MONDAY marked the 27th year of Indira Gandhi’s assassination by her Sikh bodyguards. It was also the 27th anniversary of the unspeakable massacre of thousands of innocent men, women and children that followed her murder.

Hindu mobs guided by police, government officials and Congress party apparatchiks went on an orgy in the Indian capital — raping, looting, killing Sikh families at will. Kanpur, Mumbai and also some other Indian cities witnessed horrific scenes of madness against India’s most robust and culturally assertive minority community.

Rajiv Gandhi, who took over as prime minister from his slain mother, expressed his sadness characteristically awkwardly at the killing spree. He said when a big tree is uprooted the ground underneath was bound to shake. Rajiv Gandhi won a record four-fifths majority in the ensuing Lok Sabha elections. Hindu zealots voted for him in huge numbers with the result that their own party — the Bharatiya Janata Party — got just two seats.

Friends and allies of the Congress have used Rajiv Gandhi’s unwitting assertion, of cause and effect in violence, for other and similar purposes.

Manmohan Singh sought to justify his successful vote in parliament — which is being investigated for corruption by bribery — by pointing to the second innings he got as prime minister. Narendra Modi won two huge elections after the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat by his supporters in the mayhem of 2002. Modi’s cause-and-effect theory flowed from the killing of 65 Hindu activists allegedly by a Muslim mob that attacked their train coach with inflammable material.

The big tree of our idiom can assume many forms. It took the form of Indira Gandhi in 1984. In 2002, it was the Hindu activists in the train that was attacked in Godhra who became the proverbial tree to fall. The tree is like a red line that must not be crossed. In Ayodhya in 1992, the Babri Masjid was destroyed for an error of commission, if it was that, which took place under Babar’s rule.

The cause in the cause-and-effect sequence is mostly exaggerated and sometimes it isn’t even there. A simple fact that there is some election round the corner can be a good enough cause to let loose a volley of mayhem, preferably against some hapless minority group.

An insidious campaign is palpably under way by a predominantly upper caste state apparatus to pit marginalised communities against each other to extract political mileage. Hindu tribals and Dalits were turned against Christian tribals in Orissa. Dalits and tribals were pitted against Muslims in Gujarat, just to cite two examples.

More often than not the media, unabashedly circumscribed by its caste origins, either lacks insights or shows little interest in the supposedly routine daily conflicts — unless it sees potential for one of the duels to affect its corporate interests.

The Gopalgarh massacre provides a recent example of this evident lack of interest in a spuriously devised cause-and-effect instance of violence against a local community. The grim story, linked to arriving polls in Uttar Pradesh, neighbouring Rajasthan, was located in a small village on the way to Agra.

It took civil society groups, including the People’s Union of Civil Liberties, to probe the ghastly killings of Muslims by a combination of police and Hindu mobs that took place in Gopalgarh last month. A report prepared by human rights bodies was released on Tuesday, from which an eyewitness account goes thus:

…We climbed on top of the masjid to figure out what was happening. There were around eight to 10 of us on the terrace when suddenly a young boy next to me got hit by a bullet. As I tried to realise what had happened, I myself got shot in the thigh. I could not stand still any longer and started fleeing downstairs.

“The Vajra vahan (the riot control vehicle) went towards the Eidgah and then came back to the masjid. Many of us tried to hide inside the masjid while some tried to jump off the 35-feet ditch and flee into the bushes in the backyard. Among the 10 to 15 who tried to go towards the front entrance many got shot from the Vajra vahan that was firing indiscriminately.

“The crowd following the police had in the time being arrived at the steps of the masjid and started killing the wounded or those trying to escape who were lucky enough to survive the police bullets. Survivors were trapped between the Gujjars and the police and were mercilessly butchered. The RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh]-led mob was carrying sticks, sickles and also guns.

“As the RSS activists kept standing right outside the mosque, 15 to 20 local men entered the masjid and started beating up the injured. At this point my phone started ringing and I tried frantically to cut the call pressing all the buttons I could while being beaten up mercilessly with lathis. Badly injured in the head and near the jaws I collapsed. By that time almost everybody inside the mosque had been killed….”

The rights report may come to nothing. The previous day, on Monday, the lament was familiar at a public meeting to mark the killings of 1984.

“For the last 27 years, people have been demanding justice, demanding that those guilty of the heinous crimes of November 1984 be punished...

“In conditions when the entire state machinery and official media were crying out for the blood of the Sikhs, during and after the massacre, we ordinary people across all communities came forward to defend the victims and the survivors in the relief camps. Through our acts of courage, we established the unity of the people against the communal Indian state and the Congress party, which had organised and perpetrated the crime.

“The events of November 1984 clearly show that it is the Indian state that is communal. Our people are not communal. The ruling party and the state were responsible for the crime, not ordinary people or their personal religious beliefs. Belying the claim of India being a ‘secular’ Republic, they have showed how political parties can openly organise communal violence, with the full assistance of the police and other arms of the state machinery.”

Beware the falling big tree.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com