise ja raha tha. [Curfew was not imposed unexpectedly on the city. Therefore, that part of the city where curfew was imposed every two or three years, had been preparing itself—physically and mentally—since the previous week. There was everywhere a thrill of apprehension of a special kind and those feeling it and who were acquainted with the sensation and the helplessness produced by it, knew that soon curfew would be imposed on the city. Since the previous week, they only wondered why curfew had been postponed.] (CitationRai 1991 [1988]: 9, my translation).
4. One of my informants explicitly stated that because there had been no major riots in Kanpur since Independence, “the Muslims were not accustomed, or the population … were not accustomed to curfew” (Interview, July 19, 1993).
5. All these and other hardships endured by ordinary poor people are painted in graphic detail in Rai's book. Naim summarized some of those hardships in his foreword: “A sick child cannot get medicine; a family cannot get drinking water; a girl cannot walk down the street in safety; people cannot even stay indoors in security; a dead child cannot easily be given a decent burial” (CitationRai 1998b: 14). Each of these types of experiences are described in Rai's book, based on actual experiences and incidents known to the author. As Naim has put it, they are the narrative reports of an “insider” (p. 15). Rai himself, in an “Afterword” to the English version of the novel, says that most of the “characters and incidents” depicted therein “are connected with a small neighborhood in Allahabad City.” He goes on to say: “Their pain was so immense that it seemed impossible to me to express it in words” (CitationAfterword in Rai 1998b: 120).
6. I have used the metaphor of a theatrical drama enacted in stages (rehearsal, enactment, interpretation) to describe the production of riots in India in all my recent work on collective violence, most recently in CitationBrass (2003); see also (CitationRai 1998b: 17) on rehearsal and p. 20 on the apparent planning of riots.
7. “The curfew was a frequent affair, and the policemen were accustomed to having an evening meal either in this [Hindu] lane or the one next to it. After enjoying the food and spending some time pleasantly joking with their hosts, they would amble off to the ‘Pakistani’ lanes to impose the real curfew” (CitationRai 1998b: 43).
8. The respondent was a medical doctor who said he had treated twenty-five to thirty Muslims who had been shot in this way. Also reported in Interview August, 17, 1993.
9. And, more graphically in Rai's novel: “The high heat of August had turned their closed room into a stinking hell, filled with the stench of several sweating bodies and the two littlest children's bowel movements. Ten persons were confined to a space defined by a room thirteen by eight feet, and a verandah eight by five feet” (CitationRai 1998b: 49). And, a little further on in Rai's novel, “By the end of the second day of the curfew, the bubbling latrine and the steaming heat had turned Sayeeda's home into a little hell, and its residents were beginning to collapse under its miasmic air” (p. 53).
10. The solicitousness of militant Hindus for their cattle and their satisfaction with the relief operations in this respect contrasts with the utter lack of relief provided to Muslim households during curfew.
11. He went on ultimately to win the Aligarh seat in the 2002 elections, with significant Muslim support.
12. I have confirming evidence of such events from CitationKanpur affidavits (1992): AN-6, 8, 11, 12, 22, 23.
13. Acronym for the leading militant Hindu organization in India, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which translates rather meaninglessly as National Vounteer Service Organization.
14. One of my respondents, not a resident of Aligarh but a former AMU student, placed curfew in a list of dangers in this manner, saying “as a human being, I can be afraid [and hope that there may be] no curfew, no killings, and no massacre” (Interview, January 2, 1991).
15. See the press report on the Kanpur riot (Hindustan Times, December 16, 1992): “A woman with a disabled child at home, is crying because the police has taken away both her husband and brother for violation of curfew orders. ‘My husband had gone to fetch water from a nearby tap when police pounced on him. Who will protect me now if they attack us?”’ Cf. (CitationRai 1998b: 107), where he depicts the rush, during curfew relaxation, to the public water tap (that would, in any case, run for perhaps only half an hour a day even without curfew) as follows: “The people's need for water was so critical that, despite the curses and blows they immediately began to receive from the police, they did not run away. They hopped around, stumbled and fell, but kept pushing their pots under the [g]ushing tap.”
16. Rai's novel also opens with just such an account.
17. Again, see (CitationRai 1998b: 95 and 97–98) for graphic accounts.
18. (CitationRai 1998b: 101–102) depicts a scene in his fictionalized account of a police visit in the midst of a riot to the house of a rich Muslim politician, where he was meeting secretly with “a former MLA,” a Hindu, who “was planning to contest again in the coming elections” against the incumbent Hindu MLA. The two are depicted as working together to capitalize on the riot to defeat the sitting MLA. So, the Muslim was arranging for the distribution of “free food to the poor Hindus in his neighborhood,” whereas the Hindu politician was said to be giving “shelter to his Muslim neighbours in his own house.” The truth is stranger than fiction. In the aftermath of the post-Ayodhya riots in Kanpur in 1992, I interviewed a man who, with his gang, had killed numerous Muslims during the riots there but who was later able to produce before me a terrified Muslim who was among many he said he protected and saved during the riots there (Interview, July 20, 1993).
19. See also on this point CitationWilkinson (2004: 94–96).
20. Figures on the numbers of Muslims killed in post-independence riots are available only for the riots in the 1960s and 1970s, after which the communal composition of those killed has not been publicly reported. The figures for the early riots confirm the disproportion in the numbers of Muslims killed, but (CitationRai 1998a: 112) has insisted that the percentage of Muslims killed in riots that have taken place since the destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya in 1992 “has in fact been above ninety.” As for the arrest rates, he notes that Muslims comprise an “unbelievably larger” proportion of those arrested and “taken into custody” by the police during post-independence riots in general (pp. 114–115). In addition, according to my own information concerning police treatment of persons, especially Muslims and lower castes taken into custody, many, if not most, will also have been cursed, abused, defiled, and beaten.
21. This is Rai's proposal (Citation1998a: 119).