It is not the first time that you have seen a beleaguered minority community go into a mood of complete denial. It happened with the Sikhs in the mid-eighties. There was widespread non-acceptance of the idea that the Bhindranwale phase, and the subsequent phase of terror, was indigenous, local, and mostly voluntary. For a long time, it was all blamed on Indira Gandhi’s and Zail Singh’s machinations. Bhindranwale was widely believed to be their creation. Initially, as his gunmen targeted policemen and leaders of the Nirankari sect, the dominant view within the Sikh community was that somehow this was part of a diabolical operation run by Indira Gandhi to embarrass the Akalis and give the Sikhs a bad name. Immediately thereafter, as hit squads began to pull Hindus out of buses and massacre them, or in one case shoot everybody inside a barber shop, most ordinary Sikhs you met told you, with genuine conviction, that there was no way a real Sikh could have done this. With Sikhs and Hindus, joined like fingers and nails, how is such a thing possible.It was much later, around 1992-93 as armed terror bands began to hold sway over the countryside that the sad reality, inevitably, came to be accepted. Those running the terror campaign were “our own” and were doing a great disservice to the “qaum” and Punjab. From then on, it took just a few months for terror to wind up. I can never forget conversations with a large number of militants who had surrendered as their campaign ended and were kept on the Punjab Armed Police campus in Jalandhar. Many of them, still in their early 20s, answered to the ranks of “Lt-Gen” and “Maj-Gen”. The story of one 21-year-old “Maj-Gen” was typical: “Until now people used to welcome us to their villages, even gave us food and shelter; now they began throwing us out, reporting us to the police.”This long preamble is no digression, or a session in storytelling. The Muslim community today is caught in shocked denial as well, particularly after the Jamia encounter and subsequent arrests in many states. It feels isolated, targeted, maligned and, above all, abandoned by the political class, particularly those it has always voted for. It has no leaders of its own to talk to and it no longer trusts those of the UPA, the political formulation closest to them. They feel victimised and see no hope. At the same time they do not believe even a fraction of the claims made by the police forces of six states and a union territory working in close coordination. Not only are they not willing to believe the story of the Jamia encounter, they believe the whole thing, the bombings, the arrests and “framing of young Muslim boys”, is one giant conspiracy against them. Why the police forces of the Central government, Modi’s Gujarat and Mayawati’s Uttar Pradesh, among others, would join hands to hatch such a comprehensively diabolical conspiracy is not a question that is asked often.On the specifics of the Jamia encounter, there are detailed answers to questions most commonly asked: why was Sharma not wearing a flak jacket, why was the bullet that killed him not found, how did two boys manage to escape from such a tight grip. These questions have been answered in a series of stories reconstructing the encounter in this paper earlier this week. Without repeating any of those details, here are two relevant points. Our policemen are no novices to the business of “encounters”, such as they usually are. But one principle has been followed in all such “encounters”, that nobody is taken alive. It is really suicidal to kill some people in an encounter and keep an eye-witness alive, as happened in this case. Second, if the whole thing was a fake encounter or a cover-up for a friendly fire death in a Keystone Cops operation, where was the need for the police to say that two suspects had escaped? Our encounter cops are by now far too experienced at this business to be so stupid with a cover-up.But all these are matters of mere detail. The main reason for this denial, anger, frustration, the feeling of being cornered, comes from the fact that nobody had even held a conversation with them. Nobody, particularly from the Congress or the UPA, has ever tried to explain to them what happened. Nobody held out a hand of solace and comfort, to say that while terrorism has to be fought, we will never allow any profiling or isolation of 15 per cent fellow Indians, that while it is sad that these boys have been caught, they are a very, very, very minuscule minority and nobody would allow fingers to be raised at the entire community. It is hard enough for a minority to be told that some of its members may have been responsible for doing some of the most terrible things to their country. But it is cruel when the only people talking to them are the police, and that too mostly through TV channels.You do not expect the BJP to go and do this communicating. But why has the Congress been so shy? It owes its power to the fact that Muslims and other minorities vote for it in states where it is seen as the main challenger to the BJP. Yes, Congress leaders say they are worried they may lose the Muslim vote. But are they more likely to retain it by themselves being in a state of denial? The inability, or the disinclination, of its senior leaders to hold an honest conversation with their own constituents is astounding. This is compounded by a few of them at the middle-level joining, instead, the insinuation-suspicion-denial group, driven partly by constituency pressure and partly by a strange every-man-for-himself mindset.Similarities with the decades of trouble in Punjab should chasten anybody halfway complacent. Then, too, the political class had slunk back into silence, some out of cynical calculation, some fear, and some for lack of conviction; and for nearly a decade the Indian state talked to the people — Sikhs in this case — through the police. India, Punjab, Sikhs and Hindus all suffered as a result. The consequences of the political class leaving the Muslims to the same fate will be disastrous. Good, sincere politics must fill that dangerous vacuum.sg@expressindia.com
