THERE’S an unforgettable and controversial scene from the 1993 Spanish film, ‘Kika’ that plays out in my head over and over when I look around at the media I consume and also produce. Kika, in this otherwise forgettable Almodovar film, is being raped by a convict who has escaped from prison. Her lover watches from an apartment window across the street, through a telescope. And a one-woman media voyeur turns up on the scene dressed in black leather, with a camera attached to her forehead. She wants a piece of the action for her crime show called ‘Today’s Worst’.

The Almodovar film laughs at what we consume as it holds up a dark mirror, but it isn’t as easy to shrug off the consumptive gloating as it may seem. How do you report mass violence without describing its horror? Is there something terrifying and mesmerizing that makes us turn to stories of violence? As a reporter, I am guilty of consuming stories of violence and producing them. And over time, I realized, the stories were often clones of each other as they became less and less instructive of what was really going on. As I was scrambling helplessly for a way out, the answer presented itself to me by accident.

I was tracking stories of violence from the 2002 anti-Muslim massacres, when I came across a man who surprised me. He had been a voyeur in 2002 – on the side of the mob. He had cheered on along with his friends, as Muslims were being attacked all around. After the violence abated, this man got a job to help rehabilitate victims. He was getting paid to help resuscitate the very people whose destruction he had stood back and tacitly supported.

It disturbed him greatly, this job. It exposed him for the first time to people that he had until this time only mythologized as the ‘other’. The Satanic people, the fanatics, the jihadis. Now that he worked with them, he saw how much like him they were and it was an impossible place to be. The violence of 2002 began to be broken up in this man’s mind into its infinitesimal parts – the everyday acts we all commit that eventually lead to the weakening of minorities, weakening of systems of justice and delivery of equal rights. He looked at the people with lost limbs and missing children, homeless in relief camps and saw himself, through the glass, darkly. His work made him cross that comfortable threshold between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and break it completely.

 

When I first met him, I was stumped. Could hate that was handed down as Hindu inheritance over so many generations actually change? I had not thought it possible at all, and in refusing to see hate as shape-shifting, I was guilty of fixing it. The trauma and journey of self-discovery this man put himself through as he moved over from the side of Hindu fanatics to become a left-liberal atheist, was unexpected. It gave me a new way of seeing. Violence was not static. But in order to see the movement within, I had to put on Gujarati eyes. I had to sit inside the firmament and look well past the hideousness of the crimes committed. At the entire spectrum of people from sympathizers of the mob, to its silent supporters, and join the dots from all of them to myself.

I realized how difficult this task was going to be when I was exposed to people who played a central role in committing preposterous acts of violence. I met people that had led lynch mobs, and others who had raped and killed women and children. How would I be able to get past the horrendousness of these acts to look at them from the inside out? The disturbing thing was that once I looked long and hard from the inside out, I could see where they were coming from.

 

Let me start with the story of Suresh Jadeja, convicted of raping women and killing the foetus of a pregnant woman as part of a mob of a few thousand Hindus in the Muslim colony of Naroda Patiya in Ahmedabad. Suresh’s spirit was broken when he was a little boy who looked up to his father. A father who was cruel, insensitive and dismissive of his son because he limped. He had a bad leg. Suresh grew up listening to his father say over and over that the deformed boy was not and could not possibly be his son. Rejection at such a young age began to fester inside Suresh and led him to give vent to his anger in small ways. These cascaded quickly into constant acting out, his only recourse over time. Not everyone who has a terrible father turns into a mass murderer. But when you dig the back story of someone who has committed crimes as heinous as Suresh, chances are that you will find a history of intolerable cruelty.

But to focus on Suresh as a singular story would be a mistake. The political scientist from Columbia University, Mahmood Mamdani, wrote in his book on the Rwanda genocide a line that has become my talisman. He said, ‘Rather than run away from it, we need to realize that it is the "popularity" of the genocide that is its uniquely troubling aspect… one needs to explain the large-scale civilian involvement in it.’¹ Suresh came from a community that had been declared a criminal tribe in 1871 and even seventy years after independence, they continue to be the target of the police and administration. When crimes are committed, people from his community have often been the default cache from which the police have picked up people and thrown them into prison. With over a century of oppression behind them, many turned into criminals. So when someone in the neighbourhood beat up another, they could not turn to the police for redressal. They turned to local dadas, of which Suresh was one.

 

Describing the predicament of the group Suresh came from, however, wasn’t enough: it did not explain why a large number of people got communalized and turned into a lynch mob in 2002. The answer to that, I discovered, lay in the tiniest places. In the broken-down municipal schools that did nothing to build the confidence of a child or a community of people with low self-esteem. Schools were often the place where differences between communities were hardened. Whilst school didn’t give young and impressionable minds anything to hold on to, Hindutva propaganda did. It was attractive particularly because there was nothing else around for someone who wanted to feel good about themselves to use, as a way out of the wretchedness forced upon them at birth. I was beginning to see the mob from the inside out and it told me much more about the story leading up to 2002 than when I was peering in from the outside.

Armed with this new insight, I asked myself what it was all for. What could be done with this new way of seeing? With the politics of hate only spreading outward from Gujarat to the rest of the country, I was staring at a shrinking liberal space. And the word I encountered everywhere, all the time, was ‘engage’. We must engage with people not like us. That is what had motivated me to come to Gujarat and try and understand what this violence was about. I was terrified. I had moved to Gujarat to focus exclusively on telling the story of perpetrators of mass-violence to engage, dialogue, try and understand ‘the other’. What if it was all for nothing?

 

It wasn’t until I had spent three years there and come back to Delhi to start writing that I realized what I had to do most of all. I needed to do what the protagonist in my book had done. Shatter the barrier between myself and the rest. Take away the word ‘other’. Replace it with myself. At the start of that process of painful inward looking, I was forced to ask myself why I was so interested in understanding violence. All the convenient answers I had hidden behind started to fall away when I really looked. Yes, I was doing this in order to see how to change violence. Yes, it was important to do this to try and expand a shrinking liberal space. Yes, it was important to look at the stories of perpetrators to understand how, given a certain set of circumstances, I could have been one of them. But none of these answers were truly the heart of the matter.

When I looked deeper, I saw how central violence was to my own existence. It was my story as much as it was the mob’s. I had grown up around a considerable amount of verbal and emotional violence that stemmed from my father. I had low self-esteem. And it made me cover it all up by looking outside, everywhere else under the sun for answers to the essential nature of the beast, when much of the truth lay right where I was, within.

 

If I wanted my exploration to truly be penetrative, I would have to learn to look at my own personal history of violence and then let it go. In the three years that I spent researching and writing my book, The Anatomy of Hate, I was also dealing with a father who was at the end of his days. He was constantly in and out of hospital and that made him lash out at me even more, when he was tired and his body was giving way. On one such occasion, I stormed out of the house and got on the next plane to Ahmedabad, without resolving the disquiet, without speaking to him. I reached my apartment and the phone rang. It was my father. ‘Why did you leave without saying bye’ he asked, his voice faltering at the other end of the phone line. And then he did the most unexpected thing. He apologized for the very first time. ‘I am sorry, I should not have reacted like that. But please don’t stop talking to me, I am an old man and I am ill. I don’t know how much longer I have.’

I realized that I had spent three years listening to assassins and mass-murderers, but I had not been able to deal with my own father. That day was special. I told my mother what had happened. She said, amazed; ‘You are probably the only person he has ever said sorry to.’ I loved my Dad and hated him, but until this moment, I had not felt the sharpness and vitality of his connection with me. His love and despair and fear. My love and despair and fear. But a new door was opened now, despite my blindness and stubborn refusal to see. I could start to forgive my father his rage in order to contend with my own.

We still fought, he was still obnoxious even after his apology. But it had stopped causing me to empty my insides out each time, the way I knew Suresh had probably done as a child, dealing on a much greater scale with the father problem. The tentativeness of violence always surprised me, since I was seeing it now from much closer quarters, putting my own personal story at the front of this process of discovery instead of pretending it didn’t exist. Two stories were most instructive. They made me see so clearly how hard it was for people who had been part of 2002 to live with the part they played in it.

 

One story was about a young man who my sources had told me had killed several people in the part of Gujarat he came from. I fixed to meet him at a dhaba. Over Thumbs-Up and pakoras I told him how I was writing about Hindu leaders and what lessons they had to offer the next generation. I told him it was like writing a new-age Ramayana. That I was looking for the heroes and demons of the present. That I wanted to hear of their folly and madness. This was my usual set-up story, to gauge whether the other person would be willing to open up. I didn’t even get through the entire routine when the man interrupted me and said, ‘I led a mob that killed five to ten people. I have the blood of those people on my hands.’

We had been talking for less than twenty minutes. We had never met before. Why did this man speak to me at all? Not only did he speak to me, he sent me a Facebook friend request which I accepted immediately. Then, he disappeared, not to be found either on Facebook or in real life. I knew he had switched sides from the Sangh Parivar to the Congress party. They had given him a ticket to contest a local election, fully aware of his role in 2002. I never saw him again. But he had told me what I needed to know. That the crimes he committed did not sit easily with him. So he had blurted out a confession perhaps without even being fully aware of what he was doing. He must have needed to let it out that badly.

 

There was another man I befriended who was accused of playing the part of instigator, leader of a mob that killed a large number of Muslims. We are still in touch. He has retreated into a defensive shell now, but that is three years after he too confessed at a time when he hardly knew me, that the twenty-five years he had spent as a Sanghi in the VHP and BJP were ‘a total waste’. After gulping down a glass of cheap whisky, eyes turning immediately red, this man went on to narrate how he was a key perpetrator of the ‘love jihad’ kind of violence. ‘I even had a girl abducted from a courtroom, while she had run away to marry a Muslim man,’ he said bragging. A clear sign that he was uncomfortable with what he had done.

I told the political scientist and psychoanalyst Ashis Nandy about these two people. He is an authority on the subject of violence and has also been working for the last ten years on a project where he is documenting stories of perpetrators and victims from the Partition. He said he had encountered the same phenomenon. ‘I have never met a man who sleeps well after having killed someone,’ he said. It was in this space of discomfiture that I could now see hope. It was where I started to find answers to the question – what do we do with this understanding of violence? I said to myself, when we know that the violence doesn’t sit easy with the mob, perhaps it doesn’t sit easily with their supporters – most middle class Hindus in Gujarat. In part at least, it seemed to me that the Hindu middle class voted repeatedly for Narendra Modi because they felt guilty, ashamed or somewhat embarrassed at the way 2002 had begun to define Gujarat and by implication, them. And he told them they had nothing to feel guilty about. It made them feel better.

That was perhaps the reason Modi held a Gujarat Gaurav Yatra six months after the 2002 violence, saying in speeches all through that he was restoring pride to the Gujaratis. If I was to invert that propaganda, it would read – pride had been lost and therefore was in need of restoration. If Modi was using the collective guilt of the people of Gujarat to win votes, then that was the space where new work could be done. The word ‘engage’ could be deployed to talk to people who have been wavering in their Hindutvaness. People who stood by Modi as a way of looking away from their own guilt and complicity in that time. But who perhaps still need to talk and get past it. I saw that this was a largely unaddressed space and therefore full of possibility.

 

Figuring out what to do with this unaddressed space has been much harder and I don’t have the answers to what, where, or how at all. But with this lens, I was able to see what happened in the Gujarat election of 2017 quite differently from the way I had looked at elections before. It was the fourth straight win for the BJP since 2002. But this time it was amply clear that the people of Gujarat had their Gujarat eyes on when they voted. The BJP got sixteen seats less than in the previous election. Urban voters stood by them but across rural Gujarat, it was a decisive drop. The Congress party was ahead by seventeen seats in villages and semi-urban areas.²

Political pundits looking at this election said that the Congress was finally getting its act together. That the people of Gujarat were fed up of the BJP and of Narendra Modi. But with my Gujarat eyes turned on, I felt there was actually something else going on in the state, which was far more interesting. It didn’t seem to me like the voters were actively choosing the Congress over the BJP. It was that the politics of amnesia, of forgetting about 2002, and of the pride in being Gujarati, had worn them out. It had delivered what it had to – emasculating the Muslims. Now it had no new purpose.

 

People knew that the Congress was just a slightly paler shade of saffron than the BJP in Gujarat. They had seen the party give tickets to members of the mob. They had seen through the politics of both the Congress and the BJP. By putting so many votes behind the Congress, they were throwing their votes into a void. But even that had seemed worthwhile as a vent for pent-up anger, frustration and guilt. It seemed as if the people were fed up of being told what to think, how to hide their guilt and fear. This was their way of expressing it, of letting it out. The politics of hate, by succeeding, was no longer in the space of success. Nothing was static. Having reached its peak, the only possible place for that kind of politics to move was down. It was as if the people of Gujarat were living out the prophetic words and wisdom of T.S. Eliot:

‘In order to arrive at what you are not

You must go through the way in which you are not.

And what you do not know is the only thing you know

And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not.’³

 

* Revati Laul is the author of The Anatomy of Hate, Westland (forthcoming).

Footnotes:

1. Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2001, p. 8.

2. ‘Gujarat Assembly Elections 2017: Urban-Rural Divide Between BJP, Congress Comes to Fore in Gujarat Results’, The Financial Express, 19 December 2017, https://www. financialexpress.com/elections/gujarat-assembly-elections-2017/gujarat-elections-results-2017-urban-rural-divide-between-bjp-congress-comes-to-fore-in-gujarat-results/981270/

3. T.S. Eliot, ‘Complete Poems and Plays’, and in this, ‘Four Quartets – East Coker Part III’. Faber and Faber, 1969, p. 181.