Ram Navami Processions And The Unlearned Lessons Of Communal Violence In Mumbai

The songs that played out on the music system and the slogans that were lustily shouted had little to do with Ram Navami, an occasion of piety and celebration for devout Hindus, but everything to do with baiting Muslims as the processions wound their way on main roads this past weekend. A few, like the one on Andheri-Kurla Road, were shared on social media and received unsettling cheer or justified condemnation, while on-ground activists say many more such processions were held across the city to commemorate Ram Navami.

How the pious occasion merits songs that openly threaten ‘Aurangazeb ki aulaad’, use explicit gendered cuss words set to music, and are repeated even by women, and DJs that rouse the crowds composed mostly of young men to bait the Muslims is an old question. It’s a template being used again and again, with clear political gains.

The Hindutva music targeting and baiting Muslims has been around for a few years now and has been used, without any restraint or response from law-keepers, during festivals and election campaigns. The Bharatiya Janata Party, cleverly, profits from the drumming up of hate against the ‘other’ but shifts responsibility for the offensive lyrics and songs to the musicians-singers.

This trend, reportedly from Delhi-Uttar Pradesh nearly a decade ago, has caught on and spread like wildfire, meriting columns and books and the usual tch-tch noises from shocked liberals. That people continue to be surprised by Hindu religious processions turning into open provocations and threats to Muslims is itself a surprise; the question to ask is why the administration gets away with turning a blind eye to it.

There were policemen in the procession on the Andheri-Kurla Road, but, of course, they allowed it all. Some 14,000 men in uniform had been deployed this past weekend to keep the peace during Ram Navami, according to reports.

This was not the first year that aggressive, mob-rousing Hindutva music, with violent and sexist imagery, was played in public in Mumbai. Malvani, dismissed as a low-income and low-life area of Muslims, saw this during the Ram Navami procession last year; other areas have too. Ram Navami, much like Lord Ram, has been weaponised. A religious occasion used to foment communal tensions and trouble. Clearly, Mumbai and its administrators have learnt no lesson at all.

When the violence first erupted in Bombay on the night of December 6, 1992, and was allowed to escalate into a full-blown riot through the next many days and then again in January 1993, it had started with provocative marches, slogans and ghantanaad (coordinated ringing of temple bells), as those who tracked and covered the events then would attest. The city then, as now during Ram Navami, was supposedly under the watch of a large police force.

On that December night, the “victory processions” through certain areas of the city, by highly animated groups of young men mainly from the Bajrang Dal, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Shiv Sena, rejoiced that the Babri Masjid had been demolished and sloganeered. The slogans were so abusive of Muslims that they “could not be read out in open court” during the hearings of the Justice Srikrishna Commission that investigated the violence. The cops had stood by and watched. When Muslims, anguished by the demolition, came on the streets to protest it, or threw the first stone, as they say, the police had opened fire, taking several lives that one night. The die was cast.

Administration lapses, by default or design, helped turn those provocations and baits into full-blown riots. The Justice Srikrishna Commission report pointed out the lapses, including the police mutely allowing ghantanaads and maha-artis in temples that spilt out on the streets replicating what namazis do, their inability or unwillingness to control the tensions that arose with the murder of two mathadi workers, and the arson in Radhabai Chawl in January 1993. It also pointed to the deliberate weaponisation of Hindu festivals with the use of provocative slogans and baits from mid-1992 onwards.

The processions have become louder and more brazen, with explicitly abusive and threatening slogans and songs now set to foot-tapping music. This creates “a rhetorical environment in which communal violence” takes place, as scholars have remarked. The Shiv Sena’s role has been well documented, but the quiet role that Sangh Parivar outfits played in building up this environment usually flies below the radar. As it did in the Bhiwandi riots in 1970, where the story of religious processions with provocative slogans and actions leading to communal violence in independent India can be traced.

Bhiwandi, the loom town outside Mumbai, saw the Rashtriya Utsav Mandal organise a Shiv Jayanti procession through the Muslim locality of Nizampura with marchers, armed with lathis, shouting slogans against the minorities; Muslims retaliated by hurling stones. Bhiwandi simmered for days, years later. The Justice DP Madon Commission, which probed the riots, showed that more than 80 per cent of the dead were Muslims and that 15 of the 19 members of the Mandal were either Jan Sangh members or sympathetic to its ideology.

Commemorative events, aspects of everyday life, films and festivals are weaponised to create the environment, Hindu rituals of worship, like Ram Navami, are militarised, all with the larger goal of engendering communal violence. Muslims throwing the first stone is, then, merely incidental but designed to unleash full-scale violence and state power. The pattern repeats itself in city after city. That Mumbai should fall prey to it in 2025 is most unfortunate. 

Smruti Koppikar, senior journalist and urban chronicler, writes extensively on cities, development, gender, and the media. She is the Founder Editor of the award-winning online journal ‘Question of Cities’ and won the Laadli Media Award 2024 for her writing in this column.