Some among the crowds realised this in their own distinct ways. On August 15, 1947, the late journalist, Nikhil Chakravarty, was able to capture as a cub reporter an eloquent scene in the slums of a Calcutta still reeling from the worst Hindu-Muslim riots in its history: “The first spontaneous initiative came from the Muslim bustees and was immediately responded to by Hindu bustees. It was Calcutta’s poor, especially Muslims, who opened the floodgates... Muslim boys clambered up at Chowringhee and shouted, ‘Hindu-Muslim ek

ho’...” This found immediate echo in the Hindu bustees. “Then all of a sudden in the very storm centres of the most gruesome rioting of the past year, Muslims and Hindus ran across the frontiers and hugged each other in wild joy.”

That visionary gleam took awhile to dispel. The fifties were relatively peaceful, but by the sixties communal riots were once again very much a part of the Indian political scene. The decade began with the Jabalpur riots of 1961, triggered reportedly by a Hindu girl eloping with a Muslim boy, and ended with a major conflagration in Ahmedabad, in 1969, which bore all the familiar characteristics of the major riots that followed — including the political assertion of the RSS/Jan Sangh. The Justice P. Jaganmohan Reddy Commission appointed to inquire into them made the now familiar recommendation that the Gujarat police needed to be reorganised in order to be less biased, a theme that figured hugely in the Srikrishna Commission report two decades later. Sociologist Paul Brass has argued that this “production of Hindu-Muslim communal violence”, often occurring in waves, was linked to the political construction of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ identities in post-Independence India.

... contd.