The Mumbai Riots of 1992-1993 — The Lessons That Will Never Be Learnt
Shrikant G. Talageri
[I had posted this article two days ago, on 6/11/2022, but it seems to have become mysteriously unavailable. So I am posting it again].
The Mumbai riots of 1992-1993 are in the news again, after thirty years, after the Supreme Court on 4th November 2022, just two days ago, observed that there was a failure on the part of the State Government (of Maharashtra) to maintain law and order, and issued directions to ensure payment of compensation to the victims (read "to the Muslim victims"). As expected, the media (both press and social media) is overflowing with articles and comments on the lateness and inadequacy of the suggested compensation, the failure to give real justice to the Muslim victims, and the general culpability of Hindus who want to exterminate all the Muslims in India to establish a Hindu Rashtra.
Before going into anything else, let us first get certain facts clear about those riots:
1. The first fact is that the whole of India is mined with time bombs which explode every now and then, causing controversies and stoking hatreds and riots. In Hindu circles, it has been common to say that the British, before they left India, set up multiple socio-cultural time bombs which would explode at different points of time in the future and succeed in seeing to it that India never became a strong, united and peaceful country. But this was not done just by the British, it was also done by the Congress and Leftists in India. But most of all it is the BJP which comes to power on Hindu issues and regularly stabs Hindus in the back, which has been responsible for setting up countless such time bombs which explode regularly and stir up mass organized condemnation of Hindus and consolidation of anti-Hindu forces, and, as a necessary corollary, leads massive numbers of Hindus to feel oppressed and at siege and leads to polarization behind the One-and-Only-Alternative for Hindus: the BJP.
This fact comes to light whenever we minutely examine the history of any issue which discriminates severely against Hindus and serves to accelerate the process of creating a Hindu-Mukta-Bharat: recently it was revealed that the person who made the laws giving special protection to Muslim waqf properties and putting them above the control of Indian law was a BJP MP in 1995 named Ram Ratan. Also, the only states to introduce anti-conversion laws (in 1967-68) till very recent times were the Congress ruled states of Orissa and Madhya Pradesh. The list is so long and endless that I just don't want to go into it here — I might literally "puke". The present instance is sufficient as a case in point: the time-bomb which has blown up the whole controversy at the moment is the Justice BN Shrikrishna Commission Report on the Mumbai Riots which was forcibly reinstated by the BJP government (then under Vajpayee) at the Centre after it had been disbanded by the Shiv Sena led coalition Maharashtra government in 1996.
2. The second fact is that the 1992-1993 Mumbai Riots were a watershed in the history of Hindu-Muslim riots in Mumbai, since they brought the phenomenon of Hindu-Muslim riots, or specifically Muslim riots, in Mumbai which were almost a regular annual or periodic feature of the city till then, to a grinding halt — or at least, they have succeeded in doing so for the last 30 years to date. Nothing is impossible in future.
Mahatma Gandhi had said: "My own experience but confirms the opinion that the Musalman as a rule is a bully, and the Hindu as a rule is a coward….. Bullies are always to be found where there are cowards". The 1992-93 Mumbai Riots were a testimony to the truth of that maxim. Before that year, one-way riots by Muslims took place on every pretext: anything which happened in the Islamic world outside India was till then a pretext for Muslim rioters. As I put it in my very first book in 1993: "Any event in any Muslim country gives Indian Muslims the right to take to the streets and start vicious riots, all over the country, in an orgy of loot, arson and vandalism (especially vandalism of Hindu temples, shops and houses situated near Muslim areas). The event may be the arson by an Australian tourist in the Al-Aqsa mosque in far-off Jerusalem, the temporary take-over by a group of Sunni extremists of the mosque in Mecca, the execution of Zulfigar Ali Bhutto by Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan, or the death of Zia-ul-Haq in an aircrash" (TALAGERI 1993:23). Needless to say, events in Israel and Indo-Pakistan cricket matches provided regular pretexts. And we are not even talking about pre-Independence pro-Pakistan riots.
However, after 1992-93, there has not been a single riot in Mumbai. Attempts by a few young Muslim hotheads to attack policemen and stoke riots at a rally in Azad Maidan on 11/8/2012 was quickly suppressed by community elders themselves after a massive rally by Raj Thackeray in Mumbai on 21/8/2012 reminded the saner elements on all sides as to what could happen when Hindus decided to show that they were not necessarily, or not all, cowards.
Needless to say, the cessation of the regular occurrence of Muslim rioting in Mumbai after 1992-93 has been a thorn in the flesh for all, the Leftist-Secularist as well as the Hindutva-for-elections-only politicians and activists. The revival of the Muslim victimhood saga of 1992-93 is therefore a welcome shot in the arm for all these elements.
It must be remembered that Muslims are also human beings like Hindus, and in general, while most of them are willing to support co-religionists who want to follow more actively and vigorously the "hate-other-religionists" teachings of Islam, they are actually happier in an atmosphere where there are no riots and where they can go about their regular business and activities in peace and amity even with those other-religionists. It is the extremist elements among them and the political forces who love polarization, or who cannot keep their Hindu-hating obsessions in check, who are unhappy with the positive results of the 1992-1993 Mumbai riots.
3. The third fact is that as in every single issue in existence, there are two standards operating in India here as well: one for Hindus and one for Muslims (or non-Hindus), and the two standards are inevitably sharply biased against Hindus and indulgently biased in favor of non-Hindus. In July 2017, the Supreme court rejected (for the umpteenth time) a plea for a probe into the riots against the Kashmiri Pandits which had led to the ethnic-cleansing of Kashmiri Hindus from the Kashmir Valley, on the ground that the events "pertain to 1989-90, and more than 27 years have passed". Now, the Supreme Court takes up cudgels on behalf of Muslims in respect of events which pertain to 1992-93, and more than 29 years have passed.
Recently, I had firmly (or so I thought) decided that life is too short to be spent in fruitless and frustrating pursuits, and, since it is now inevitable that the BJP Parivar and its robotic armies of multitudinous bhakts are going to achieve a Hindu-Mukta-Hindustan within a few decades, and since nobody (at least in sufficient numbers) cares too figs or two f***s about it, I should stop writing on political subjects and concentrate only on two things: on my Rigvedic and historical studies, and on the all-important task of living a happy and contented life following the Charvaka principle of "maximizing pleasures and minimizing pains" as far as possible.
However, the subject of the Bombay Riots of 1992-93 is one on which I had done detailed research in 1993, and (hand)written an article (those were the days when I had never done any typing, had never seen a computer, and I believe there was no universal internet) which I sent by post to Sita Ram Goel. Two years or so later (not having a copy of my own article) I again went to the archives of the Times of India in Mumbai and painstakingly recreated the article as best as I could and sent it by post to Koenraad Elst. My article of the time is not available any more, but Koenraad Elst has referred to it in his book "Communal Violence and Propaganda" published by Voice of India, New Delhi, in 2014. He writes: "I had heard many Hindus complain about the unfair reporting, but when I asked them to document their complaint, I found that nobody even cared to collect newspaper clippings (it is part of the RSS culture to go by rumours rather than verified hard information). The one exception was Shrikant Talageri, who took the trouble to go to the library and look up the relevant press reports; to prove his point, he sent me an essay, The Bombay Riots (so far not published anywhere), about the media coverage of these riots, quoting from the Times of India accounts and adding some interesting observations. The present section and the next (1.3.5-7) summarize his argument, except for adding some quotations from other journalistic accounts to put it into perspective" (ELST 2014:58-59).
Throughout the 112-page book in general, and on pgs. 58-69 in particular in respect of these specific riots (and my now-unavailable article on them), Elst's book gives the whole story of Riots vs. Riot-Reporting in post-"Independence" India. This small booklet is a classic expose of the whole history of "Hindu-Muslim riots" in India and is a must-read for all those who have anything to say or think on the subject.
About my said article, I had exposed how the first round of riots in December 1992 started by Muslims, even as per the biased and anti-Hindu Times of India editorial of 12-1-1993, which wrote: "There is a marked difference between the riots that took place in Bombay after December 6 and those a month later. While the first were sparked off by Muslims who were incensed by the destruction of the Babri Masjid, these appear to be the handiwork of organizations whose diabolical object is to terrorize Muslims by destroying their property. The scene of the riots has shifted from the slums and chawls to the more prosperous central areas where some Hindu militant bodies have their strongholds. There is a method in the madness that has descended on the city and there has virtually been a pogrom declared against Muslims".
So although the first riots were sparked off by Muslims (which the editor did not think of pointing out before the Hindus also retaliated, and must later on must even have regretted bitterly his unconscious lapse in making the above admission in the first place even at that late date), the rioters of the second phase become the "diabolical" perpetrators of a "pogrom"!
Inherent in this is, of course, the accepted principle that Hindus have no right to be "incensed" by the historically much-attested destruction of literally lakhs of their original temples, including basic ones like the three in Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura, but the Muslims have every right to be "incensed" by the recovery by Hindus of even one of these lakhs! To the extent that it justifies all their (Muslim) rioting while still making any retaliation by Hindus unjustifiable, condemnable and punishable.
Worse, the editorial (of 12 January 1993, referred to above) not only excuses the Muslims for the first round of riots, but even blatantly lies about the starting of the second round of riots. In this, we see a stark contradiction between the daily news reports in the Times of India from 6-1-1993 to 9-1-1993, and its editorial of 12-1-1993. As Koenraad Elst puts it in his book: "Its reporting during the first three days gives what Mumbai resident Shrikant Talageri considers the true story, though only to the reader who knows Mumbai well: the areas mentioned where 'people' and policemen were attacked were all Muslim-dominated areas. Following Press Council rules, the paper did not mention which community was on the attack and which one on the defensive, until three days later, when the Shiv Sena started its retaliation. From that point onwards, the first three days, when muslims were on the attack (in the inflated rhetoric of communalism reporting, it could have been called a 'pogrom' of Hindus by Muslims) were kept out of view., but the details of subsequent Shiv Sena-led Hindu violence against Muslims were reported in full" (ELST:2014:60-61).
These riots, along with the extremely important result of bringing the perpetual habit of Muslim rioting on different pretexts to a grinding halt in Mumbai at least and making Mumbai a riot-mukta city for all its residents (including Muslims), had certain other effects: it established Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray as a Hindu Hriday Samrat (the second one after Veer Savarkar) in the eyes of all Mumbai Hindus — only a Hindu resident of Mumbai from those days will understand the greatness of the role he played in saving the Hindus of Mumbai — and paved the way for the first ever victory of the Shiv-Sena-BJP alliance in the Maharashtra state assembly elections. Like in the old films of the newly independent India of the fifties, this was also the only time I saw an atmosphere of true camaraderie and feeling of oneness (and not just during joint participation in the maha-aratis, and joint facing of the riots) among Mumbai Hindus hailing from every single part and corner of India!
It was also during these Ayodhya and Riot days that I made my first and some of my best friends from the Muslim areas, and these friendships have endured through everything. And I am sure they will continue to endure despite all the efforts of the Secularists, Leftists and Hindutva-for-elections-only politicians and activists, all baying nostalgically for the return of those highly polarized times.
