UK in denial on what led to riots, but is India learning a lesson?

[Dr. John Dayal]

JOHN DAYAL

Has India learnt any lessons from the recent riots that savaged the
United Kingdom early in August? The British Governmnt and its police
seem to be in a state of denial of the root causes that led to the
violence, but there are lessons in it for India, and for that matter,
for its neighbours in south Asia which are, or will soon be, forced to
think about the after-affects of an entirely unregulated march of
global capital under the guise of liberal economic policies, and the
refusal of the government to play its role as a nurturer and protector
in a welfare state. With six thousand communal riots, and hundreds of
other incidents of mass violence, India must do some thinking. It is
important to look at the British riots.

The first impressions across the globe were ‘how terrible is the BBC
coverage when it comes to riots happening in London’. Those who have
all their lives banked on the venerable “Beebe “saw amateur camera
panning all over streets and buildings in a haze of smoke and flames,
the images jerky with the panic of the persons wielding the lens. The
reporters, out of thier depth, were panting “Oh my God, I have never
seen anything like this in my life.”
They had not. Most of those reporters were too young to have seen
London and other towns afire in the race riots of the 1980s.

These riots had caught them unawares, as it had surprised the
coalition government of Prime Minister David Cameron, who was on a
vacation in Italy [where he famously failed to tip a bargirl, and had
to apologise later].
Ironically just before his vacation, he had before an audience of
world leaders in Munich disowned Britain’s much-wonted policy of
multiculturalism, saying it was an “outright failure” and partly to
blame for fostering Islamist extremism. The UK, he said, “needs a
stronger national identity to prevent people turning to extremism.“
State multiculturalism had encouraged different cultures to live
separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream. “We have
failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to
belong,” Cameron said. For good measure, he added that the “hands-
off tolerance” had encouraged Muslims and other immigrant groups “to
live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream.”

It was not Islamic fundamentalists or Al Qaida cells which had lit the
fire. This time around, it was not issues of race or religion that
triggered the violence, but common counts of abject poverty and
deprivation in the inner cities, and the state’s failure to reach
out with sympathy to an increasing number of the victims of the
economy, now facing a second meltdown.
The trigger, in hindsight, was a thoughtless “dirty harry’ police
shooting of Mark Duggan, 29, at Ferry Lane, Tottenham. Reports said
the death occurred during an operation where specialist firearm
officers and officers from Operation Trident, the unit which deals
with gun crime in the African and Caribbean communities, were
attempting to carry out an arrest on 4th August.

Duggan was a passenger in a minicab and was shot after an apparent
exchange of fire. A police officer's radio is later found to have a
bullet lodged in it, but there was no evidence that Duggan had fired
a weapon. Riots began when family and friends of the victim complained
that the police were showing no eagerness in investigating his death
and identifying the guilty policemen.

On the night of Aug. 8, a group of hooded youths ran up the street
throwing trash bins while others stomped on the top of police patrol
cars. Still others shattered through glass phone booths and set cars
on fire. In the three days that followed the initial riots in
Tottenham, youth across England had put the government and police on
notice in a evening and night-time orgy of arson and stone pelting
which spread to Nottingham and then to Birmingham, Bristol and
Liverpool.

The urban warfare totally exposed the police, its morale still not
recovered from the recent exposes of its involvement at the highest
level with News of the World and big business. The top brass of the
police had to quit because of their wining and dining with phone
hackers of Murdoch’s news empire. This time, their orders from the
Cameron government are for ruthless action. The forces on the ground
have been trebled. Prime Minister Cameron ordered the enlarged police
forces to use the water canon on rioters, while the acting
Metropolitan police chief warned he would catch the culprits and bring
them before a court.. Nationwide, police have now made more than 2,000
arrests. Officially, four persons have been killed. One of them was a
Pakistani whose father, in a poignant speech, forgave the killers, and
called for unity of all people. Scores of shops and buildings have
been looted and gutted. The injured also number in the hundreds, with
at least two deaths in the riot areas. Businesses say their losses
have been ruinous.

There are still no signs if the government has understood the gravity
of the crisis and the socio-economic causes underpinning it, and has
a plan of action to not just restore instant peace, but heal the deep-
seated anger.
British social scientist and author Ron Boyd-Macmillan, who arrived in
India even as London was burning, told Tehelka there was no doubt
“inner city deprivation had led to the violence. In the economic
policies followed by a succession of governmetns, the people living in
the inner cities – people of Caribbean origin as much as poor among
the Whites -- had been totally ignored. There was no investment in
their education. They felt they had been disowned by society, if
partly by their own choice. A lot of the urban youth were angry that
they did not belong to society .”

Boyd-MacMillan said elements of these subclasses had been
criminalized in recent times. It speaks for the real quality of the
police that they had little intelligence on these developments,
focused as they were on the political watch on Islam.

There is also emerging evidence, he said, that the riots were very
well organised, either in deliberate outside organisation or through
contemporary social networks.

At the end of the day, the physical poverty in the by-lanes and
tenements remains a tinderbox. The poverty in Great Britain’s
politics provides the short fuse. And there are no indications that
the government, long on rabblerousing rhetoric and short on political
acumen will be able to set up policies and structures to not just
defuse the tension, but provide that long-term growth and human
dignity which the people, in their twin identities as arsonists and
victims are seeking.

In a not so curious development, the Muslim Pakistani and Bangladeshi
communities and the Hindu and Sikh Indian communities, each living in
not so rich suburbs of Greater London were gloating that they kept
their youth out of the riots. Worse, in a manner of speaking, they had
also prepared thier own vigilante gangs to protect their mosques and
their gurudwaras. This would seem a typical British divide-and-rule
policy. It is a moot question if this will integrate them with the
local population, or further distance them from the white and the
blacks.
This, the behaviour of Non-Resident Indian and People of Indian/
South Asian Origin, is an area of study for social scientists and
psychologists at home, specially those trying to understand the appeal
of Hindutva in expat communities. In India, Hindutva elements call
upon Christians and Muslims to join the “mainstream” as if they had
not been part of the local culture, language and customs, differing
only in the God they worshipped. The Indian origin person abroad
refuses, and very aggressively so, to mix with the local western
cultural milieu, owing his absolute loyalty to “Mother India”. They
Are the ones, by the way, who fund the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
back in India.

In the post riot situation, there has been some deeper analysis
substantiating the assessment made earlier by Roy Boyd-MacMillan.
Young people of Caribbean, Asian and white origin were interviewed and
there were fierce confrontations in TV studios between older people
and them.

Many of the young people of 14 had a reading age of seven, had no
stake in the system, feared competition from immigrants and didn't
care about anything as they felt 'warehoused' or dumped. “Parental
authority had vanished in many homes, children couldn't even be
slapped as young people had been empowered over the years -- one young
person said that if a mother had slapped her daughter at the police
station for being involved in the riots at the police station, she
would have been charged by the police! Many had grown up in single-
parent homes. There was no positive male authority in the home, Roy
has also said.

“Failing schools. Failing families. Failing social structures. Failing
economies. The youth who never were able to learn how to work hard and
cross over to where their effort was valued,” an analyst said.

The Church too has seen part of the malaise. It has long ceased to be
a part of the life of the people. But it does see where the problem
lies. The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams has condemned
England’s education system in the wake of this week’s riots, for
abandoning its duty to teach children “virtue, character and
citizenship”. He said state schooling had focused too much on creating
pupils who would grow up to be “consumers” and “cogs” in an economic
wheel. Dr Williams said the riots represented “a breakdown of the
sense of civic identity, shared identity, shared responsibility “One
of the most troubling features of recent days has been the spectacle
of not only young people, but even children of school age, children as
young as 7 taking part in the events we have seen,” he said.

The immediate political and physical response of the government has
been politically naïve and mechanically brutal. The police eventually
quenched the fires in the shops and the tenements, but it is a moot
question how the Cameron government will restored confidence, and
bring in the much needed development and injecting of resources in the
inner cities of England now crowded with the deprived and the angry.

The first lesson India has to learn is that globalisation, an entirely
unchecked liberalisation and a succumbing to capital and corporate
interests without commensurate concern about the common people leads
to a great torsion in society. Racism is not much of a issue in India,
but communalism, the plight of the minorities, dalits and tribals is a
rapidly emerging issue. The data from the Planning Commission shows
that these communities have not kept pace with the growth, in economy,
education, health, even nourishment, compared with the so called huge
middle class, and with other communities in urban areas. The
pauperisation in the countryside, the plight of the landless peasantry
and the mass migration to the towns and cities, often for petty jobs
or manual street labour, creates islands of absent penury and dismay.

The protests in Orissa over land acquisition for Posco, or in West
Bengal and against the Special Economic Zones across the country, are
an early warning of a great unrest that is brewing without the
government showing any awareness towards it. The tension in and around
the National Capital Region, Gurgaon, Noida and Greater Noida,
Faridabad and similar townships is another early warning. It is not
just that the famers and peasantry are loath to give up their land.
They feel cheated that the same land is sold at a profit to the
developers who them make huge profits by selling flats and apartments
to the teeming middle classes who suddenly have the money but not the
base which they can call home. As a matter of fact, the middle classes
themselves are deprived of these roots. It is anyone’s guess if the
land agitation will not spread across the country with disastrous
results. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural employment scheme, NREGA,
remains a short term sop, and that too beset with rampant corruption.

It is now clear to the meanest intelligence that much of India has not
benefited from the last twenty years of globalisation and
liberalisation. The nine per cent rate of growth has to be
counterpoised with the inflation in food prices. Education is fast
becoming a preserve of the rich, with only a badly planned and badly
financed basic education coming to the share of the poor and the
marginalised in the guise of the Right to Education.. The right to
food, now in the shape of a Bill to be moved in Parliament, but which
is already being dismissed as too little too alter, offers very little
hope for the poor in the immediate future.

In the Plan, the government has shown no indication that is concerned
in a real sense with the vast slums that have come up in all cities
where the poor live in conditions not fit for animals. Instead of
pumping money to ensure a fair life to these people, with
opportunities of education, government is playing with paper projects
such as the Unique Identity UID schemes and short term employment
projects that fall between the two stools of subsidies and cash
transfer to the needy. The differences within the Congress party and
within the government on such issues, and the total lack of accord
with the opposition parties gives little hope of concerted national
policy that will create conditions to narrow down the deep divide
between the haves and the have nots.

The police and the media have also not learnt a single lesson in the
last quarter of a century. Satellite TV channels, and regional print
and electronic media that ape them, are finding common minimum
denominators that once again cater to the middle class or the ;lower
middle class. They do not bring the spotlight to focus on the really
poor who may not be their readers and viewers, but who none the less
exist on the margins of society and look with frustration on the
events in their neighbourhood or the community television.

One thing that the poorest of the poor now seem to share with their
counterparts in the West is social networking. Facebook may not be the
rage in rural India, but the mobile handset is very much visible in
the hand of the young and the old in the villages and slums.. What
will happen if people start using these communication facilities to
knit the slum dwellers and the villagers, the starving millions, into
a semblance of unity? It is plausible to construct scenarios where the
march of thousands in Nandigram or the hundreds in Noida can grow a
hundred fold to surround national and state capitals demanding
redress. Policy makers need o week up to this scenario.
Lastly of course is the global illiteracy of the police force in
dealing with people’s protests without bursting in a military excess
in which the water canon is the most benign weapon, and the gun the
most final. The police in India does not see itself as s social
structure, or a wing of the government that can reach out to the por.
Despite thirty years of the Dharam Vira Commission on Police reforms,
police forces remain representatives of a imperial power which they
actually were before Independence.

The post-liberalisation situation is crying out for police reforms,
which seem nowhere on the horizon. There seems to a political
conspiracy involving the ruling and opposition parties that the
police, specially its armed wings, need remain rooted in their
colonial past as instruments of force to protect the state and the
ruling class. India could in the short future see riots much worse
than those of London, riots not between religious communities, or
caste groups, but in the rebellion of the marginalised and the poor.
This is the time to take social and economic development delivery
measures which will prevent a rising of the poor -- or poverty riots
as described in the United Kingdom.
[end]