Review: The Once And Future Riot by Joe Sacco
This is probably the first book I have read that explicitly mentions that no AI models can be trained on it. Welcome to the times. Local libraries are a much better source, just like bookstores, for discovering unheard of and interesting books. A thousand times so than Amazon where the clutter overpowers one’s senses and the recommended books are nothing out of the box.
I had neither heard of Joe Sacco nor about his books. I am lagging behind my reading on books on Palestine since many years and in general too. The fact that I hadn’t come across his award-winning one shouldn’t come as a surprise. Neither should it surprise you that the likes of Sacco like to believe and spread the one-dimensional-view of Hindutva, trying their best to paint the narrative that Hindutva is the cause of religious tensions in India. Someone should ask his kind were there no riots on religiously ferverish lines before Hindutva’s rise? Politicians are no saints, and the favourite scrouge of mine, ‘democracy’, has been written about as if some magical cure to all ills. If politicians, religious staunchness, countries can be critized, why can’t authors, concepts be?
Having said that, Sacco does present facts as neutrally and objectively possible, though with a tinge of bias — and that’s alright. At least he presents facts from all sides — a trait lacking in most Indian media nowadays where they pander to only one side of the spectrum (whatever that side be). He interviews first-hand the local village leaders, victims, lawyers, journalists, government officials to unearth what had happened during the Muzzafarnagar riots of 2013. A series of incidents had led to simmering tension between the Muslims and the Jats. However, later, the killing of one Muslim boy, and the lynching of two Hindu boys by a mob is what lead to uncontrollable anger — or maybe it was controlled in a way that it happens without tipping off larger warnings in the system. Apparently, the powers that be of U.P. at that time – Samajwadi Party — didn’t pay much heed to the complaints of Muslims before the riots. And after the riots, partially awarded compensation to favour their vote bank, the Muslims. Throught twists and turns of the Indian ‘system’, some got the money, albeit partially after paying bribes; whereas others never got what they should have.
There can be no happy endings coming out of a religious riot. There are no winners. As heartless as it sounds, some of the Jats complain to Sacco that earlier their farm laborers were Muslims from their own village who would work for 200 rupees per day — but with them being gone, they are forced to procure laborers from outside their villages at a much higher rate! Sacco also explores how the divisive lines between the Jats and Muslims are not just religious, but even of class — Jats being the land-owners and Muslim workers being their ‘servants’. The same divisions however do not exist in some of the villages where Muslims of Pathan ancestry reside and they are untouched by the riots — seemingly due to their valour and the reluctance of Jats to take on them. Sacco traces the divide of Hindu-Muslims back to the Partition of 1947, which is good that at least he cares to go back in history; but religious riots used to occur even in pre-independence India. He makes no effort to go back that far. He seems to have concluded that there were no religious riots or differences before the partition.
It is a decent book to inform one’s self of how the ‘boiling of the frog’ took place in 2013 with a nearly-balanced narrative; but isn’t authoritative or scholarly in any sense. Maybe that’s a bit too much to expect from a comic book. It is good enough to win awards and for podcasts. And surely good enough to be spoken about praisingly at literature fests. When attention spans have become extinct, who cares about objectivity.
#politics #sacco #muzaffarnagar #hindutva #muslim #riots #comic
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