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In India today, all manner of public grievances, real or imaginary, provoke bloody rioting. In Guwahati, cricket fans went berserk when a match was cancelled due to rains, while in Bangalore, fans of a film star, who died peacefully of old age, went on a rampage for two whole days.
Now, residents of Vadodara are rioting because a two centuries old dargah was demolished by the local Municipal Corporation. So far five people have been killed and several injured.
It is as if mobs burning, looting and damaging public property have become the symbols of protests in democratic India. All other forms of raising objections or debating have become redundant; large-scale violence is the first choice of the aggrieved. Many of these events have little to do with public interest, but it is the public that suffers
the most.
In the Vadodara incident, the civic authorities claim that they were only going ahead with a well-announced demolition drive aimed at all kinds of illegal structures, including shops and, for that matter, temples.
The demolition order was preceded by an effort from Muslim organisations to have it declared as a heritage structure, which was refused by the mayor of Vadodara. There is no dearth of such places of worship that spring up on public land. They need to be treated like any other illegal structure.
However, Gujarat today is perhaps the most communally polarised state in India. The wounds of the riots of 2002 have still not healed. The alarming part of this latest incident is that two of the deaths happened not at the site of the riot but in stabbings later in the day in a communally sensitive neighbourhood.
Clearly, the incident, even if it was brought under immediate control, has the potential to simmer and resurface. The various authorities—at the civic, state and central level—will have to work hard to ensure that the situation does not get out of hand. But it is also the responsibility of non-state actors, like community leaders and non-government organisations, to put in greater efforts at creating a stable environment.
What this riot and others tell us about the state of Indian society is that we cannot manage discontent without having chaos on the streets that leads to tragic deaths on a regular basis. Move over argumentative Indian; you have now graduated into the rioting Indian.