State organized communal violence and terror remains the preferred weapon of the ruling class
The destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992 was carried out with the full complicity of the Congress Party government at the centre and the BJP government in UP.
State organized communal violence and terror remains the preferred weapon of the ruling class
The destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992 was carried out with the full complicity of the Congress Party government at the centre and the BJP government in UP. Large-scale communal violence in Mumbai, Surat and many other places was organized during the months that followed, with thousands of people being terrorised and killed on the basis of their religious identity, and the central and state governments failing to protect the people.
This destructive act which shocked the masses of Indian people, was carried out following a concerted campaign, for nearly three years before this, for building a Ram Mandir at the site of the Babri Masjid. While the BJP led this campaign, the Congress government acted as "mediator" between Hindu and Muslim religious leaders, allowing the dispute to continue.
The destruction of the Babri Masjid showed once again, that organizing communal violence and terror remains the preferred weapon of our rulers, to divide the toiling people and divert them from the real issues facing them. In November 1984, the assassination of Indira Gandhi was used by the Congress party and government to unleash genocide against people of the Sikh community. Similarly, in 2002, people of the Muslim community were the target of brutal communal violence organised by the BJP government in Gujarat. Targeted communal violence and massacres have been organized time and again, against the Christian community in Orissa and other communities as well, the latest being the bloody communal violence organized last month in Muzaffarnagar, UP.
While different communities may have been targeted each time, the same diabolical methods have been used to execute these crimes, with the governments in the state as well as at the centre — irrespective of which political party is leading it — and the entire state machinery at its command fully facilitating its execution. In each case, the aim has been the same, i.e. to terrorise and divide the people, to crush the united popular opposition to the agenda of the ruling bourgeoisie.
Spokespersons for the ruling class, including representatives of various political parties, repeatedly promote the notion that the source of communalism and communal violence lies in religious fundamentalism of various organisations of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and others. Through numerous TV debates and other forms of propaganda they argue that the people are communal while the Indian state is secular. Nothing can be further from the truth.
The events over the last 6 decades and more confirm time and again that the Indian state is communal to the core, as are all the political parties representing the interests of the ruling bourgeois class. They clearly reveal that the "secularism" of the Indian state is an imperialist philosophy inherited from the British colonialists, who implemented the policy of "divide-and-rule" but preached “tolerance” while inciting people to fight one another on the basis of religion. They spread the notion that people in India are communal and fighting one another and that it was the “white man’s burden” to maintain “communal harmony”. The Indian state has continued to uphold the same practice and promotes the same notion, in order to divide the polity between "secular" and "communal" and confuse people about the real source of communalism and communal violence.
The demolition of the Babri Masjid exposed to our people their complete powerlessness under the existing political system. People were outraged that the two biggest parties in Parliament can get away with any heinous crime to expand their vote banks and to divert and divide the people. The police and state authorities fully facilitate these crimes against the innocent people while the guilty, those who masterminded these crimes not only go unpunished but are even rewarded with ministerial posts. And the people have no power to halt or prevent these crimes. It drew people to the inevitable conclusion that we have to organise to get rid of such a system and replace it with one in which people have political power in their own hands. The outrage among the people following the events of 1992 played an important part in giving rise to the movement for people’s empowerment.
In the last 20 years, the political representatives of the ruling bourgeois class have been increasingly resorting to the politics of communal violence and terror in order to achieve their political aims. What the last 20 years have confirmed is that the state and its organs – including the legal and judicial systems, the various commissions of inquiry, and so on – cannot be relied on to get justice for the victims of communal violence. The Indian state uses communalism and secularism as two sides of the same coin, to split and divert the people. The aim is to prevent the people from understanding the real source of their exploitation and oppression under this system and from coming together to fight it.
As long as the present political and economic system of the bourgeois class continues, our people will be subjected to more calamities like the events of December 1992. The challenge before the working class and all people of conscience is to put an end to this system and replace it with a new system in which the toiling people will have political power in their hands, to set the agenda of society in the interests of the vast majority and deal the harshest punishment to all those who inflict such crimes on our people. In such a system, state organized communal and terrorist violence will have no place and the rights, the lives and liberties of every human being will be secure.