Congress’s desperate bid to win over minorities
The Congress-led UPA regime's intent behind reviving the Prevention of Communal and Targetted Violence (Access to Justice and Reparations) Bill, 2011, is what it was when it proposed the legislation back in May 2011: Divide society along communal lines and reap political harvest. The UPA's decision to bring the slanted Bill out of cold storage comes only months before the 2014 general election, at a time when the ruling coalition is faced with a strong anti-incumbency sentiment. It knows that it has wasted the mandate of the people it received in 2009, and the regime is now using the Bill as a rallying point to lure minority community voters to its fold. While it is far from clear whether this dangerous and cynical political strategy will convert into votes for the Congress and its allies, there is no doubt that it will widen existing social faultlines.
Drafted by the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council, the Bill that claims to prevent communal violence is itself communal. It neatly divides society into one majority and one minority community, then proceeds on the outrageous assumption that it is always the former that attacks the latter — no matter who the actual victims may be. Yet, as the Bodo-Muslim riots in Assam or the Muslim-Christian violence in Kerala or the tribal flare-ups in Odisha show, such simplistic assumptions do not reflect the complex reality of communal violence in a country as diverse as India. They only expose the insecurities of a regime that realises its days are numbered. Moreover, the anti-communal violence Bill is not just a blow to secularism; it also threatens India's federal structure. By allowing the Union Government to step in during a riot, the Bill impinges on the rights of the State Government, as law and order is a State subject. State regimes have long registered a strong protest and rightly argued that the Bill hampers their ability to respond to a communal flare-up and makes it difficult to prosecute the guilty.
It is not that the UPA regime is unaware of these flaws. When the Government proposed the Bill in 2011, the legislation came under heavy criticism from all quarters and was summarily dismissed at an all-party meeting. It is safe to assume that, if presented in its original form, or even if tweaked a bit, it will meet the same fate. The Bill is also unlikely to stand legal scrutiny, given its unconstitutional premise of demarcating the population into majority and minority groups on the basic of religion, caste, language and ethnicity. In other words, the UPA knows that it will not be able to take the Bill to its logical conclusion. Why bring it upIJ The coalition would like us to believe the revival has been necessitated by the Muzaffarnagar riots. Yet, the violence in Uttar Pradesh was not because there were no laws to prevent a communal flare-up. It was sparked by the unabashedly partisan politics of the State's ruling party and blew out of control after the regime mishandled the situation. Besides, the Muzaffarnagar violence was neither the first nor the most deadly instance of communal unrest since the UPA came to power. Even between 2011 and now, there have been several equally terrible cases across the country, from Kanyakumari to Kashmir. But the UPA regime has only woken up now, and with a wrong solution.