Malta-born American cartoonist Joe Sacco has gained worldwide popularity for his unique ‘comics journalism’ and has added another feather to his cap with his latest book, ‘The Once and Future Riot’. But the publisher has stopped this book from distribution. After all, this is about the biggest Muzaffarnagar riots since the 2002 Gujarat riots. Let us first look at the facts. India has a sad history of occasionally banning books. But the government has not banned Sacco’s book. The publisher itself took this step. He stopped the book and sent a five-page note suggesting some amendments, which Sacco rejected. Now many other Indian publishers are trying to contact Sacco. Sacco says that he wants the book to reach Indian readers. In this 144-page book, Sacco, a master of comics-journalism, has told a complex story through his brilliant sketches. The text is recorded only in ‘blurbs’, which will take no more than two hours to read, unless you are mesmerized by his drawings and lost in the story told through pictures and faces. The book is not banned, and no law prevents any book from being read. The story of the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots told by SACCO is straightforward, largely linear, factual and has been told many, if not hundreds, times in Indian journalism. Nothing surprising has been said in the book, no new revelations have been made and nothing has been exaggerated. SACCO has described the riot as ‘small’ in view of the Indian context. After all, why has Sacco written an entire book on this, while his works on the massacres and massacres in Bosnia and Gaza have brought him a lot of fame and awards? Why did they get so much interest in the riot which they are calling ‘small’, in which a total of 62 people, including 42 Muslims and 20 Hindus, were killed? It is certainly no small thing that 62 people were killed in a riot just 150 kilometers away from New Delhi. But whether you like it or not, there has also been a scale for the size of communal riots. Sacco’s ‘reporting’ is incredibly nuanced but arguably they have missed the mark in some cases. For example, his understanding that communal riots in India occurred only after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, following the mass killings that took place during Partition. Whereas Gujarat itself has a history of riots even before 1992, especially in the 1969 Ahmedabad riots in which 512 people were killed. Big numbers say a lot. Research on communal violence has been based on the Varshney-Wilkinson dataset. This dataset is named after Professor Ashutosh Varshney of Brown University and Professor Steven Wilkinson of Yale University. It contains data of 1,194 notable communal riots that took place in India between 1950 and 1995. Of these, 72 percent i.e. 871 riots took place during the tenure of the governments of Nehru, Indira and Rajiv Gandhi. The series of communal riots in India did not start after the demolition of Babri Masjid, but the irony is that SACCO accepted this argument. To know more about our national shame in the form of communal riots, also see ‘A Factsheet on Communal Riots’ on the website of ‘Public Policy Research Centre’. But this should not let us lose sight of what Sacco has emphasized about how local conflicts escalate into riots, with almost leaderless and initially politicized mobs taking over. Politicians and theorists also take advantage of the opportunity. Sacco says that this is what happened in Muzaffarnagar. They also remind who was in command at that time. At that time, there was the Samajwadi Party government of his father Mulayam Singh Yadav under the leadership of Akhilesh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh and the command of the country was in the hands of the UPA government. Both ‘secular’ forces! Given how polarized public debate has become after the Babri demolition (1992) and the Gujarat riots (2002), sometimes a sharp foreign eye gives you a clearer picture. Sacco describes how isolated incidents in Muzaffarnagar were treated lightly, such as the rape and attempted murder of a Muslim girl; the murder of a Muslim boy on suspicion of harassing a Hindu girl and the murder of two cousins from the Hindu group in revenge; Muslim mob attacks a procession of Jats; All such incidents were not taken seriously. Sacco says that in the case of murder of two boys, the police arrested many Muslims, whose shirts had blood stains on them. All of them were released the next morning and the SSP and the District Magistrate were also transferred. SACCO has written that the Jats of UP may have felt that this was an attempt to satisfy the Muslims. In his 17-page findings titled ‘The Future Riot’, Sacco wrote that the riots helped the BJP win the 2017 and 2022 elections in that state. But no government will ban a book saying such things. Such things can be found in two dozen books published in the last decade. Yes, the publisher is right in saying that publishing the map of India given in the book would be a violation of the law. But everyone knows how to deal with such matters. In foreign publications such maps are stamped as incorrect, or they are removed. But using this as an excuse for not distributing a book would be a cruel joke. There has been a long history of communal riots in independent India. Gujarat itself has a history of riots even before 1992, especially in the Ahmedabad riots of 1969 in which 512 people were killed. Big numbers say a lot. The Varshney-Wilkinson dataset contains data on 1,194 communal riots that occurred in India between 1950 and 1995. (These are the author’s own views)
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Shekhar Gupta’s column: It is important to talk about the reasons for the riots
