Riots in India

India has faced a number of riots both before and after its independence.

Quotes

• These communal riots may be justly regarded as an outward manifestation of that communal spirit which grew in intensity throughout the nineteenth century and at last drove the Hindus- and Muslims into two opposite camps in politics. The ground, was prepared by the frankly communal outlook of the Muslims, typified by the Wahabi Movement and the Aligarh Movement. The situation was rendered worse by the policy of Divide and Rule adopted by the British Government with the definite object’ of playing one community against the other. The spectre of communalism which haunted Indian politics even at the close of the nineteenth century was destined to grow in size and volume as years rolled by. The cloud that was no bigger than a man's, hand in 1900 soon overcast the whole sky and brought rain, thunder and storm which drenched the whole country with blood and tears in less than half a century. (440)
  • R.C. Majumdar History Of The Freedom Movement In India, vol I.

• How far Gandhi’s fast had any salutary effect on the communal relations may be judged by the fact that four days after Gandhi began his fast there was a serious communal riot at Shahjahanpur in which the military had to intervene and 9 were killed and about 100 injured. On October 8 when Gandhi broke his fast, there were serious communal riots at Allahabad, Kanchrapara near Calcutta and at Sagar and Jubbulpore in C.P.
  • R.c. Majumdar, History of the Freedom Movement in India, Vol. 3, p. 283. quoted in Vikram Sampath - Savarkar, A Contested Legacy, 1924-1966 (2021)

• The situation only worsened in 1925 and 1926. No less than sixteen communal riots occurred in 1925, the most terrible being those at Delhi, Aligarh, Arvi (Central Provinces) and Sholapur. On 2 April 1926, deadly riots erupted again in Calcutta. They went on over three waves leaving hundreds killed and injured. Riots rocked interiors of Bengal, Rawalpindi, Allahabad and about five riots occurred in Delhi alone.
  ...Between 1922 and 1927, approximately 450 lives were lost and 5000 persons injured in communal clashes. Almost every province seemed to have been affected by the virus. The storm spread easily and widely from one place to another, bringing in its wake enormous loss of life and property.
  • Vikram Sampath - Savarkar, A Contested Legacy, 1924-1966 (2021)

• As a government-appointed Statutory Committee observed in 1928: Every year since 1923 has witnessed communal rioting on an extensive, and in fact, on an increasing scale which has as yet shown no sign of abating. The attached list, which excludes minor occurrences, records no less than 112 communal riots within the last 5 years, of which 31 have occurred during 1927.
  • RC Majumdar, History of the Freedom Movement in India, pp. 285–86. quoted in Vikram Sampath - Savarkar, A Contested Legacy, 1924-1966 (2021)

• So, at every stage of the escalation, you see Muslims starting, Hindus merely reacting, and Muslims pre-planning large-scale violence. And it is not me who says so, I read this in the reporting of secularist newspapers (though not on their Opinion page). These are indications from unsuspected sources that members of the Muslim community take a disproportionately large part in starting communal violence... But going by the riot information generally available, I do find that there is truth in the received wisdom that
  1. a clear majority of the riots are started by Muslims,
  2. a clear majority of the victims are Muslims, at least in the final count
  3. a clear majority of the victims shot by the police (not including the Kar Sevaks) are Muslims; the police in most of these case claims self-defense against attacks by mobs or snipers. ...
  In order to keep an assessment of riot patterns in perspective, we should compare with the situation in Pakistan and Bangla Desh. The general pattern there is:
  1. Roughly 100% of Hindu-Muslim riots are started by Muslims.
  2. Roughly 100% of the victims in the actual communal confrontation are Hindus.
  3. Those few times the police intervenes, it does have the decency to stop the attackers rather than their fleeing victims, so the vast majority of those killed in police firing on the occasion of riots, are Muslims. But like in India, the police often fails to intervene, which may get interpreted as a form of passive connivance with the majority community. ...
  If Muslims are not more riot-prone than Hindus, then why do you never ever hear of a Hindu attack on mosques in Bangla Desh, but a lot of the reverse? Or, for that matter, why not Christian attacks on mosques, even while Christians do get their share of attacks and harassments from the Muslims? In these Muslim-majority countries, communal violence is a completely one-directional affair. Even when Muslims destroyed hundreds of Hindu temples on the pretext of protest against the Shilanyas in Ayodhya, there has not been any report of similar retaliation by the Hindus....
  As a general rule, in communal conflicts the world over, you will find majorities attacking minorities, seldom the reverse.... But in India, you do see one of the minorities on the offensive even where it is clearly outnumbered. Even if their percentage of starting riots was only proportional to their percentage of the population, i.e. about 12% (and no secularist so far has been dishonest enough to suggest this), then that would still be more than what minorities elsewhere, and especially in Islamic countries, would dare to do.
  • Elst, Koenraad (1991). Ayodhya and after: Issues before Hindu society.

• When reading the press reports about communal riots, one should make a distinction between two stages of riot reporting. The day after a riot breaks out, the press will just write what happened, in some detail. The report will be a little bit blurred by the obligatory usage of non-definite terms for the communities involved : "As members of one community passed through an area dominated by another community, stones were thrown at them", etc. But the experienced reader can mostly understand who is who... However, the editorials devoted to these instances of communal carnage are not interested in the details of the matter, and in their effort to allot guilt and suggest remedies, they often implicitly start from a riot scenario which is totally unsupported by the factual details that appeared in the first report.
  One might of course start blaming any possible (I hasten to prefix alleged) provocative slogans uttered by the processionists and by that local VHP leader; but normally, people who start the violence, like throwing stones or committing murder, are held responsible for these acts, and at least partly responsible for the reactive violence which they may trigger. It is humanly quite feasible to listen to objectionable and insulting slogans without having a knee-jerk reaction of throwing bombs. It is a free human decision to react with violence. At worst, slogans can be a reason for violence ; given human freedom, they can never be the cause. This fake excuse of the provocative slogans leading mechanically to stone-throwing and worse, is used routinely by biased reporters.
  • Elst K. Ayodhya and After: Issues Before Hindu Society (1991)

• This is the usual media discourse: two-sided violence or even one-sided Muslim violence is presented as a Hindu attack on the poor hapless Muslims (as in late February 2020, when the Wall Street Journal and Scroll.in notoriously misrepresented a photograph of a Muslim rioters’ attack in Delhi as showing a Hindu attack), and only when the Muslim initiative is too glaring to be denied, their rearguard tactic is to present it as two-sided.
  • Elst, K. Forever Ayodhya, 2023, Aryan Books International chapter 18. The Truth about Ayodhya that Many Journalists Seem to Ignore

• Till today, Hindu-Muslim riots are typically started by Muslims. If Hindus restrain themselves, the riot remains small and is not reported in the international media. Only if Hindus mobilize does it become a newsworthy riot, and those are the cases where the victims on the Muslim side can be numerous. This way, a false impression is created of Muslims living in constant persecution by an overbearing Hindu majority. A proper perspective is given by comparing with the situation in Pakistan and Bangladesh, where all Hindu-Muslim violence without exception has Muslims as perpetrators and Hindus as victims, because the fearful Hindu minority wouldn’t dare to act against the Muslims, not even in retaliation. Moreover, for every instance of violent Hindu reaction in India, there are a dozen where the Hindus control their anger.
  • Elst, K. The argumentative Hindu (2012)

• Any event in any Muslim country gives Indian Muslims the right to take to the streets and start vicious riots, all over the country, in an orgy of loot, arson and vandalism (especially vandalism of Hindu temples, shops and houses situated near Muslim areas). The event may be the arson by an Australian tourist in the Al-Aqsa mosque in far-off Jerusalem, the temporary take-over by a group of Sunni extremists of the mosque in Mecca, the execution of Zulfigar Ali Bhutto by Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan, or the death of Zia-ul-Haq in an aircrash.
  • S. TALAGERI 1993 The Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism (1993) :page 23

• The Muhammadan mobs attacked all the Hindu Temples in the city, numbering about fifteen, and broke the idols. They also raided the Sharan Vishveshwar Temple and attempted to set fire to the Temple car. The Police were eventually obliged to fire, with the result that three Muhammadans, including the Police Superintendent Mr. Azizullah, were killed and about a dozen persons injured. Next morning the streets were again in the hands of Muhammadan mobs and considerable damage was done to Hindu houses and shops. On the arrival of Police Reinforcement, order was restored. On the 14th August the Muslim mob fury was at its height and almost all the temples within the range of the mob, some fifty in number, were desecrated, their sanctum sanctorum entered into, their idols broken and their buildings damaged.
  • the Gulbarga Riots of 1924, , in R.C. Majumdar, History of the Freedom Movement in India, Volume 3, 1st edition, Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay, Calcutta, 1963, p. 278.