Flaws in the Communal Violence Bill | Analysis | Human rights

The Bill, if it survives in anything like its 2011 avatar, is unlikely to pass constitutional muster for a very secular reason: it clearly transgresses into the state’s domain of maintaining law and order by giving the centre the right to intervene in communal situations. It is also clearly violative of the fundamental rights of people by lumping them into entities called majority and minority – when the constitution says we are all entitled to equal treatment. The NAC’s version of the Bill was built on the assumption that majorities target minorities. Even though the bill seeks to remedy this by using the district for identifying majority and minority, and also identifies linguistic minorities, and SC/STs as worthy of protection, it is difficult to imagine a more polarising way of dealing with communalism. Between them, religious minorities, linguistic minorities, and SC/STs will form 50 percent of the population. How ridiculous is it if 50 percent of the population is to be protected from the other 50 percent by determining local majorities and minorities? If the purpose of secularism is to unite rather than divide communities, how does the deliberate identification of majorities and minorities help the cause of fostering amity? In its original avatar, the Bill sought to protect violence by district-level majorites against minorities, hold state officials liable for “dereliction of duty” if they fail to prevent communal riots, and create a huge bureaucracy to prevent communal riots. That first idea, that communalism is about protecting the minority from the majority, fails an elementary test: it would not, for example, cover the Bodo-Muslim riots in Assam last year, for the simple reason that tribals and minorities are both presumed to be victims. It would not cover a Shia-Sunni riot in Lucknow, for both are presumably minorities. It would not cover a Muslim-Christian communal situation in Kerala – a state where a teacher from one community had his hand chopped off by a militant from another minority community. It would not cover the Kandhamal riots, because both the groups were tribals – even if one grants that they were egged on by Sangh Parivar or church groups. The second point is that the bill would etch communal identities in stone. Once a district is deemed to be the geography in which minorities and majorities are to be subject to regular headcounts, what is the chance that the two communities will unite rather than divide? What if a district has two communities in equal numbers? Or three communities with none crossing 50 percent? The third issue is about fixing responsibility for riots on specific civil servants. Prima facie, this may be a good idea, for it is high time babus were held accountable for action and inaction. But this requirement fails to note fundamental differences between places that are relatively insulated against communalism, and places that aren’t. According to Ashutosh Varshney, who is no admirer of the Sangh Parivar, “a mere eight cities in India – Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Baroda, Hyderabad, Aligarh, Meerut, Delhi and Kolkata — had nearly 46 per cent of all deaths in Hindu-Muslim riots.”

Flaws in the Communal Violence Bill | Analysis | Human rights