Riot After Riot: Reports on Cast and Communal Violence in India 9780140110265, 0140110267

Citation preview

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/riotafterriotrepOOOOakba

PENGUIN BOOKS * RIOT AFTER RIOT M.J. AKBAR, an Indian Muslim, was born in January 1951. His maternal grandfather, Mir Habibullah, was a Kashmiri who took his shawl business to Amritsar. In the chaos of 1947, Amritsar was emptied of Muslims and the family went as .penniless refugees to Pakistan. His paternal grandfather was orphaned early in life, and ran away from the poverty of his village in Bihar to the industrial outskirts of Calcutta. A Hindu called Prayaag, he later converted to Islam and took the name Sheikh Rahamatullah. He remained in India because of his commitment to the Congress Party. M.J. Akbar was educated at the Calcutta Boys’ School and gradu­ ated with honours in English from Presidency College, Calcutta, in 1970. He then became a trainee sub-editor with the Times of India organization and was posted to the Illustrated Weekly of India under Khushwant Singh. He was given the job of editing the fortnightly magazine Onlooker of the Free Press Journal Group in 1974 and joined the Ananda Bazar Group of Publications in Calcutta in 1976. Here he reshaped and edited the successful weekly magazine Sunday. In 1982, he conceived, designed and edited the new daily English newspaper of the group, The Telegraph, which so^n achieved great success. Apart from editing these two publications, the author has also undertaken a great many on-the-spot reports and interviews. In 1985, he wrote India: The Siege Within which was published by Penguin. M.J. Akbar lives in Calcutta.

From the library of

Bina Gupta Curators’ Distinguished Research Professor

M.J.AKBAR

RIOT AFTER RIOT Reports on Caste and Communal Violence in India

PENGUIN BOOKS

Penguin Books (India) Limited, 72-B Himalaya House, 23 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi-110 001, India . Penguin Books Ltd., Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England Viking Penguin Inc., 40 West 23rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10010. U.S.A. Penguin Books Australia Ltd., Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd., 2801 John Street, Markham, Ontario, Canada L3R 1B4 Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd., 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand First published by Penguin Books India 1988 Reprinted 1988, 1990 Copyright © M.J. Akbar 1988 Introduction copyright © Khushwatit Singh 1988 All rights reserved

\

The essays in this book first appeared in Sunday magazine and The Telegraph, Calcutta. Made and printed in India by Ananda Offset Private Ltd. Typeset in Times Roman

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or other­ wise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other then that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subse- ' quent purchaser ahd without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval sys­ tem, or transmitted in any form or by any means ( electronic, mechanical, photocopy­ ing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copy­ right owner and the above mentioned publisher of this book.

To Aveek With gratitude In friendship

Contents Introduction A Split-level War in Jamshedpur * Massacre in Moradabad Have Gun, Will Kill A Tale of Two Villages Death had a Signature The Spiders of Orissa Revelations Down South The Land of Seven Hundred Hills The Tomb of the Eunuch God’s Martyrs Gorkhaland’s Historical Imperative The Tyranny of the Failed Artiste Meerut’s Politics of Communalism Life and Death on a Burning Ghat The Day New Market Died

'

.. .9 . . . 15 . .. 33 ...45 ...61 ...77 . .. 87 ...92 ... 104 ... 115 . . . 126 ... 135 . .. 145 . .. 151 . .. 159 . .. 172

Introduction , The theme of this book is violence in the land of Gandhi. The Mahatma had made non-violence (