By connecting the dots in over 600 cases of communal disturbances in UP since the Lok Sabha elections, a new investigation shows how aided and abetted by technology, almost anything can be turned into a communal conflagration.

A communal riot is not the progeny of immaculate conception. For the most part it’s not even an act of spontaneous combustion in a tinderbox. That comes as no surprise to most of us. But when they come in rapid succession they tend to become a blur of names, dots on a map – Muzaffarnagar, Saharanpur, Meerut. And those are just the ones that make the national evening news. Sometimes however you need to step back and connect those dots. That’s what a multi-part series in The Indian Express tries to do. It goes into some 600 communal incidents in Uttar Pradesh since the Lok Sabha results came out on May 16th. Most of them didn’t even make national news or were just blips. But once you start connecting the dots a pattern starts to slowly emerge. (Read the remarkable Express series here, here and here.)

Political watchers will analyse the findings in terms of a shifting electoral map where as the Express puts it “an aggressive BJP, a desperate SP, and a flagging BSP” are jockeying for power. But there’s a larger and darker story there that goes beyond power politics in UP and the race to the gaddi in Lucknow.

It reveals the outlines of what is almost a how-to guide for communal riots in the 21st century. You do not need to assassinate a prime minister or topple a mosque any more or set fire to a train compartment full of kar sevaks. Aided and abetted by technology, almost anything including a minor traffic accident or a conflict about widening a village road, can be rendered inflammable and blown up and out of control. It’s about coldly and calculatingly following these steps.

Location, Location, Location (or Timing, Timing Timing): IE says about 400 out of the 605 incidents they studied took place in or around constituencies that will have by-polls by mid-November because local MLAs have become MPs. The correlation between elections and communal tensions is as clear as day. But once the location is established it still needs a flashpoint. There are traditional ones like women, cows and land. The IE investigation finds 61 trigger incidents relating to cow slaughter and 50 odd cases of elopement or eve teasing. Firstpost’s Subhajit Sengupta went to Saharanpur after the flare-up there and found that one theory floating around was that it was a battle for the possession of the lucrative markets on Ambala road with its thriving wholesale business. Sengupta says former Congress councilor Moharam Ali Pappu and his men had their eyes on it though they hid behind religious rhetoric.

Now there are newer and easier flashpoints.

Mic Testing 1 2 3: “Traditionally used for propaganda, provocation and posturing, the loudspeaker was transformed into an effective instrument of polarisation,” says IE. It’s enormously effective, low investment, and hard to ignore. Loudspeaker fights account for a whopping 120 instances of the incidents. In Kanth town in Moradabad there was an unwritten tradition that the Dalit temple used a loudspeaker during Mahashivratri and not at other times. That changed when a loudspeaker was installed to felicitate Kunwar Servesh Kumar who had won on the BJP ticket. The loudspeaker was not taken down after the felicitation, reported Ajaz Ashraf for Firstpost, angering the Muslims. Interestingly, Muslims had helped fund the construction of the temple in the first place.

Hindus argue their loudspeaker is only for occasional use, Muslims use it year round. “The loudspeaker will remain where it is, and the Shiv Katha will continue. The temple uses loudspeakers only occasionally. What about the masjid? Their radio (loudspeaker) blares throughout the year. Have we ever objected?” Kapil Mishra of the Bageshwar temple committee tells IE. The loudspeaker sends out the message loud and clear.

Technology is Your Friend: IE published a WhatsApp message allegedly sent out by Vijay Kumar Mittal of the Bageshwar Temple Committee in Saharanpur telling everyone to gather for a show of strength at the temple. Mitron aaj to tumhare mandiron se speaker utar rahe hain, ek na huye to kal yeh tumhare ghar main ghuske tumhari izzat utarenge. (Friends, today, they are removing speakers from your temples; if you do not unite, tomorrow they will enter your homes and humiliate you.) Mittal denies he sent that message.

But in the end it does not matter just as it does not matter if images of civilians killed in Gaza are proved to be from Syria or a video of “killing of Hindu youths by Muslim mobs” is found to be a two-year-old mistaken-identity lynching scene from Pakistan. By the time the fake is exposed, the damage has been long done. 2500 people showed up at the Bageshwar temple in Saharanpur.

Silence, the Babu is Asleep: In 2013 in Muzaffarnagar, Siddharth Singh writes in Mint “(t)he failure of the administration lay in not anticipating the groundswell of unrest. Any effective district magistrate, who has the pulse of his district, cannot miss these signs.” Three people, one Muslim, two Hindus from the Jat community, had been killed in an incident earlier. There had been a Jat mahapanchayat and tempers were on edge.

Singh writes that administrators typically keep in touch with all kinds of informers at all levels to alert them about signs of impending trouble. “But since the Mandal revolution, the link has been sundered completely” in states like UP and Bihar writes Singh. Local notables connect not to the DM but directly to MLAs and MPs all the way to cabinet.

That was clear at an Azam Khan rally in Masuri this election. Nisar Mohammad, a social worker told me admiringly how Azam Khan summoned local leaders like him to the official guest house in Delhi after communal violence racked the area. “He said I personally came to find out what the situation was, how the police and security forces were acting. And I told him the forces were not harassing or abusing anyone needlessly.” When the parties finally do act they are seen to act on behalf of their votebank. So if SP rounds up more Dalits than Muslims that’s read as a signal. As Masuri's Hafiz Fazlur Rehman told me bluntly during the election campaign, “Politicans are snakes. They all have poison in them. Mulayam Singh just has less venom for the likes of us. He stands up for us.”

The New Local: Some reports hark back to a sort of bucolic idyllic past where communities lived peaceably together. Caste equations were always in play and political parties have exploited them. Just because Mayawati might have fashioned a Dalit-Muslim tie-up at one point does not mean the BJP cannot try to break it for their own ends now. That’s politics.

What is new now is how old and homegrown village elder style solutions to “get along” are being set aside by larger forces. Both sides are encouraged to double down and supporters can be bused in from outside to ramp up the numbers game. The Moradabad loudspeaker fight is a classic example. Ajaz Ashraf reported for Firstpost that in Kanth after the loudspeaker was no taken down the Dalits dug in their heels. “They told me that Muslims can bring it down if they think they can,” Jatav leader Jabar Singh told Ashraf. Once police tried to forcibly remove it hell broke loose. But even then a six-point samjhauta agreement was hammered out by all parties concerned.But the local agreement was unilaterally abrogated by Servesh Kumar Singh writes Ashraf. The Hindu quoted Singh as saying “It is not only about Dalits but the larger Hindu identity and about Hindu samaj. The Hindus in the vicinity of the village also need to be taken along because it is a matter of larger Hindu solidarity.” Local just got bigger and the power dynamic has changed.

Police in my Pocket: Local officials have been tamed by political whips as everything gets centralized. This is not necessarily specifically communal. It’s just all-purpose powerplay to show who’s boss. But it means, says Singh in Mint that the law administration is often cowed down and slow to act. “For example, how is it possible that even after imposition of prohibitory orders under Section 144 of the code of criminal procedure (banning an unlawful assembly of people) and a curfew, local officers were unable to apprehend politicians’ instigating violence.”

When police take three days to register a case it means their credibility is shot. That means for example with the recent alleged forced conversion and gangrape case in Meerut the authorities have an uphill struggle separating fact from rumour. The authorities are so compromised by past history they cannot play honest broker and say with credibility that the human trafficking and organ harvesting ring is not true but the conversion story might be credible.

Bigger is Not Always Better: What is new says IE is “the intensity and spread of the violence in areas that are completely or predominantly rural”. Rural conflagrations mean they are harder to track or nip in the bud. The administration is more slow-footed in its response. It’s also striking that many of the incidents are fairly minor. They did not make the news because they were nipped in the bud or didn’t quite catch fire. Chances are no one would have guessed that there were 600 incidents since May 16th. But what it shows is that you do not need a full-scale communal bloodbath anymore. In fact, smaller incidents are more effective because they can stay under the radar and yet make the point creating an atmosphere of slowly-built suspicion that can be more effective than a cataclysmic rupture. One loudspeaker dismantling story in Kheti Viran can be a rumour but another is not. Two days after the Kant riot, 25-odd madarsa students mostly teenaged allegedly forced their way into a Ravidas temple in Kheti Sarai and damaged the loudspeaker there.

In this kind of murky climate communal tension is not hard to manufacture. UP is proving to be a communal conflict factory churning out incident after incident, each a cheaply-made copy of the other. The question to ponder is whether the factory in UP will become a laboratory for the rest of the country.