COMMENTARY OCTOber 5, 2013 vol xlvIiI no 40 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 10 Hilal Ahmed (ahmed.hilal@googlemail. com) is a fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi. Muzaffarnagar 2013 Meanings of Violence Hilal Ahmed The issues of weak governance and the cynical communal politics of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Samajwadi Party have been noted in the recent spate of violence in western Uttar Pradesh. This article looks at the social dynamics of caste assertions, new media technologies and the merging of the good governance and Hindutva narratives to try and understand how and why a commonplace incident of criminality transformed so quickly into such a major bout of communal violence. T he recent Muzaffarnagar violence, in which more than 50 people were killed, is described, explained, and even analysed in two different yet con- nected ways. 1 There is an event-centric portrayal of this violence. We are told that the trouble began in the last week of August 2013, when a teenage Hindu/Jat girl was harassed by a Muslim boy in the Kanwal village of Muzaffarnagar district. Two brothers of this girl killed the Muslim boy; however, they were also lynched to death in retaliation. 2 This is not a rare incident in this highly crime-prone district of Uttar Pradesh ( UP). Media reports and even serious academic research show that family rivalries and community honour often lead to a series of murders in Muz- affarnagar area (Naqvi 2013). But, the subsequent events transformed this epi- sode into a typical “communal” clash. It is reported that although the local officials banned public meetings by im- posing Section 144, a public meeting was held on 30 August 2013 in the city after the Juma congregational prayers. Many district and state-level Muslim leaders associated with the Congress, the Sama- jwadi Party ( SP ) and the Bahujan Samaj Party ( BSP ) attended this meeting and delivered inflammatory speeches. Con- sequently, communal tension increased. In the meantime, a fake video, which claimed to capture the killing of the Jat boys, was posted on social media and led to further polarisation. In protest, a mahapanchayat of thousands of Jat farmers was called on 7 September near Kanwal village. 3 The local Bharatiya Janata Party ( BJP ) unit, it is informed, was directly responsible for organising this rally. As expected, the mahapanchayat was addressed by local Hindu leaders, who delivered equally provocative speeches. After the scheduled programme when people were headed home, they were attacked by a mob and 12 people died in this wave of violence. To control the situation, the state government asked for the army to be deployed. However, the organised killings did not stop for next two days and the death toll went up to 39. Many people left homes and took shelter in the camps. This narrative revolves around a few empirically-grounded anxieties: how did the political leaders get permission from the district administration to organise two massive rallies, especially when Section 144 was imposed? Why did the state government fail to arrest the political leaders who organised these meetings, despite the fact that their names were mentioned in the FIR which was subsequently filed? The scope of these questions is magnified further by underlining a few conspiracy theories: a secret alliance between SP and BJP for sharing Muslim and Hindu votes; a game plan of Congress to divert public atten- tion from basic issues; BJP’ s attempt to capture the Jat constituency, etc. These inferences are either debated as “explana- tions” for what happened and/or as the “conclusions” which these events led to. 4 There is another, ostensibly grand, political narrative of this violence, which seeks to establish an observable connec- tion between the events of Muzaffar- nagar and the emerging configurations of Indian politics. The debate on the elevation of Narendra Modi as BJP’ s prime ministerial candidate, the failure of Akhilesh Yadav-led UP government in controlling the riots, the increasing communal clashes between Hindus and Muslims in north India, and the Vishva Hindu Parishad’s (VHP) famous Ayodhya yatra, are seen as inseparable fragments of the larger picture of this highly pola- rising Hindu communal politics. This narrative evokes the “history” of Hindutva politics, especially its violent manifesta- tions during the peak days of Babri Masjid- Ram temple controversy, as a legitimate reference point. The political-moral significance of these explanations should not be under- estimated, particularly when a large number of people (mainly Muslims) have