Communalism and Sexual Violence in India

The Politics of Gender, Ethnicity and Conflict

Megha Kumar

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781784535308
• eBook ISBN: 9781786720689
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Social Sciences

Sexual violence has been a regular feature of communal conflict in India since independence in 1947. The Partition riots, which saw the brutal victimization of thousands of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh women, have so far dominated academic discussions of communal violence. This book examines the specific conditions motivating sexual crimes against women based on three of the deadliest riots that occurred in Ahmedabad city, Gujarat, in 1969, 1985 and 2002. Using an in-depth, grassroots-level analysis, Megha Kumar moves away from the predominant academic view that sees Hindu nationalist ideology as responsible for encouraging attacks on women. Instead, gendered communal violence is shown to be governed by the interaction of an elite ideology and the unique economic, social and political dynamics at work in each instance of conflict. Using government reports, Hindu nationalist publications and civil society commentaries, as well as interviews with activists, politicians and riot survivors, the book offers new insights into the factors and ideologies involved in communal violence, as well as the conditions that work to prevent sexual violence in certain riot contexts.The Politics of Sexual Violence in India will be valuable for academic researchers, Human Rights organizations, NGOs working with survivors of sexual violence and for those involved with community development and urban grassroots activism.

CHAPTER 1

1969

Many Muslim women were subjected to severe sexual violence during the 1969 Hindu–Muslim riot in Ahmedabad.¹ This violence was similar to that which occurred during Partition in 1947, and during the anti-Muslim massacre in 2002 – the two most devastating episodes of communal violence in India's modern history. In 1947, 1969 as well as 2002, women were stripped, paraded naked on streets, raped in fields, on roads and in their homes, sometimes in the presence of their husbands, siblings, parents and children. Their breasts were scratched and cut off, and their genitals mutilated. Some of the victims were left for dead, some murdered. Yet in significant ways, the 1969 riot was different from the episodes that preceded and followed it.

The foremost difference is in the scale of the violence. During 1947 and 1948, thousands of Hindu, Sikh and Muslim women were raped, at least one million people were killed and up to 15 million people were displaced (Khan 2007). Punjab and Bengal, the two regions that were partitioned, were the epicentres of the violence, but several other parts of India were affected as well. Since Partition, India has mercifully never witnessed a human tragedy of comparable magnitude. However, those it has witnessed are by no means negligible. Whereas Gujarat escaped Partition violence largely unscathed,² it has since witnessed recurring communal violence. The worst such episode in the state occurred in the summer of 2002. Between February and April 2002, up to 2,000 people were killed in 19 of the total of 26 districts in Gujarat. An estimated 150–200 Muslim women were subjected to brutal sexual violence in Ahmedabad (the worst-affected region) and at least two other districts (CCT 2002, 1:226). Some 2,500 Muslims were reported ‘missing’ and 113,000 others were forced to flee their homes and seek refuge in 103 relief camps across the state.³

In contrast to 1947–48 and 2002, the overall toll taken by the 1969 riot was relatively smaller: according to official estimates, 660 people were killed, 1,074 grievously injured and over 48,000 rendered homeless in sporadic rioting across Gujarat between 18 and 30 September 1969 (Reddy Commission 1971: 179–82). Informal estimates put the number of fatalities at 1,000–2,000 (Spodek 2011: 172). No other state apart from Gujarat was affected by the riot. In 1969, Ahmedabad was the epicentre of the violence; seven of Gujarat's 19 districts were affected.⁴ These were Banaskantha, Mehsana, Sabarkantha and Gandhinagar in the north; Kheda and Anand in the east; and Vadodara in the south. Sexual violence was perpetrated against Muslim women in several neighbourhoods across Ahmedabad, as will be shown in the course of this chapter.

Although relatively smaller in scale compared with 1947–48 and 2002, the 1969 riot in Ahmedabad was the deadliest episode of communal conflict India had witnessed between 1950 and 1995. Even when communal violence reached unprecedented levels across the country in the early 1990s, no single riot and no city recorded as many fatalities (Varshney 2002: 220). In Gujarat, Hindu and Islamic festivals and mass religious processions had frequently resulted in inter-community scuffles since at least the eighteenth century (Dave Commission 1990, 1:67–9). Just prior to independence, communal riots occurred in the state in 1941 and 1946 as well. Between 1956 and 1968, the government had also recorded numerous ‘minor incidents’ of rioting involving Hindus and Muslims (Reddy Commission 1971: 46). The 1969 riot, however, surpassed all these episodes.

The religious background of those involved in the violence also sets the 1969 conflict apart from the events of 1947 and 2002. During Partition, Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims were perpetrators as well as victims of sexual and other forms of violence. During 2002, on the other hand, the overwhelming majority of the victims were Muslims, and almost all the perpetrators of the post-Godhra massacre were Hindus. The 1969 riot lay somewhere in between these extremes: both Hindus and Muslims were targeted for violence, but the latter comprised the majority of the victims and incurred disproportionate losses. According to official statistics, of the 660 people killed, 430 were Muslims and 230 Hindus; of the 1,074 injured, 592 were Muslims and 482 were Hindus. Out of the Rs 42 million worth of property destroyed or looted in Ahmedabad alone, property worth Rs 32 million belonged to Muslims (Reddy Commission 1971: 179–82). Unofficial statistics put the death toll at up to 2,000, which if true would make the 1969 riot as deadly as the 2002 massacre. Yet there is an important distinction between these two episodes: the marked widening of the gap between the casualties suffered by Muslims and Hindus. In 1969, Muslim fatalities would have comprised about half to two-thirds of the overall death toll, unlike in 2002, when the overwhelming majority of those killed were Muslims. This shift reflects the intensification of communal divisions across large parts of Gujarat, particularly from the mid-1980s.⁵

Another crucial difference among the three episodes has to do with the role of the state apparatus, especially the government, individual politicians and the police. In 1947–8, the Indian subcontinent was undergoing a tough and bloody transition from colonial rule to democratic self-governance. Both the newly created Indian and Pakistani administrations were overwhelmed as over 10 million people crossed the Radcliffe Line in Punjab and Bengal in the largest mass migration of people in the twentieth century. Neither the Indian administration nor its Pakistani counterpart was directly implicated in perpetrating sexual and other forms of violence against Hindu or Muslim women and men. On the contrary, the government led by India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru took an overtly paternalistic attitude towards women who had been raped, abducted or converted to Islam during Partition, and were still in Pakistan. In 1948, it launched a ‘Recovery Operation’ to ensure that such women were returned to their rightful ‘owners’ (their country and their families), even if that meant disregarding the wishes of those women who did not want to return to India or to their families (Butalia 1998; Daiya 2008; R. Menon and Bhasin 1998).

Since Partition, however, the role of the state in inter-religious riots has undergone a significant shift, which culminated in 2002 when several senior politicians, members of the Gujarat legislative assembly and police officials condoned the violence against Muslims, and in some instances even actively facilitated it.⁶ At the time, the BJP was in power in Gujarat as well as in the national government in Delhi. By contrast, in 1969, the Congress Party–led regional government was neither overwhelmed by external contingencies (as the Indian government had been in 1947–48), nor overtly Hindu nationalist in ways that the BJP government in 2002 certainly was. Yet, as will be argued in what follows, it was overwhelmed by the riot and was not completely impartial in its handling of the violence.

While journalists, writers, academics, commentators and activists have done much to restore the events that occurred in 1947–48 to the archives, and have prevented the horrors of ‘Gujarat 2002’ from being forgotten or concealed, relatively little is known about the sexual violence that occurred during the 1969 riot. This lacuna is conspicuous in both official records and academic commentaries. On 13 October 1969, less than two weeks after the 1969 riot was brought under control, the Home Department of the Gujarat government appointed a three-member official commission of inquiry and tasked it with investigating the causes of the riot, the efficacy and adequacy of the administration's preventive and control measures, and proposing recommendations that might be adopted to prevent such riots from recurring. Supreme Court Justice P. Jaganmohan Reddy was appointed the commission's chair, and Gujarat High Court justices Nusservanji K. Vakil and Akbar S. Sarela were its other members.

In just over a year, on 24 October 1970, the Reddy Commission submitted a two-volume report to the government, which in turn published it for public perusal on 9 March 1971.⁷ The report contained invaluable information on areas affected by the violence across Gujarat, notes on some major incidents, testimonies of government officials, the police, politicians, social activists, Hindu nationalist leaders, propaganda material seized by the authorities, details of injuries caused, etc. However, it made not a single reference to the sexual violence that had occurred in September 1969. In fact, the Reddy Commission made no attempt to disaggregate fatalities or injuries on the basis of gender or age, occupation and caste. In the context of a communal riot, it assumed that religious identities – ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ – alone qualified as categories of analysis, with the result that violence inflicted against women because of their gender was omitted from the investigation.

The lacuna is also present in all but one academic commentary on the issue. Sociologist Ghanshyam Shah has provided the only scholarly account that I am aware of.⁸ In his 1970 article, Shah records the most gruesome aspects of the violence:

Atrocities multiplied by the 20th (September) evening when several poor labourers were either burnt alive or murdered. In some places they were thrown into fires. Scythes, axes, knives and spears were used for killing people. Women were raped or ripped bare and forced to walk naked on the road: children were beaten against stones or their legs were torn apart. Limbs were cut out of dead bodies, women's breasts were cut and sex organs were mutilated or torn apart. (G. Shah 1970: 195)

However, Shah's article does not analyse this violence. It contains no investigation of how sexual violence against women was instigated, orchestrated or inflicted. This chapter is an attempt to fill that gap.

Expecting present-day sensitivity to gendered violence from local, regional and national institutions of the 1960s would perhaps be anachronistic. After all, modern feminism emerged in India only around the early 1970s, and it was only from the late 1980s and early 1990s that feminist activists, gender-sensitive academics and other scholars raised our awareness about sexual violence and other gendered crimes. Even so, the gaps in the official documents on the 1969 riot with regard to sexual violence are glaring, and compound the already acute difficulty in establishing the precise scale of sexual violence against women, specifically during any large-scale conflict. As a result, it is impossible to gauge, for example, how many Muslim women were sexually victimised during the 1969 riot in Ahmedabad; whether Hindu women, or some men, were also subjected to similar brutality; and whether rapes occurred beyond Ahmedabad in the other affected parts of Gujarat as well.

This chapter endeavours to recover fragments of this lost history. Here, I examine the context in which the 1969 riot occurred, the specific events that catalysed the violence, and how sexual violence against women was instigated, orchestrated and inflicted across Ahmedabad, with particular reference to the experience of Muslim women during the riot. An exploration of events that occurred outside the city is beyond the purview of this book.

Decline of the textile industry and Ahmedabad's industrial workers

The textile industry is the oldest manufacturing industry in India. At the dawn of independence in 1947, it was also the largest organised domestic industry, with the cities of Bombay, Ahmedabad, Coimbatore and Kanpur as its main centres. From the 1960s, the industry was heading towards terminal decline as composite mills (i.e., mills where spinning, weaving and processing were carried out in the same plant) struggled to preserve competitiveness vis-à-vis the burgeoning small-scale industrial units. Ahmedabad was desperately vulnerable: the composite textile mills had been the backbone of the city's economy since at least the early twentieth century, as well as its largest employer. At the start of the decade, some 141,347 workers, well over a quarter of the 433,000-strong urban workforce, depended directly on the mills for their livelihood, while a substantial number worked in sectors ancillary to the mills such as construction, chemicals and mining (Government of India 1971: 24–5).

In the mid-1960s, as economic stagnation set in, hundreds of mill workers were made redundant or temporary, and work was increasingly outsourced to cheaper, contracted labour. The total number of workers employed in the mills fell in 1970 to 132,803 (which was equivalent to about one-third of the city's adult male population) (Government of India 1971: 24). Up to 10 per cent of these workers were hired on temporary contracts, which offered only about a quarter of the pay of full-time employees and no benefits (Spodek 2011: 158). Yet even as the textile industry declined and avenues of employment shrank, thousands of unemployed migrants from rural Gujarat, UP, Maharashtra and Rajasthan continued to pour into Ahmedabad in search of livelihoods and better futures. Consequently, the population of Ahmedabad district rose from over 2.2 million in 1961 to 2.9 million in 1971 (Government of India 1961: 20; 1971: 80). During the same period, the population of Ahmedabad city increased 38.25 per cent from 1.1 million to 1.7 million (Gayer and Jaffrelot 2012: 49). This created a shortage of both jobs and housing.

Scheduled Castes and Muslims were disproportionately affected by these changes: they comprised a mere 10.8 per cent and 7.9 per cent, respectively, of Ahmedabad city's population in 1961, but formed the bulk of the mills' labour. Even though the mill workforce comprised people from UP, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and rural Gujarat, the work was determined by their caste and religious identities. Muslims and upper-caste Hindus (especially Patels) dominated the weaving departments, while Scheduled Caste communities such as Vankars and Chamars ran the spinning shops (Gillion 1968). Moreover, since Scheduled Castes were considered ritually impure, they were prohibited from entering the premises of weaving shops to prevent them from ‘contaminating’ the textiles (Breman 2004: 17). This spatial segregation had been an enduring source of animosity between the different caste and religious groups in the city.

Yet, despite caste-based discrimination and spatial segregation, employment in the mills was invaluable to the Schedule Castes. Mills offered job security, insurance against disability and illness, higher wages compared to those in the informal economy, social facilities and political representation through Ahmedabad's Textile Labour Association (TLA), which was formed under Gandhi's guidance in 1919 (Breman 2004). Redundancy took all this away from them.

Muslims, for their part, had been gradually pushed out of the mill workforce from the 1940s because of the prejudiced hiring preferences of mill owners, most of whom were orthodox Hindus who desired cultural homogeneity in the mills (Breman 2004: 134). Yet, as with their Scheduled Caste counterparts, the mills were dear to Muslim workers as well: besides considerations of economic and social security, communal hostility beyond the compounds of the mills was worse, and other employers were deeply reluctant to hire Muslims to permanent posts.

As the economic situation worsened for male workers previously employed in the mills, so also working-class women were affected adversely. Already from the 1940s, Scheduled Caste and Muslim women had been pushed out of the mill labour force – partly to create employment opportunities for men, and partly because of patriarchal notions that women's ‘proper place’ was in the house (Breman 2004: 24). Women comprised only 5,487 (or under 4 per cent) of mill workers in 1960 (ibid.: 82). In other sectors of Ahmedabad's formal economy, such as the non-household manufacturing, processing, services and repairs industry, there was only one female worker for every 20 male workers (9,759 women to 197,725 men) in 1961. By 1971, this ratio had deteriorated to 1:27.6 (8,622 women to 238,101 men). In the household manufacturing sector, where women have traditionally constituted a larger proportion of the workforce, the decline was even more dramatic: there was one female worker for every 1.4 male workers in 1961 (20,972 women to 29,901 men), and one female worker for every 5.7 male workers in 1971 (2,892 women to 16,491 men) (Government of India 1961: 20; 1971: 80–1).

Indeed, nationwide industrial stagnation had made women across India more vulnerable than men to unemployment and underemployment and to expulsion from the organised labour market. At the pan-Indian level, the participation of women in the paid labour force (including middle-class workers and industrial labourers) had fallen to 17.4 per cent in 1971 from 31.5 per cent in 1961 (census data quoted in Roy 2005: 138). Between 1961 and 1971, women's participation in the formal economy of Gujarat plummeted from 491 per 1,000 male workers to 231 (Women's Studies Research Centre 2003: 77).

Failure to find secure employment and reasonable wages, and the need to supplement family incomes, also led more women into sex work. According to the records of Jyoti Sangh, the oldest women's organisation in Ahmedabad, at least 192 women were involved in sex work between 1960 and 1970, as opposed to 142 in 1950–59 and 161 in 1940–49.⁹ Interviews conducted by the present author and by sociologist Jan Breman with industrial labourers in Ahmedabad (many of whom were formerly employed in the textile mills) also suggest that the decline of the textile industry, and overall economic stagnation from the mid-1960s, forced more women into this trade, further undermining women's social standing.

Ahmedabad's burgeoning informal economy offered relief, but only barely. Laid-off, underemployed and unemployed male and female workers increasingly sought employment in semi-skilled or unskilled sectors, such as wood and paper manufacturing and small repair and alteration workshops. However, this employment offered lower pay, minimum or no benefits, longer hours, a diminished social standing and a sharp decline in living standards (Breman 2004: 113–15). Moreover, entrenched caste and religious prejudices blocked the access of Scheduled Caste and Muslim workers to better-paid and more secure jobs. This left upper-caste Hindu (both migrant and Gujarati), Scheduled Caste and Muslim industrial labourers increasingly competing with one another for jobs and social respectability. The housing crisis that paralleled the economic decline of the textile industry made matters worse.

The industrial belt, the walled city and the western enclave

In the 1960s, the majority of Ahmedabadis lived east of the River Sabarmati. A significant proportion of the labour class, which constituted almost a quarter of the population, lived here in dilapidated chawls and slums close to the factories and mills. Built on either side of dead-end alley-ways, chawls were one- or two-room tenements that lacked even the most basic civic amenities such as water, electricity and sanitation. Most of the chawls were built by mill owners in the 1930s and 1940s and made available to the workers at subsidised rents.

However, in the 1960s, the s...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Maps and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. 1969
• 2. 1985
• 3. 2002
• 4. Aftermath
• Appendix Hindu Nationalist Propaganda Materials
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Back cover