Muzaffarnagar Riots Perils of a Patronage Democracy

Clientelistic politics is fuelling the current upsurge of communal violence in Uttar Pradesh. When the channels that provide access to state resources are organised around social divisions, the potential power-shifts that elections bring about provide ample motivation for political elites as well as common voters to mobilise.

Ward Berenschot (ward.berenschot@gmail.com) is a political scientist and author of Riot Politics: Hindu-Muslim Violence and the Indian State (Columbia University Press/Rupa Publications, 2013).

The recent upsurge of communal violence in Uttar Pradesh (UP) has allayed hopes that India’s economic growth would gradually put an end to a long history of Hindu-Muslim strife. Since 7 September 2013 at least 52 people (15 Hindus and 37 Muslims) have died and 50,000 people were displaced around the town of Muzaffarnagar. Subsequently about 30 children have frozen to death due to the appalling conditions in the refugee camps where thousands are still staying out of fear of returning to their ransacked homes.
The immediate trigger had been a dispute over, apparently, the stalking of a girl. This dispute led to the death of the alleged stalker, a Muslim, and two family members of the girl, Hindu Jat farmers. In this region Muslims have been working the field of Jat farmers for generations, but this interdependence did not prevent politicians from both communities to react to the incident with incendiary speeches. As the UP government wavered in its response and community mobilisation got underway, a gruesome spectacle of mass violence enfolded. The Muzaffarnagar riots have been the largest outburst since the 2002 violence in Gujarat, but it is by no means an isolated incident: after the Samajwadi Party (SP) under Akhilesh Yadav came to power in UP in March 2012, the police has counted 39 outbursts communal riots (Rai 2013).
To explain this upsurge, we need to go beyond the usual political incriminations and look at the nature of UP’s political arena instead. Sure enough, there are plenty of reasons to blame political strategising for the violence. Ahead of the 2014 general elections, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) badly needs to recover lost ground in UP. BJP leaders like Sangeet Som seem to have taken to this task by inciting violence and circulating fake videos. He and other BJP leaders have been vitiating the atmosphere with angry speeches during a large mahapanchayat meeting of the Jat community on 7 September 2013. Their militant defence of the Jat community seems a calculated attempt to solidify Hindu support.
Similarly, there are good reasons to suspect that the wavering response of Yadav’s government have been guided by the need to maintain the support of UP’s Muslim community, so crucial for SP’s electoral victory in the 2012 state elections. This might explain the perceived bias of the police against the Jat community, the release of Muslim suspects and the transferring of police officials who arrested these suspects. Because of these observations it has been argued that the recent violence is the result of an implicit “deal” between the BJP and SP, intended to polarise society along communal line (see Centre for Policy Analysis 2013; Rao et al 2013). Intense polarisation might serve to weaken the mobilisational capacity of competing political parties like Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and Congress.
Such political machinations are a recurring element of reporting on communal riots and they also figure prominently in academic explanations for India’s Hindu-Muslim violence. They are, however, unsatisfying on two accounts: firstly, such a focus on the strategies of political elites leaves unexplained why common villagers – who do not share the same political interests – could be instigated to participate in the violence. And secondly, the observation that politicians can benefit from the resulting social polarisation begs the question: what is it about India’s political arena that makes social polarisation such a profitable political strategy?
After a year-long period of fieldwork on the organisation behind Gujarat’s 2002 violence, I feel that the answer to these questions lies in the dependence of particularly poorer citizens on patronage networks to gain access to state institutions. Such an analysis is not meant to refute political explanations for violence, nor does it exonerate individuals of their responsibility for stoking communal embers. But it might help to understand why they do so.
Patronage networks are exchange networks: through these channels political elites mobilise (electoral) support – votes and campaign support, but also campaign budgets – while compensating their supporters by providing them with access to state resources such as jobs, public services or business contracts. The widespread dependence of citizens on such patronage networks is strengthened by a largely self-enforcing mechanism: as citizens reward politicians for providing them with access to state resources, political success is largely premised on developing control over the functioning of state bureaucracies, which in turn reinforces the dependence of voters on political mediation. It is because of this entrenched political meddling in the functioning of state bureaucracies that India has been called a “patronage democracy”.
Infrastructure for Violence
So what does this dependence on patronage networks have to do with the violence that engulfs a community after a relatively small incident such as eve-teasing? A focus on the functioning of these patronage networks yield two important mechanisms of how and why a patronage democracy engenders – under certain conditions – communal violence. One mechanism is related to the actual organisation of violence, the other to the political exploitation of social identities.
First, the organisation of violence. A recurring element in studies on the “groundwork” of UP’s politics are descriptions of how political parties are using their control over the distribution of state researchers to attract and reward voters (Chandra 2004). Such clientelistic strategies require effective networks: informal links between local (community) leaders, political workers and state officials are necessary to ensure that efforts to distribute state resources – jobs, public services, government contracts, etc – will indeed be reciprocated by voters at the time of elections.
Furthermore, clientelistic strategies lead to the politicisation of state bureaucracies. The inability of police officials in UP to arrest politically well-connected criminals – yielding perceptions of a “goonda raj” – is just one visible effect of the control that politicians wield over the bureaucracy. As a result, for less-privileged citizens the access to, say, a secure land title, a government job or a loan is not based on one’s individual rights as citizens but rather the result of the negotiations and exchanges of favours with political intermediaries (Jeffrey 2002).
In this way clientelistic electoral strategies are generating widespread patronage networks that, at times of communal tensions, can serve as the infrastructure for the mobilisation of mobs and the organisation of violence. Not just party members or local strongmen but also criminal actors, state officials, businessmen and police officers derive at least a part of their livelihood from the (business) opportunities and state resources that can be obtained through political connections. Such benefits give these actors various incentives to nurture their contacts with politicians and influential bureaucrats. These incentives make the instigation of violence possible: the capacity of political actors to mobilise large mobs, distribute weapons, and prevent police intervention is related to the rewards that individuals at lower levels in the clientelistic pyramid can reap by performing favours for their patrons.
Police, Goondas, Leaders
Take, for example, the failure of police officials to stem the violence and the accusations that minister Azam Khan ordered the transfer of police officials and a district magistrate for arresting Muslims. For police officials maintaining good relations with politicians serves to streamline a steady stream of bribes. By crossing politicians, by for example, attempting to prevent violence, police officials risk being transferred to “punishment postings”. Given the considerable bribe they often had to pay to secure a good posting, such a transfer would imply a serious financial risk. As a result of this dependency on political patrons the police force cannot function as a bulwark against the instigation of ethnic violence; the control of politicians over the postings of police officers undermines the capacity and willingness of individual officers to function as custodians of the law.
A similar argument can be made about another important type of contributors to communal violence: local criminals or goondas. Patronage channels need individuals known for their capacity for violence, not only for the (campaign) money that their illegal activities bring in, but also because of the need for “muscle power” to establish local authority to provide protection in the absence of a fully sovereign police force. For their part, local goondas face strong incentives to attach themselves to political patrons, since their livelihoods – extortion, gambling, illegal trade, etc – often depends on political contacts to ward off police intervention. As a result political actors dispose of a lot of “muscle power” that can be asked to take the lead during outbursts of violence.
A third group of contributors are community leaders. Local leaders come in various forms and sizes, but a recurring aspect of local leadership is that it is bound with a capacity to “get things done”, i e, to deal with state institutions on behalf of their community members (Krishna 2007). For ambitious individuals, the development of ties with influential power holders can thus hardly be avoided – which makes them and their community vulnerable to political manipulation. In a similar manner one can analyse the local popularity of militant organisations like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) or the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Their appeal is not just based on ideology or the invocation of a shared enemy. Their popularity is also related to the way these organisations are integrated into local patronage channels and, consequently, the capacity of these organisations to provide followers with a government job, a business opportunity or preferential treatment by the police.
In short: the networks involved in the instigation and perpetration of violence are not just “institutionalised riot systems” (Brass 2003), they are patronage networks. Their capacity to instigate violence is related to their capacity to provide access to state resources.
Patronage and Identity Politics
A second important mechanism linking the daily machinations of a patronage democracy to outbursts of violence concerns identity politics. It is often commented that India’s pervasive identity politics stems from the usefulness of social identities to mobilise electoral support. A focus on the intricacies of clientelistic exchanges can help understand why this is so.
When access to public services is shaped by political intercession rather than policy provisions, candidates do not need to convince voters of the effectiveness or reasonableness of policy proposals. They need to find ways to credibly convey the promise that after elections they will be willing to devote time and energy to solve their problems. Social identities provide useful means to convey this promise. A shared social identity – whether in terms of caste, regional background or religion – provides a candidate with the (symbolic) arguments to convince voters that he will be “their man” and empathises with their needs. The different identity dimensions among the electorate are instruments for politicians to make these promises more convincing. Through the use of different identity symbols, and through the invocation of antagonisms between voters, politicians can convey their most important message: after the elections I will be more helpful to you than other candidates.
Furthermore, a clientelistic political arena generates important incentives for political leaders, their clients as well as brokers to structure their clientelistic exchanges along the lines of social divisions such as religion or caste. As both voters and politicians exchange political support for access to state resources, ethnicity provides them with a very useful tool to do so. A shared caste background of candidates gives voters some reassurance that an elected candidate will actually be of help after the elections to deal with state institutions. For politicians the invocation of identity symbols provides them with a useful means to convey a credible promise to the electorate that they will be more helpful to the voter then the opposing political party.
And for brokers – the local leaders and “fixers” who mediate the interaction between politician and voters – their leadership of a community can be used to reassure politicians of their capacity to deliver a large number of votes. As politicians need to use their limited resources efficiently, they prefer to deal with brokers who possess authority over a large number of voters. In the absence of strong civil society organisations (like trade unions, cooperatives, business organisations), brokers can invoke their membership of a community to reassure politicians of their capacity to deliver a large number of votes. After elections, this membership is again invoked to pressurise politicians into delivering the promised public resources.
Community Mobilisation
This imperative to organise election campaigns around us-them divisions stimulates politicians to engage in attempts to manipulate the importance that voters attach to different identity dimensions. While, for example, the BJP target a religious divide, BSP, Congress and SP particularly target caste-divisions. As political campaigns are thus organised around different identity dimensions – caste, religion as well as class and region – electoral success depends to a certain extent on heightening the public awareness of one such dimension at the expense of other dimensions.
Campaign speeches of politicians can often be interpreted as attempts to manipulate this salience of “their” identity dimension. Outbursts of communal violence serve this purpose very effectively: by polarising society along a religious divide, such violence hinders the mobilisation efforts of parties who target caste divisions. A patronage democracy thus stimulates a constant manipulation of the importance that people attach to different dimensions of their social identities.
The process of invoking social divisions to facilitate clientelistic exchanges has the important side effect of associating the membership of a community to the access to (state) resources. As the contacts and solidarity that these networks offered proved essential to secure education, healthcare or security, the impression is generated that the election of someone from another community to a key position would form a real threat to one’s well-being and one’s chances to succeed in life. When the networks that provide access to state resources become organised around social divisions, the potential power-shifts that elections bring about, thus provide ample motivation for not only elites but also their followers to mobilise.
In this way one could interpret the remark of a Jat farmer from Muzaffarnagar that, “There will be no peace until the balance of power is sorted out” (Jha 2013). This remark is not just about community honour. As Muslim votes have helped the SP to come to power in UP, their access to state institutions, particularly the police, has improved. This increased closeness to state authorities yields not only material benefits, but also symbolically shifts perceptions of power and superiority between communities. Take this quotation from a Meerut resident: “This government has been trying to show itself as pro-Muslim. As a result, young and irresponsible groups among Muslims too race about on mobikes, violate traffic signals and, when stopped, stick their mobiles on the ears of the policeman and put a local leader on the line, frightening the cop” (Chishti 2013).
Such community-based shifts in access to state institutions create tensions. In this way the fragmented and versatile nature of local patronage channels can help explain the current upsurge in violence in UP. The national elections in 2014 are creating tension in UP not only because Narendra Modi’s candidacy is bringing Muslim-Hindu divisions to the fore, but also because these elections provide an occasion for local communities to rally against (or defend) uneven access to state institutions.