The Anatomy of Hate

Book Review

 

Title: The Anatomy of Hate

Author: Revati Laul

Publisher: Context, New Delhi, 2018, 2023

Pages: 222

Communal hatred has often its roots in people’s psychological vulnerabilities rather than objective grievances. When individuals grapple with low self-esteem or a profound sense of insecurity, they may adopt exclusionary ideologies as a defence-mechanism to bolster their own fragile sense of worth. By devaluing a ‘target’ community, the individual creates an artificial hierarchy that provides a temporary, albeit toxic, ego boost and a feeling of belonging to a ‘superior’ group.

This process can be exacerbated by prejudice, which is a cognitive shortcut that relies on overgeneralised stereotypes to simply a complex world. The internal anxieties and personal failures are projected onto a marginalised group. Internal distress is transmuted into externalised hostility. Thus hatred becomes a virtue, though it is nothing more than a coping strategy used to navigate a perceived threat to one’s social status or identity.

Revai Laul’s book is an excellent case study that illustrates the above theory. In essence, it is the story of the Gujarat riots of 2002. But the author has taken a unique approach in speaking about the horror and terror of what happened under apparent sanction from authorities that chose to look the other way for a while.

A mob has no face. It is a massive cauldron of seething emotions, all negative and violent, born of the psychological problems mentioned above. But the individuals in that mob can be interesting case studies. And that’s just what Laul does. She presents three individuals – Pranav, Dungar, and Suresh – who perpetrated terrible deeds or were witnesses to such deeds during the 2002 Gujarat riots.

Pranav was a college student when the 2001 Gujarat earthquake happened. He volunteered to help the victims. When the riots took place a year later, he was an indifferent observer of the violence and the looting of shops by his hostel-mates with the tacit consent of policemen who seemed not to care. Pranav accepted the work given by an NGO after the riots and had to collaborate with a Muslim young man. Then he began to understand the Muslim community better and his attitudes underwent a transformation.

Towards the end of the book, Pranav is a completely transformed man, a good human being, who takes classes for young students with the specific objective of making them see certain necessary truths. “We are often proud of things that we have had absolutely no control over,” he says to his class. “That we have not decided. For instance, I did not decide to be born in a Hindu household. And this is the beginning of most of our problems… They are based on choice-less identities….”

Pranav came from a rising middle-class background and hence he didn’t have to grapple with too many psychological insecurities. Dungar, on the other hand, belonged to the Bhil tribe. His tribal identity engendered his low self-esteem and he didn’t like to attend classes at school. But joining the BJP and attending the meetings of Bajrang Dal and the VHP gave him a new identity. He staked claims to being a Rajput who bought his tribal identity merely for the sake of securing certain government benefits. The right-wing outfits gave Dungar a respectability which he had never enjoyed. He stopped eating nonvegetarian foods and shunned alcohol. The tribal identity had given him a place below the Muslims in social hierarchy; but right-wing associations lifted him up.

When the riots broke out, Dungar was a passionate arsonist who set fire to Muslim buildings. He gave his sincere services to the right-wing activities of terror and violence. Eventually, Dungar too learns the hard lessons, though he also acquired much wealth by being in active politics. By the time the 2017 Assembly elections came in Gujarat, Dungar had turned completely anti-right-wing. He campaigned for the Congress and told the people that “the BJP was a party of hollow men.”

Suresh was a criminal at heart. He belonged to a tribe that was listed by the British officially as criminals. His people took pride in being thieves. The men married many women. Suresh’s father had seven wives. Suresh had suffered from polio as a child and hence he limped badly. His father used to say that he was not his son.

Suresh grew up with too many personal insecurities. He was only happy to kill as many Muslims as the BJP and others wanted when the riots broke out. He boasted too about it. The book quotes his rantings which were recorded secretly by a journalist.

He was cruel to his wife too. He had married a Muslim girl, who was only 14, merely to spite Muslims because his own sister had eloped with a Muslim youth. Suresh attacked Muslim women, raped and killed, and relished all the crimes he committed – in the name of religion.

Suresh’s religion was just a mask. A façade that concealed his diabolic wickedness. Justice did catch up with him in the end. In spite of all that he and his people did to threaten the witnesses to give false statements in court, the truth was revealed and Suresh spent years in jail.

Revati Laul shows us in this book that the mob is not always a faceless, unidimensional machine. It has a face. Faces, rather. We see clearly three different faces in this book.