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Farid Khan was born and raised in Patna, India. He was a part of the Patna unit of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) since he was a child. After completing his MA in Urdu from Patna University, he trained in theatre at the Bhartendu Natya Academy in Lucknow. His poems have been published in several leading journals and magazines.

For issue #164 of The Internationlist, Khan argues that in today's India, riots are deliberately engineered to spread permanent communal hatred and fear for political expansion, with violence now normalized in any geography and against any individual.

Earlier, riots took place where there were workshops, where there were workers’ unions, and the atmosphere had been vitiated over time. And since the riots were engineered to break the workers’ unity, after a while, harmony would be restored. Whatever hand the government had in instigating these riots, and it often did have such a role, neither the government nor the opposition would dare support the riots openly. On the contrary, they would conduct peace marches to help calm things down afterwards. They would try to stanch the wounds on the body politic. In other words, they tried to hold on to some shred of decency. (And even as I write this, a wave of shame breaks over me for I seem to have been talking with nostalgia about the ‘good old days’ as if the riots then were ‘good old riots’ when they brought as much misery and pain and horror with them as any riots today.)

If you do not believe me about the relationship between riots and work spaces, try to think of a riot that broke out in a village or some backward town. One simply did not hear of this. The riots in Muzaffarnagar in 2013 ended that myth. It demonstrated that now villages could be the scenes of riots.

This was because the reason for the riots was no longer the breaking of workers’ unity or the destruction of their union. Now, the intention is to spread hatred between communities and the expansion of empire. It intends to create and maintain a polarisation between the communities. And so, any incident can be used to instigate a riot. In other words, the death of a single person can be weaponised to cause the deaths of many. These are the ‘Achche Din’ (the good days) promised to us by the government.

Now, any Muslim can be killed anywhere, and the benefit of bigotry can be accrued anywhere in the country. Geography is no longer a barrier. Here, the godi media [1] and the communally-minded media have had a decisive role to play. Some Dalits have been caught in its coils, and two Hindu sadhus in Palghar, too. But for the communally- minded elements, these are the exceptions that make the rule. Forsaking the joy of bigotry is not even on the table.

Firing a gun from someone else’s shoulder is one of the principal practices of communalism. And so, the entire Muslim community lives in fear of mob lynching but the BJP wants it known that its minions can enter any house they choose and beat up anyone they choose because it is their ‘raj’. And they will secure their votes because of this. They see this as their security. You can see this from the brutality of the violence in Gujarat. I do not believe that Gujarati society always wanted a cruel, communal-minded government. The savagery of the massacres cannot have affected the Muslim community alone. It must have had some effect on Hindu society as well, leaving them with the feeling that if they did not obey the government in all things, they too could suffer the same fate as the Muslims. Hindu society in Gujarat probably feels compelled to support a communally-minded government in order to erase the shame of their fear; this is what persuades them to accept that this is progress. This was where the title ‘Vikas Purush’ (Man of Progress) gained currency. If you do not believe this, ask any Gujarati merchant. First, the poor fellow will try to guesstimate your position. Then before he answers your question, he will look around to see that he is not being seen talking to you. He too has to keep an eye on public sentiment.\

One should think about why Emperor Aurangzeb had Dara Shikoh and Sufi Sarmad executed publicly. He could have quietly sentenced them to death in jail and no one would have been any the wiser. But he wanted their death to be news; he wanted to make a public display of his cruelty. That is why he had them executed in public in Delhi. While these public executions were a good way to terrify his opponents, they were also a good way to keep his supporters in line. And in this way, he managed to reign for fifty years.

When an argument fails, attack. If the government can offer no reason for its re-election, what can it do? Aurangzeb could have sat down and had a conversation with Dara Shikoh and Sarmad. Nathuram Godse could have tried talking to Mahatma Gandhi. But what could they have said? They had nothing to say. And so they wielded their weapons instead: swords and pistols. Then these acts of violence are glorified in some quarters. Communally-minded fascists have very little to say. The Nazi Party under Hitler constructed any number of illusory arguments against the Jews but they knew that none of them were truly valid and so they launched a pogrom against them instead. Public sentiment was with them. In 2014, Islamic terrorists entered a school in Peshawar and killed several schoolchildren. If they had a theory, or an idea, they might have explained it to the children. But why bother when public opinion was with them?

The mob lynching of Akhlaq, the mob lynching of Junaid, the mob lynching of Pahlu Khan, the mob lynching of Dalits in Pune, the mob lynching of the sadhus in Palghar, the mob lynching of some old woman made out to be a chudail (witch) et cetera, et cetera— each incident means the abandonment of the social order, religion, morality, government, governance and humanity. At this time all the mob lynchings in India are underpinned by one belief: the Hindu is in danger. Just think of that for a moment. If 80 per cent or more of the population is in danger, what must be the state of the other less than 20 per cent? What does this mean? Can a communally-minded government not even ensure the security of its community? Can it not free its constituency from fear? And if it cannot, what use is such a government?

Notes:
[1] Godi media is shorthand for the docile media that sits in the lap—godi—of the government.

Excerpted with permission from Stranger In My Own Land: A Muslim In India After 2014 by Farid Khan and translated by Jerry Pinto. Published by LeftWord Books, 2025.

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