The lynching of Mohammed Akhlaque in Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, has led India's statesmen - old and young - to reprise the role of the concerned leader. The prime minister was forced to break his obdurate silence after the president reminded the nation of the importance of "India's core values". On Twitter, the Congress vice-president expressed his anguish on seeing "the trust and harmony built over decades" being "destroyed by the politics of hate". Rahul Gandhi has inadvertently opened up a line of enquiry that merits attention. If pluralism and tolerance are indeed part of India's "core values" - this was the gist of Pranab Mukherjee's message - why has India's secular fabric failed, repeatedly, to repel communal polarization?
One credible proposition is that communal violence is seldom spontaneous. Usually, such conflagrations are the product of not just careful planning and execution abetted by State apathy but also years of systematic indoctrination of communities into a divisive agenda by shadowy organizations. Investigations in the Dadri tehsil have revealed the existence of several vigilante, tech-savvy gau raksha outfits that acted as "informal pressure groups". Earlier, the displacement of Muslims from Muzaffarnagar, where the Jats and the victims had coexisted within an interdependent - albeit feudal - economy, had led India to discover the chilling potency of such campaigns as Love Jihad and Ghar Wapsi. Kandhamal had witnessed a surge in the presence of radical Hindutva groups that exploited subterranean community tensions before Graham Staines was murdered.
Cold facts
Diverse societies have evolved mechanisms to douse such fires. But even decades old trust and harmony can be frittered away because of the institutionalization of a system of patronage in which the services that are supposed to be provided by the State are distributed among claimants - usually the socially disadvantaged groups - in return of their allegiance to the majoritarian agenda. The riots in Gujarat in 2002, which have been studied extensively, are a perfect example of such a dangerous trade-off. Records show that most of the perpetrators of the violence belong to the adivasi and Dalit communities. An entrenched communal mindset, the result of organized propaganda over years, did not alone bring about the demise of the famed Dalit-Muslim alliance in the state. Profit - monetary payments or the ownership of land and property vacated by the fleeing Muslims - played a significant role in the fragmentation of social relationships between Muslims and Dalits/adivasis.
Various strategies have been employed by the advocates of pluralism to combat communalism in India. They range from artistic initiatives to the constitution of Peace Committees. But not enough has been done to neutralize the Hindutva myth factory. The purging of empirical evidence of Hindus eating beef and the conflation of Muslims with cattle-slayers are just two instances of the perverse success of this institution.
The anti-communal discourse must think of ways to disseminate quantitative data to confront such twisted propaganda. The shrill demand to ban beef is a case in point. The beef ban is not merely an assault on the freedom of choice in a nation that ranks seventh in the world in the domestic consumption of the meat. Such a ban has the potential to diminish India's vikas - the prime minister's favourite word - by 2 per cent, restrict a source of cheap nutrition for a sizeable section of beneficiaries as well as pose significant environmental challenges on account of the unregulated rise of the cattle population.
Enough reasons not to loathe those who love their chateaubriand?
