By Soroor Ahmed, TwoCircles.net,
A quarter century has passed since the communal earthquake had rocked the silk-city of Bhagalpur in Bihar on October 24, 1989 yet we are still piecing together the rubbles of social, political and economic fabrics.
The tremors continued to shake the entire seismic zone across a large part of the cow-belt of the country, for several weeks as the BJP leader, Lal Krishna Advani, had already launched his Ram Janambhoomi movement. The aftershocks were felt most powerfully on October 26 when the district police revolted against the transfer of the SP, K S Dwivedi, when the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was very much there. The most powerful man of the country appeared totally helpless and clueless. These upheavals might have weakened the foundation of secularism, but not destroyed it.
History has come full circle in these 25 years. In May 2014 Muslims voted overwhelmingly in favour of RJD’s Bulo Mandal, a Gangota, an extremely backward castes living on banks of Ganga in eastern Bihar. They were alleged to be in the forefront of riots of 1989. Yet the minority community largely ignored the sitting BJP MP, Shahnawaz Husain, and the ruling Janata Dal (United) candidate, Abu Qaisar, as they considered Bulo as a better secular choice. Thus, he is the first Gangota to be elected to the Lok Sabha. This had happened notwithstanding the fact that the RJD could not withstand the NaMo wave elsewhere and won only four seats in Bihar.
If the parliamentary election held within a month of Bhagalpur riots in November 1989 saw the BJP increasing its tally from two to 88 seats, recently, something very strange happened here. When the Congress party is down in the dump its candidate, Ajit Sharma, father of actress Neha Sharma, won the by-election from Bhagalpur Town Assembly seat held on August 21. Ever since 1967 the BJP or its earlier avatar, the Bharatiya Jan Sangh, had lost this urban seat only once.
This is an unusual development as the by-poll was necessitated after the BJP veteran and former minister, Ashwini Choubey, got elected to the Lok Sabha from Buxar parliamentary seat at the western end of Bihar.
Bhagalpur Town segment has a big upper caste and trading community votes, besides it is an RSS bastion, yet exactly 25 years after the riots the victory gave a ray of hope to the Congress.
The Bhagalpur riots drove the proverbial last nail in its coffin in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and several other states. A few months before the riots both the Chief Minister and Speaker of the state Assembly, Bhagwat Jha Azad and Shiv Chandra Jha respectively, were from this city. In fact, the clash between both the Jhas forced the Congress high command to replace Azad, father of cricketer-turned-BJP MP, Kirti Azad, with Satyendra Narayan Singh in March 1989. The Bhagalpur riots inquiry commission report also referred to this open tussle and its impact on the politics of the district.
Though the November 1989 election was held in the most polarized atmosphere it was V P Singh’s Janata Dal candidate, Chunchun Yadav, and not anyone from the BJP, who was elected from Bhagalpur parliamentary seat. Another irony is that like Gangotas, Yadavs too were said to have played a leading role in the riots. But that was before the advent of Lalu Prasad on March 10, 1990 and the announcement of the implementation of Mandal Commission report by V P Singh five months later. Bhagalpur set the stage for a new type of social engineering even before the Mandal report was actually implemented.
Following the Muslim-Jat formula of late Charan Singh of Bharatiya Lok Dal (in 1979 he went on to become the PM for a brief period) in Uttar Pradesh, Lalu started working on Muslim-Yadav combination from the day one. This helped him survive politically for 15-long years before being upstaged by ‘Chote Bhai’ (younger brother) Nitish Kumar, a Kurmi, another backward caste, in November 2005.
Those keen on tracing the origin of Mandal-Mandir phenomenon cannot ignore Bhagalpur though it is neither the birth place of B P Mandal (whose ancestral village is Murho in Madhepura district of Bihar) of the Second Backward Classes Commission fame, or of Ram and Sita. They were born in Ayodhya and Janakpur in Nepal respectively.
A quarter century later Bhagalpur remained a mystery as it denied the BJP victory in the Lok Sabha and Assembly by-polls when everything was going right for the saffron party. In a way Bhagalpur helped Bihar build new bridges––not just the one built in this city over river Ganga during the Lalu-Rabri era. The social bridge kept the state––otherwise notorious for violence and crime––communally peaceful. Bihar saw just one big communal riot – two months before the demolition of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. On October 6, 1992, Sitamarhi, the town situated on the border with Nepal and which is famous for Sita Samahit Temple was marred by the communal violence in which about 50 perished. Sita was abandoned here; she gave birth to Luv and Kush and descended into the lap of Mother Earth forever. Thus both the holy places associated with Ram and Sita witnessed violence.
Like in Bhagalpur in 1989 the Sitamarhi riots took place after the Durga Puja and over religious procession. A dispute over the route of a procession, carrying idols for immersion, sparked off violence in Sitamarhi. Bhagalpur has lost much of its ‘silken’ touch, not just because of riots, but also because of other factors, though a large number of looms belonging to Muslim weavers were destroyed and many of them killed. Korean and Chinese synthetic yarns that look like silk but lack the intrinsic qualities of raw silk have flooded the market.
Local people attribute it to the construction of Ganga bridge, which reduced the distance from Nepal, from where these foreign yarns are brought. Besides, there is now a growing demand for other types of clothes such as linen.
The social fabric woven after 1989 violence, anyways, appears to be holding though the inquiry commission reports, compensations, pensions and punishment –– albeit only for some rioters ––have failed to fully heal the wounds.
(Soroor Ahmed is a Patna-based freelance journalist. He writes on political, social, national and international issues.)