India Today sting on UP politicians shows how riots are bought

No sooner than India Today TV ran its sting operation exposing how some politicians were ready to engineer communal violence for a price, you could see spokespersons of different political parties expressing “shock”.

I can understand that a public condemnation of such nefarious designs becomes a duty for most leaders. But what astonishes me is the “shock” that each one of them, irrespective of party affiliation, chose to highlight.

Wasn’t it rather intriguing that our political class is blissfully unaware of what goes on right under its nose, especially when it claims its success on the strength to understand the pulse of the people?

Interestingly, there are many like me who were not the least shocked to find an elected MLA offering to ignite communal violence for anything above Rs 5 lakh. After all, most politicians live and die for money; ideology, passion or public good being only jargons for public consumption. Why then should anyone be shocked to witness the India Today expose?

Apparently, what must have irked the political leaders was that the cat was out of the bag. The multiple faces that many political leaders are capable of putting up stood exposed. It showed that bribery, corruption, wheeling-dealing, lobbying and nepotism were only the tip of the iceberg. What the sting had brought in the public domain was the level to which some politicians could stoop.

After all, there has been politics played over dead bodies in India. There have been umpteen incidents of communal rioting in different parts of the country where politicians have been found to be the agent provocateur in one form or the other. Even the Muzaffarnagar riots are believed to have been the result of the incitement of communal passion by local BJP leaders like Sangeet Som and others.

But strictly speaking, they only added fuel to the fire. The initial spark had resulted from an innocuous quarrel over eve-teasing.

Yet, the motivation behind the violence that followed, which took 62 lives across five districts of western Uttar Pradesh, was political.

The 2014 Lok Sabha elections were round the corner and even as Narendra Modi was systematically shunning any communal reference in his campaign, his party’s local lumpen elements were let loose to rake in votes by playing the politics of polarisation.

And despite the fact that Jats and Muslims had traditionally lived in harmony in this affluent region of western Uttar Pradesh, the politicians of the area succeeded in forging a deep divide between the two communities.

That some people had deep vested interests in allowing the embers to simmer became glaringly visible when the Uttar Pradesh government also failed to take timely assertive action. Perhaps that suited the ruling Samajwadi Party. It also reflected how the BJP and Samajwadi Party complemented each other.

Thus, what one witnessed in Muzaffarnagar was another pattern of a politically-fuelled communal flare-up.

And it was no surprise again when the one-man inquiry commission set up by the Akhilesh government under retired high court judge Vishnu Sahai conveniently passed the buck to none other than the local intelligence unit inspector - the lowest man in the official rung. What can you make of it when the blame is shared neither by any political leader nor any official of consequence?

I am not trying to insinuate any financial trade-off. But deals struck without such trade-offs can often be more lethal than what was visible in the sting.

More than four decades ago when a communal conflagration left the otherwise cosmopolitan steel city of Jamshedpur burning, a leading national weekly had revealed how the rioting was sparked off soon after a closed-door meeting between some RSS and Jamaat-e-Islami activists. Who gained out of the violence could be anybody's guess but the victims were ultimately none other than the poor masses.

If two political rivals could have an underhand deal to manufacture a riot way back in the 1970s, why should stage-managed violence cause an outrage in this day in age when the moral fibre in politics is nearly extinct?