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9 / The Practice of Communal Politics Although I have argued that, insofar asAligarh City is concerned, riots that precede elections intensify interparty competition and provide a basis for it through communalization and polarization ofthe electorate , Aligarh is also part of a broader framework of interparty competition at the state and national levels that must also be kept in mind in considering the overall relationship. In the case of the mass mobilization that accompanied the three successive communalized elections of 1989, 1991, and 1993 in Aligarh, interparty competition intensified only after the great riots of 1991. However, it was the intense struggle for power at the Center and in the state of U.P., accompanied by the MandaI agitation and the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, that initiated the process. As one of my respondents put it just after the 1990-91 riots, they were a consequence of the "particular game ... going on in Delhi, how to win votes and how to become the prime minister. I think that was one of the important reasons of [the communal riots1in the whole U.P. state and Aligarh."l Moreover, as this same respondent put it, "the riots did not occur in a dayor so," but involved three years ofcontinuous preparation and rehearsal on the part ofthe SIP, the VHP, and other parts of the Sangh Parivar, punctuated by the shilanyas of 1990 and the vast rioting that was associated with it in Aligarh, followed by the destruction of the mosque on December 1992 and the vast rioting associated with it throughout most of the country. Nor can there be any doubt that there was deliberate provocation of Hindus to attack and kill Muslims, available in the form of tape cassettes of the fiery speeches of the BJP female "sannyasi," Sadhvi Rithambara. Although we do not have any recorded speeches of RSS-BJP-VHP leaders in Aligarh, it cannot be doubted from what they have said to me in polite encounters with a foreign scholar that they spoke even more directly to their followers and The Practice ofCommunal Politics 1241 to their voters in the communalized Hindu mohallas of Aligarh than they did with me. Furthermore, the militant Hindushave their own object ofhatred in Aligarh, their own Babri Masjid, as it were, in the presence of the AMU, which has been used for the past half century "as a symbol that this is a Pakistani center , antinational center,"2 and was used so effectively in the great rumor about theAMU Medical College Hospital killings in 1991. So, the AMU, like the Babri Masjid, was "very much a part of this whole game" of competition for votes. Throughout this broader vote competition, Mulayam Singh Yadav and the Ianata Dal appealed directly and successfully to the Muslim voters, standing forth as their protector and as the protector ofthe mosque. Although his police saved the mosque from destruction in 1990, they did not save the Muslims ofAligarh from the riots that descended upon them in its aftermath. Further, it was the BJP that emerged victorious, riding the electoral wave produced by the shilanyas and its riotous aftermath, in both Aligarh and in the state as awhole. Indeed, the May1991 elections themselves were accompanied by additional waves of rioting in many constituencies in the state. Moreover, those elections brought the BJP to power in the state for the first time} That government in turn created the conditions that made possible the destruction of the mosque in December 1992. The respondent previously quoted remarked to me at the tail end of the 1990-91 riots in Aligarh, "This is a political riot, ... a communal-cumpolitical riot."4 Indeed, the whole period from the first stirrings of the VHP mobilization over the mosque in Ayodhya in 1984 until its denouement in December 1992 was a deliberately provocative buildup ofcommunal tension that intensified political competition. It also produced-predictably-waves of communal rioting that in turn built heightened communal solidarities in constituencieswith large Muslim populations deliberately targeted bythe BJP for special efforts; the rioting in turn fed back into the competition for votes, in a circle that ended only in the aftermath of the destruction ofthe mosque, when the returns from communalization of the electorate and the production of communal violence rapidly diminished. THE POLITICIZATION OF COMMUNALISM AND RIOTS AS A CONTINUATION OF COMMUNAL POLITICS BY OTHER MEANS Myinterviews are replete with explanations that consider the political process central to the communalization of Hindu-Muslim relations in India. It also [18.116...

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