India divided over communal
violence bill By Sudha
Ramachandran
BANGALORE - India is on the
brink of enacting legislation that will seek
justice for minorities of all categories when they
become victims of targeted, mass violence.
Crafted by the National Advisory Council
(NAC), the Prevention of Communal and Targeted
Violence (Access to Justice and Reparations) Bill,
2011, will be introduced in parliament during the
upcoming monsoon session.
The bill aims at
creating a framework for preventing pogroms such
as the attacks on Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, and
the provision of relief for victims of such
violence. It has kicked up a storm with some
people criticizing it as "draconian" and
"anti-Hindu" and
others dismissing it as
"toothless and meaningless".
Broadly, the
bill targets acts that result in injury and were
directed against persons because of their
affiliation to any group. Such acts include sexual
assault, hate propaganda, torture and organized
communal violence. The bill creates a National
Authority for Communal Harmony, Justice, and
Reparation, charged with preventing acts of
communal violence and monitoring investigations
into incidents. It also covers the punishment of
officials who fail to discharge their duties in an
unbiased manner during outbreaks of such violence.
Communal violence has wracked India for
decades. Partition of the subcontinent in 1947 was
accompanied by horrific violence between Hindus
and Sikhs on the one hand and Muslims on the
other, leaving a million dead and over 10 times
that number homeless.
Since independence,
there have been countless instances of communal
violence. In the 2005-09 period alone, 648 people
were killed and 11,278 injured in 4,030 such
incidents, according to the PRS Legislative
Research website. Communal clashes during this
period peaked in 2008 with 943 cases being
reported that year.
Communal violence in
India is rarely spontaneous. It is mostly
engineered.
Most clashes have been between
Hindus and Muslims but Hindu-Christian violence
too is not uncommon. While people of all religious
communities suffer during these riots, it is the
minorities - Muslims, Sikhs, and in recent years
Christians, who constitute 13.43%, 1.87% and 2.34%
of the population respectively - who have borne
the brunt.
Some of the worst communal
pogroms have occurred in the past three decades.
In 1984, following the assassination of prime
minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards,
mobs led by politicians from the ruling Congress
party incited and organized the burning and
looting of property and killing of Sikhs in Delhi
and other parts of North India. Around 3,000 Sikhs
were killed. The government did nothing to halt
the violence for at least three days. Indira's son
and successor, Rajiv Gandhi, even justified the
violence, declaring that "when a mighty tree
falls, it is only natural that the earth around it
does shake a little".
When the Babri
Masjid, a famous mosque in Ayodhya was destroyed
by Hindu nationalists in December 1992, riots
broke out in various parts of the country. Mumbai
suffered the worst with around 900 people killed,
about 575 of them Muslims.
A decade later,
Gujarat convulsed with communal violence when mobs
led by ministers and politicians of the state's
ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its
fraternal organizations attacked Muslims and
destroyed their property. Chief Minister Narendra
Modi's government did little to stop the violence.
In fact, police were reportedly instructed at a
meeting that they allow Hindus to "vent their
anger" against Muslims over an "attack" on a
train, the Sabarmati Express, which was set alight
a few days earlier, resulting in the death of
around 59 passengers, mainly Hindu.
Rarely
during communal violence have those targeted got
state protection. Police ignore calls for help and
refuse to register cases filed by victims. Seldom
have the guilty been brought to justice. According
to Harvinder Singh Phoolka, a senior Supreme Court
advocate who has been fighting for justice on
behalf of victims of the 1984 riots, "Out of 2,733
officially admitted murders [in the anti-Sikh
violence of 1084], only nine cases led to
convictions." Twenty-seven years since the pogrom,
just over 20 of the accused have been convicted -
a conviction rate of less than 1%.
What is
more, rarely have victims received the relief they
are entitled to.
If communal violence
occurs and is not controlled immediately it is
because the police and local authorities refuse to
do their duty, points out Siddharth Varadarajan in
The Hindu.
"What we need, thus, is not so
much a new law defining new crimes (although that
would be useful too) but a law to ensure that the
police and bureaucrats and their political masters
follow the existing law of the land. In other
words, we need a law that punishes them for
discriminating against citizens who happen to be
minorities," he writes.
And this is what
the Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence
bill sets out to do.
Not only does it
create stern punishments for public servants for
dereliction of duty towards victims, the bill also
holds their superiors accountable. "Where it is
shown that continuous widespread or systematic
unlawful activity has occurred," the bill says,
"it can be reasonably presumed that the superior
in command of the public servant whose duty it was
to prevent the commission of communal and targeted
violence, failed to exercise supervision ... and
shall be guilty of the offence of breach of
command responsibility."
With the bill
providing for sentences of up to 10 years
imprisonment for breach of command responsibility,
"superiors will hopefully be deterred from
allowing a Delhi 1984 or Gujarat 2002 to happen on
their watch," Varadarajan says.
India's
constitution declares the country to be secular.
However, institutional bias against religious and
linguistic minorities is deeply entrenched, making
them vulnerable to violence.
The
Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence Bill
seeks to change this in several ways.
It
describes "communal and targeted violence" as that
acts that are "knowingly directed against any
person by virtue of his or her membership of any
group, which destroys the secular fabric of the
nation" and then goes on to define "group" as "a
religious or linguistic minority, in any State in
the Union of India, or Scheduled Castes [Dalits]
and Scheduled Tribes."
In other words,
only violence against a minority community is
considered communal violence.
The law also
makes it obligatory that at least four of the
seven member posts in the National Authority for
Communal Harmony, Justice and Reparation belong to
a minority community.
The bill's attempt
to correct institutional bias against religious
and linguistic minorities has drawn fire from
Hindu nationalists, who see it as evidence of the
United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government's
appeasement of Muslims. They are asking why
violence against the majority community should not
be considered communal.
Social activist
Ram Puniyani draws attention to "concrete
realities" in Indian society to justify the bill's
focus on minorities. The minorities have after all
suffered disproportionately during communal
violence. Muslims comprise 90% of victims of
violence, he says.
Besides, the bill
speaks of "a religious and linguistic minority in
any state" in India. Hindus are an overwhelming
majority - 80.46% - nationwide but constitute a
minority in seven states, including Jammu and
Kashmir, Punjab, Mizoram, Meghalaya and Nagaland.
They too are thus covered by the bill.
An
earlier draft of the bill had irked secular
sections as well. It had defined communal violence
as that which has destroyed India's secular
fabric. This prompted criticism that the bill
raised the bar for violence to be regarded as
communal too high rendering it meaningless. After
all it is arguable whether any incident of
communal violence has actually destroyed India's
secular fabric.
Responding to criticism,
the NAC has now made 49 amendments to its earlier
draft. In its definition of communal and targeted
violence it has dropped the reference to
"destruction of the secular fabric". It has also
deleted a clause in the earlier draft that allowed
the federal government to unilaterally intervene
in communal situations in states as it had raised
concern over its implications for the working of
the country's federal structure.
The NAC
has, however, ignored the right-wing's criticism
and stuck to its focus on minorities in the bill.
This could mean that the bill will come up against
fierce opposition in parliament from parties like
the BJP.
Sudha Ramachandran is
an independent journalist/researcher based in
Bangalore. She can be reached at
sudha98@hotmail.com
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