It has been a bewildering series of events -- so bewildering that it defies any attempt to find an easy unifying narrative; and for that reason, will also defy easy solutions.
Very roughly, violence in Myanmar in June between Buddhist Rakhine and Muslim Rohingya was followed by the circulation on social media in Pakistan of doctored images which played up the alleged "slaughter" of Muslims. Then there was violence in the state of Assam, in India's North-East, between the indigenous Bodo tribes and ethnic Bengali settlers, who were also Muslims. Reports of atrocities in Assam and Myanmar triggered protests by Indian Muslims in Mumbai. And finally, came alarmist messages telling students and migrant labourers from the North-East living in southern India that they would be killed in revenge for the deaths of Muslims, triggering an exodus as thousands piled on trains in a panicked rush for home. India has asked Pakistan, where it says many of the doctored images originated, to help track down their source. It is also blocking websites posting inflammatory content, in a crackdown which may end up curbing Internet freedom.
It is a difficult story to tell, not least but because the language you choose to describe what happened can lead to overly simplistic conclusions. Should we blame the rise of social media for spreading false rumours? Do we describe the violence in Myanmar and Assam as communal, and ignore all the other factors that can divide people across the region -- ethnic, political, economic, social, linguistic and cultural?
What about the growing competition for resources at a time of economic downturn and rising populations? Or what about the grand historical sweep -- across a region once run by colonial rulers -- are we seeing a resurfacing of competing identities which were contained by the British and then by the nation states which took over? Do we blame the inability of central governments to enforce law and order, or the retreat of the nation state in an era of globalisation? The fall-out of the post 9/11 wars? Whatever it is -- and it is probably a combination of some or all of these factors, it has been an extraordinary phenomenon. With news and rumours from places as far apart as Myanmar, Pakistan, India's North-East and its southern cities spreading fast on social media, it is perhaps the first time since the Raj that events in the region have been so interconnected. It is a tinderbox.
So what have we learned from what happened? Not too much, as far as I can see, beyond bewilderment and with it fear, both of "the other" and of rapid change.
One possible starting place is with those doctored images of the violence in Myanmar (also known as Burma). While I am unsure who first reported these, I am sure where I first read about them -- in Pakistan's Express Tribune on July 19. The newspaper ran a detailed piece showing how, for example, images of Tibetan monks helping victims of China's earthquake in 2010 had been used to "prove" the slaughter of Muslim Rohingya by Buddhists in Burma. Read more here
With hindsight, it should have been clear those images would jump across the border into India which, rather than waiting until August to block websites, could have begun to counter them with a coherent campaign to disseminate accurate information -- all without threatening the freedom of the Internet. Where is the mechanism, either regionally, or internationally, to identify and address inflammatory propaganda in the same way that the World Health Organisation tries to prevent infectious diseases from spreading within and across borders?
In the same paper, also in July, columnist Ayesha Siddiqa wrote about the risks of imbuing the very serious problem of persecution faced by the Rohingyas -- related to questions of statehood and territory -- with a purely religious mantle.
"Scanning through some of the material on the issue in social media, it doesn't take long to realise that the entire debate is not really about Burma but about the social divide in Pakistan," she wrote. Read more here
In Dawn newspaper, columnist Huma Yusuf followed up with her own piece on how violence against Rohingyas had been turned into a narrative of Muslim victimisation by the religious right in Pakistan for its own political gains. Read more here
And she had noticed something that should worry us all -- that even the Pakistani Taliban had come late to the party compared to the mainstream discourse that had taken root in mainland Pakistan.
"More troubling than the clever politicking of religious political parties is the fact that the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) issued a statement about the Rohingya many days after the issue had been debated in the social and mainstream media and taken up by politicians. The fact that everyone beat the TTP to the defence of the Rohingya shows the extent to which a particular narrative of Muslim victimisation at the hands of non-Muslims has been mainstreamed. Outrage at the persecution of obscure Muslim communities in far-off lands used to be the stuff of extremist pamphleteering and radical sermonising; it now forms part of everyday discourse in Pakistan."
Again, note the date of her piece. July 30. We had ample warning this was coming. This is not to blame Pakistan -- its English-language media seemed to me to be the first to warn of the photo-shopped images and social media rumours. Why were these warnings not synthesised into a response, either by states, or internationally rather than waiting for the exodus to the North-East? Addressing social media rumours quickly through bilateral, regional and international cooperation is not going to resolve the original root causes of violence, but it would be considerably better than reactively shutting down the Internet.
Meanwhile, the situation in Pakistan does not look like it is going to get better any time soon. The state is in retreat and the space growing for those who exploit religion for political gain. Indeed, such is the weakness of the state that it was unable to prevent this month a massacre of Shias, or even the arrest of an 11-year-old Christian girl accused of blasphemy (though it is worth noting that Pakistani civil society activists on Twitter spread the news of the jailing of the girl to the extent the government was compelled to take notice, and her case highlighted in the international media).
As is the case with social media, religious intolerance too is not the only issue. All the other elements that went into creating tensions across the region over the last few months -- including competition for resources, ethnic divisions, the decline of law and order, economic downturn and rapid change -- are probably at their most virulent in Pakistan.
But an entire country can't be put in an isolation ward like a patient with an infectious disease -- trapping inside a population of more than 180 million people. It would be far better to try to identify all the different elements and address them one by one. And remember that if we choose to label what is happening purely on the basis of religion, it is more likely to become so, by playing into the same narrative promoted by those who doctored the Myanmar images in the first place.
What of India? Few places suffer more from over-simplification than India's North-East. I have been there only once, to Assam and Manipur. What little I learned was that it is a phenomenally complex region, quite a dark place, and in parts more disturbing than Kashmir at the height of its insurgency. With its multiple indigenous tribes, festering resentment against Delhi and geographical isolation from mainland India, the North-East has faced problems for decades.
The violence in Assam was between the indigenous Bodo tribe and settlers who had migrated there from what is now Bangladesh (Settlers have been migrating to Assam since the days of the Raj). On one side were people asserting a tribal Bodo identity. On the other were Bengalis, who are ethnically different; they are economic and political competitors, and in this case also Muslim. Why would we, or should we, choose to stress one difference -- the religious divide -- over another?
Indeed, as the Indian website Kafila noted in an excellent piece, "Much before ‘illegal Bangladeshi immigrants' were conjured up as the diabolic ‘other' conspiring to ‘overwhelm the natives', it was the Bengali Hindu immigrants in Assam who faced the hostility of the native Assamese." Read more here
Yet according to India's Outlook Magazine, one Indian Urdu paper used the doctored Chinese earthquake photos and reports of the violence in Myanmar and Assam to stress a threat specifically directed at Muslims. Read more here
After Assam, came the violent protests in Mumbai, followed by the SMS and MMS warnings of revenge attacks to people from the North-East, and then the exodus. Yet the messages (for which Indian media have reported the arrest of three men in Bangalore) and the doctored images are not enough to explain the scale of the exodus. As The Hindu wrote in an editorial, it also reflected a loss of faith in the state's ability to protect its citizens (the current weakness and unpopularity of the government comes on top of a steady loss of central authority over the years.)
"It is no secret that to the average citizen, the credibility of the political class as a whole is dangerously low," it said. "The corruption of institutions of governance has alienated millions. The insecurity is made worse by the climate of intolerance and bigotry that is asserting itself in the public space. All this provides fertile ground for the kind of mischief witnessed recently, in the form of distorted pictures, baseless threats and fictional reports of violence being used to cause an exodus of people."
As is the case in Pakistan, though in a far less virulent form, India also faces intense competition for resources, slowing economic growth, and a resurgence of identity politics -- based on caste, socio-economic status, state-level affiliation and to a lesser extent religion. Social media merely helped crystallise it, in this particular case into the form of an exodus.
It is unlikely to be the last we will see of the influences which rippled across the region over the last few months, and of their peculiar and unpredictable linkages. The real challenge now, though, is to describe accurately what happened and why. For all the power of the Internet to deliver a huge volume of information from every corner of the world, we are not making nearly enough headway in working out how to collect and process it, and then synthesise it into multi-layered solutions.
Indeed looking at the events of the last few months, the tardy and simplistic responses, and the multiplicity of different players involved, I am reminded more of the rumours and underlying tensions that led in 1857 to an uprising against British rule, also known as The Indian Mutiny or The First War of Independence.
