Ground Report: Were the #BasirhatRiots as serious as the media told us?

Ten days after the communal riots erupted in Basirhat, things have calmed down somewhat, but they are far from peaceful. The deployment of the Border Security Force (BSF), special police forces such as STARCO might have brought back normalcy, but it will take time to heal the wounds in North 24 Parganas district. West Bengal has witnessed several communal riots over the last few years, but Basirhat could be the defining one.

The divide is evident. The Mamata Banerjee-led government failed to contain the mob violence on July 2 over an inflammatory Facebook post by a 17-year-old Hindu boy – Sauvik Sarkar. The locals of the village told Newslaundry that the police’s action against the rioters was lackadaisical. Baduria Congress MLA Abdul Rahim accused the Trinamool government of choosing not to quell the situation that very night. Banerjee failed to analyse the situation appropriately, he said. Locals also claimed her police went soft against rioters from a specific community.

The mob was thirsty for Sarkar’s blood, many demanded his arrest, several also called for his hanging. It was eventually contained by religious leaders and local representatives that night in Rudrapur area of Baduria. But rumours spread and riots hit Basirhat constituency on July 3. Shops were identified, attacked and ransacked. A few houses had stones pelted at them; but it was the local police that was the real target of the ferocious mob.

While the Trinamool Congress government must be held accountable for Basirhat, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) hasn’t helped matters by projecting the low-intensity riots as a major attack on Hindus. And the national media fell hook, line and sinker for this script. Almost all reports on the communal unrest in Basirhat-Baduria described it as one of the worst riots in the country.

Newslaundry travelled to Basirhat-Baduria to explore the reasons for the constantly simmering tensions between the two constituencies of West Bengal – located a scant few kilometres from the porous Bangladesh border. We noticed that there was a pattern to the violence in Basirhat. The violence was limited within a three-kilometre radius, shops, mostly those in the market areas, were the most obvious targets for the mob. The worst of the violence in Baduria was aimed at the police and a few chosen houses.

The post, a furious mob, and fanaticism

The police barricade at Trimohini street of Basirhat had a white flag hoisted on it. It’s past 2 in the afternoon. A small truck filled with BSF jawans had just left the street. On July 9, the town was returning to its pre-riot state. A chain of shops were damaged in this market street, but 51-year-old Shaheed-ul-Islam’s chemist’s shop was not touched. “Hamara paas chhod do, ya faasi laga do – yahi do dafa bolte hain (Muslims were saying only two options were possible – either hand him [Sarkar] over to us or hang him!),” said Shaheed. Shouldn’t Sarkar’s fate be left to the law, we asked? This seemed to anger Shaheed, “Muslim ko aghat laga hai (Muslims have been hurt by his action).” Thumping his chest, he added, “Jalta hai idhar (It hurts here)”.

On July 2, a mob of thousands were somehow calmed by religious leaders from the community. However, as the tension escalated, even after the arrest of Sarkar from Rudrapur, the mob kept demanding ‘justice’ (and their demands were the same) amidst chants of Nara-e-Takbeer, and Allāhu Akbar.

Abdul Latif Islam, 38, met us at his shop. He told us he had worked in Saudia Arabia for 11 years and the only apt punishment for disrespecting Allah and Nabi (the Prophet) was death! It is at this point one realises how entrenched and fervent mob justice has become. Abdul admitted rioters should not have attacked any property owned by Hindus.

Ajay Pal and his sister Roma De had been running their tea shops here for the past three decades. They had to close their shutters on Sunday and could return on Wednesday. “On Tuesday, someone from the locality informed us that our shops were attacked as well,” Pal said. The rioters took everything–cigarettes, biscuits, cash–and damaged what they couldn’t carry. The counters and shutter of the shops bore the marks of age and recent assaults. An elderly policeman, who asked not to be named, told us, in between sips of tea, that this was case with every shop in the nearby areas as well.

MB Anwarul, 25, runs a fishery business. “I had to bear a loss of at least more than a lakh. We receive fish from Digha and then process it here for export. Dange ke karan ice nahi mila, saara maal kharab ho gaya. Saari macchli fekna pada (We failed to get ice and had to throw away an entire lot of fish),” said Anwarul. According to him, he is a small player in the fishery market and at least 30 big businessmen from the area suffered losses in lakhs. The air, thick with the stench of dead fish, he said, spoke volumes as to the loss.

While Anwarul also demanded strict action against Sarkar, he claimed that Hindus first attacked the properties owned by Muslims. What happened later was merely retaliation.

Trimohini has several properties owned by Hindus, and Muslims are in minority in this market area. Anwarul told us, that the nearby areas have a mixed population of both the communities and the villages around are Muslim dominated.

Shops in Tatra and Paik Para were also attacked and looted. On Wednesday, Kartik Ghosh was attacked by a mob in Paik Para. He died a day later in Kolkata.

Several shops were attacked and ransacked by the rioters. 

Sarkar was a resident of Magurkhali locality of Baduria’s Rudrapur. The neighbours spoke of the horror that struck the locality on Sunday evening. “We took all our important documents and fled from our house,” Sarkar’s 28-year-old neighbour said. Afraid of any possible backlash, she requested us to keep her identity anonymous. She added, “They wanted to set the house on fire. When we returned two days later, we saw [Sarkar] house in this condition.” The doors were broken in. The house bore scorch marks from an aborted attempt at torching it. Rubble in the back of the house made it impossible to determine what it might have been. Other Hindu families living nearby said wiser voices had prevailed and the house wasn’t torched.

Constituencies of North 24 Parganas district are Muslim dominated. From Kolkata to Basirhat, one comes across greenery, fields and huge ponds for fishery. Despite such resources, a large section of society here is economically weaker. Many of the people here are involved in farm work, fishery, and several others stitch clothes for companies based in the state capital.

Members of All India Sunnat Al Jamayat (AISJ) said a large section of the community is illiterate or semi-literate – their explanation for why religious sentiments are easily hurt. The AISJ has taken up the work of educating the Muslim community in the district. Abdul Matin, general secretary of the AISJ, was one of the people who had tried to calm the mob on July 2. On Monday, AISJ tried once more to stem the tide of violence, but they were told, “If you have not stood in the moment when Kaba and Nabi have been disrespected – you are not Muslim,” Din Mohammad of the AISJ told us. He said the people involved in rioting were neither educated, nor understood the Constitution or religion. “Woh log jo Quran nahi padte, jo Masjid nahi jaate, wo hame keh rahe hain ki hum Islam ke liye khade nahi hue (those who don’t go to the mosque, or even read the Quran, were accusing others of not standing up for Islam),” said 27-year-old Tariq-ul-Islam.

The internet kept the riots on the boil

Sarkar had allegedly posted the blasphemous post on Sunday. In a matter of hours the matter flared up, inviting rage from thousands of members of the Muslim community. Interestingly, a screenshot of his posts began doing rounds on Facebook, and, especially, on WhatsApp. Accessibility to smartphones and affordable or free internet services by mobile internet service providers aided in the circulation of such posts. By Monday morning, several other posts and screenshots were being shared amongst the community which only fanned the already giant flames.

While the Banerjee government was busy locking horns with West Bengal Governor Keshari Nath Tripathi, Basirhat was imploding. It was only on July 5, that the state government realised the need to ban internet services. But by then, the damage had been done. Pictures demanding death for Sarkar were among the most popular WhatsApp messages.

Tariq-ul-Islam, a resident of Baduria, shared the offending images with us. Unsurprisingly, it included images of police attacking protesters, children being lathi-charged, dead bodies and Muslim women pleading in front of the police forces. None of these images were from either Basirhat or Baduria.

“We received these images on WhatsApp. As common people are not going out, no one knows what the reality is,” Tariq said.

Add to this, rumours of mosques being targeted and temples being vandalised also did the rounds. Section 144 was imposed outside, so there was no way to confirm these stories – unless you were part of the group of rioters.

Baduria MLA Abdul Rahim said that even though the localities have a “secular face”, it was due to rumours that the situation got out of control. What stopped the Banerjee government from promptly banning internet and mobile services is a secret best known to it. It did not stop them from quickly snapping internet services during the ongoing Gorkhaland protest.

WB BJP state president Dilip Ghosh asked us much the same thing. “Why didn’t they ban the internet service? They had experience with Gorkhaland, what stopped them to immediately ban the data services in Basirhat?” He added that it was an administrative failure.

How the mainstream media added fuel to the fire

Ghosh, in conversation with us, had said that Bengal has had a history of communal violence. From the partition of Bengal during independence to the 1964 Calcutta riots, West Bengal has witnessed the worst. Over the past few years, the Trinamool government has been under fire for incidents such as the Malda and Dhulagarh communal riots.

It is imperative to the point out the role the media played in blowing Basirhat out of proportion. The situation on the ground clearly indicates that the riot was low-intensity, and the damage done to market areas, temples and mosques was done in a phased manner.

While shops in Trimohini area were attacked and ransacked on Monday, shops in the market and houses in Tatra and Paik Para were damaged on Tuesday and Wednesday. Ghosh, the only casualty in the riots, was attacked by a mob on Wednesday as he was returning home. The 65-year-old man used to collect dead chicken to sell as fodder to poultry farms.

According to his son Prabasish Ghosh, 38, an announcement asking Muslims to come together was made from the Paik Para mosque.  “As the voice was faint I am not sure about the exact words used but they were asking people to join in large numbers,” he said. Within half an hour, they received a phone call that Ghosh had been attacked. The riots had left them helpless. The family had to wait for the administration to send an ambulance to safely pick up their patriarch from Paik Para.

Muslims from Paik Para asked what was Ghosh doing outside when he knew the situation was communally volatile. According to the Muslim settlements in Paik Para, Ghosh was part of the Hindu mob which had allegedly attacked houses and the market in the area.

The houses had stones thrown at them, kuccha houses or shops were probably damaged by sticks and rods. Locals claimed to have heard bombs go off. But considering the low scale damage, it appears that they could have been Molotov cocktails. In Paik Para and Moila Khola, very few shops were gutted.

In Baduria, the police and its property became the main target of the rioters. Buses and several police vehicles were attacked and charred. A few of them were still there at the Baduria police station entrance, a reminder of what had occurred there.

The rioters in the inter-caste clashes in Uttar Pradesh’s Saharanpur district’s Shabbirpur village had left over 25 houses devastated and several Dalits were injured. During the 2016 Jat reservation stir in Haryana, the rioters had left behind complete havoc in Jhajhar’s non-Jat localities. While no two instances of violence can be compared and contrasted, the damage in Basirhat was not even close to any of these riots.

‘Outsiders’ and Bangladeshi Jamat theory 

Were those involved in the violence, in Basirhat and Baduria, ‘outsiders’? Several media reports have made such claims, some going as far to claim they were from Bangladesh. They attributed the information to locals. But there was no mention of who these people were, or verification of these claims.

Hafeez-ul-Mohammad, who house was attacked by a Hindu mob on July 5, said that attackers from both Hindu and Muslim communities were “outsiders.” We asked if they were wearing different clothes or had accents or dialects different from the ones in North 24 Parganas? The answer was no.

He said, “We didn’t recognise the attackers.” They could be from other nearby villages, he said. When the Muslim mob was on a rampage, only properties owned by Hindus were attacked. When Hindus retaliated, those belonging to Muslims became their target. No violence with such specific pattern can be carried out without the help of people who live there.

Imam Yasin Mondal was present at the Milan mosque and saw the frenzied mob swelling within minutes. Around 8 in the evening they tried to set Sarkar’s house on fire. Mondal said that the attackers were majorly from outside the village. When asked where exactly, the 51-year-old imam said, “They were from Narayanpur, Navapada, Simulia. No one from outside the region was among the attackers.” He accepted that a few from Magurkhali were present with those involved in the arson. These villages are under the same district.

Similarly, the possibility of Bangladeshi migrants and Jammat links to rioters was being discussed at length on social media. Even though both Muslims and Hindus are equally concerned about the increasing number of illegal Bangladeshi migrants, that connection did not come at all in our time in the area. A senior journalist with a leading English daily, said, “What do you mean by Jammat? It could be any Muslim organisation. The only Bangladeshi Jammat that should be a concern for India and West Bengal is – Jamat-ul-Mujahidin (JMB). But the possibility of them getting support in these districts is almost impossible.” The JMB is a Bangladeshi terrorist outfit aimed at establishing an Islamic state based on Sharia law. He said that a JMB attack would be an attack on the Bengali identity of the Muslims here and there is the least chance of them being involved.

Matin claimed that he has not observed any such development in the region. Baduria MLA Rahim did accept that in the recent times, the communal forces in the area have become stronger but he has never felt the presence of the JMB. Both Matin and Rahim said that if the JMB has an impact on the locals here, then it is a matter of concern and also the failure of Indian intelligence agencies.

Of communal divides and appeasement politics

Even though the Basirhat riots can be considered mild (in comparison to what they were made out to be), its consequences ripple far and wide. There is a communal divide in the area. The attacks on temples and mosques have hurt sentiments on both sides.

At Moila Khola, a temple to goddess Kali – Maayer Iccha -was attacked by Muslim rioters. The statue was vandalised and all jewellery stolen. “The temple was attacked on Tuesday when Muslims took out the march. Maayer tikli, payal, chuddi sab le gaya (They took away all the jewellery of the goddess),” Meeta Mukherjee, the caretaker and priest, told us. These images were circulated on WhatsApp angering Hindus. Possibly, this is why the mosques were attacked.

Locals claimed that the second temple, barely 100 metres away from here, was attacked and the donation box looted. “They tried to bomb the temple but it didn’t go off. Everyone was frightened and that is when Hindus had to stand for themselves,” Pranoy Mondal, 29, said. The broken window panes of his house indicate that it had also become the target of rioters. Later on Tuesday and Thursday, Hindus marched in large numbers. Notably, in a video accessed by us, Hindu mobs can be heard chanting Jai Shri Ram – probably a new trend in West Bengal.

Trinamool’s Basirhat MLA Dipendu Biswas was in Germany when the riots began. On Thursday, when he returned to his constituency the police tried to pick a couple of Hindu youth. It is widely believed that the police was acting at Biswas’s behest.

On Thursday, the police had barged into the house of Sanjeev Chowkidar of Godownpada – a slum-like locality, along the railway track in Basirhat. He was allegedly one amongst those whom they tried to arrest. “They checked my box, containers of rice and other things in the house,” said Chowkidar. However, the women in the locality had assembled and confronted the police and after which they had to leave empty handed. A 22-year-old neighbour claimed that Biswas was behind the attempt at arresting the Hindu youth. His phone also had pictures of the vandalised Moila Khola temple and other such ‘atrocities’ committed against Hindus.

The police’s going soft on Muslim rioters is another allegation by the opposition party. BJP state chief Ghosh said the police did not even lathicharge rioters from the Muslim community.

Interestingly, the police officials at Baduria police station refused to speak to the media. Their standard reply was, “Please, go to Basirhat. All our senior officials are there. You can speak to them.” The Trinamool government has shunted a large section of officials deployed in Basirhat – for failing to contain the violence. On July 10, the station in-charge, Biswajeet Bandopadhyay, said, “I have taken charge barely 48 hours back. We are ready to provide all sorts of security to those living in this district.” When asked if the police were planning to arrest any of the rioters, he said, “Both the processes are going on simultaneously. We are identifying the rioters and also focusing on maintenance of law and order.”

Mamata Banerjee’s policies over the years have often had her labelled pro-Muslim, a reputation not unheard of in this area. In April 2012, the state government had announced Rs 2,500 allowances for imams and later Rs 1,500 for muezzins, who say the azaan. This was challenged in the Calcutta High Court and was declared to be “unconstitutional” in September 2013. However, this helped in the mushrooming of mosques in the region. “At least 50-60 new mosques have been built in the last four-five years,” Peerzada Khobayeb Amin of Basirhat’s famous Moulanabeg Darbar Sharif told us. The dargah has a following of lakhs from both the communities. “Villages, which had one mosque, swiftly constructed another one – in the hope of getting government allowance,” said Amin. He added that this appeasement to garner Muslim votes left an impression, one of resentment on the other community. “Such policies only help in increasing communal divide.”

Back in Moila Khola, those like Mondal said that so far they had been voting for the Trinamool but now they will look towards the BJP. Several Trinamool offices were targeted and vandalised after rumours spread claiming Biswas was getting Hindus arrested.

Roughly 25 km away from here, in Rudrapur, one realises that the BJP has been able to successfully exploit the Trinamool’s image of Muslim appeaser. “Mamata namaz padhne chali gai. Aajtak dekha ki Muslim neta ko Hindu ka culture follow karte hue? (Mamata went to offer namaz. Have you ever seen any Muslim leader celebrate Hindu customs?),” said Swaroop Mondal. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has been active here for the past five years.

Swaroop, 27, is in-charge of the RSS in Rudrapur. “Our support base has been increasing since 2014. We have around 2,500 members here and 300 come for shakhas.” The RSS holds five shakhas in the area and three months back, a BJP office was opened at the Rudrapur street. BJP flags in Rudrapur were visible on several houses around the newly-opened BJP office.

A young man in his twenties, with a teeka, standing outside the BJP office suddenly told us “Only Republic TV had the courage to show what was happening here. It was only after Republic broadcasted the news, others followed and so the situation improved.” It was only after he left, that we were told that he was a Trinamool youth leader.

West Bengal has been a Trinamool stronghold for an inordinately long time. But no one party has expressed as much interest in the region following the riots as the BJP. The party seems to be making inroads into the state on the backs of the Hindu insecurity vote. The BJP state president’s brazen comments against Muslims reflect confidence that should worry the party governing West Bengal.

The author can be contacted on Twitter @tweets_amit.