When Parliament reconvenes after the Holi break, it will discuss the riots in Delhi that have led to more than 50 deaths. The debates in both Houses may well be acrimonious and even ill-tempered, but they are also necessary. As a healthy and functioning democracy, it is imperative that a dissection of what triggered the clashes, if the response of the police was adequate and what lessons are to be learnt, is undertaken by the lawmakers. Interesting and invaluable as the discourses in the mainstream and social media are, their interventions are bereft of public accountability. MPs have a responsibility to the citizens of India that non-official institutions lack.Last month's riots in the capital were horrible but they were by no means the most serious the country has witnessed. In terms of both casualties and intensity, the riots after the assassination of Indira Gandhi in Delhi, 1984, the post-Ayodhya riots of 1993 in Mumbai and the post-Godhra riots in Gujarat in 2002 were more serious.What is distinctive about last month’s explosion in Delhi was the scale of documentation. Unlike the past when a reconstruction of violence was dependant on subsequent eyewitness accounts or, at best, some photographic and TV camera footage, much of the happenings in Delhi have been captured on people’s smartphones. Some of these videos are already in the public domain and many more may emerge in the coming days. Together, they permit a more rounded reconstruction of events and serve as a corrective to sweeping generalisations grounded in individual political preferences. This is very necessary because the crucial divide between analysis and activism appears to have disappeared in India in recent months.The use of the term ‘genocide’ is an example of the distorted narrative that has crept into assessments of the Delhi violence. Apart from the fact that it implies state involvement in settling sectarian scores, genocide suggests that the violence was onesided and targeted against the Muslim minority. The evidence suggests that while Muslims took a greater beating, Hindus living in Muslim-dominated enclaves also suffered grievously. There is also compelling evidence to show that Muslim mobs attacked the Delhi Police with unrestrained ferocity. In similar situations elsewhere, the police have often opened fire. That it showed relative restraint would indicate that it was acting under instructions.Many of the post-mortems of the Delhi riots have pinned responsibility on the utterances of local BJP leaders who threatened direct action in case the Shaheen Bagh dharna was sought to be replicated in other parts of the city. While threats of violence are deplorable, there are facets of the anti-Citizenship (Amendment) Act that need scrutiny. In particular, there was the bid to block roads in northeast Delhi, replicate Shaheen Bagh and create disturbances around the visit of President Trump? Was it a made-for-media mobilisation aimed at maximising international publicity and tarring the image of the Narendra Modi government? Were widespread disturbances built into this approach?Earlier, there had been attempts to provoke the government into removing the Muslim matrons and clearing Shaheen Bagh. This included inflammatory speeches by hotheads that were quite in contrast to the picture of pained constitutionalism the protesters sought to convey. Certainly, images of the police forcibly removing elderly ladies from a protest venue would have been terrible for any government. When the government opted instead to let the protesters tire themselves out or be thrown out by the Supreme Court, did the threat to settle the CAA on the streets find its expression in the Delhi riots?If this was indeed so, it was grounded in political callousness. Since the Bhagalpur riots of 1989, communal riots have been marked by a large measure of asymmetry. Regardless of which side cast the first stone, Muslims have come out of riots bruised and battered - except in West Bengal where politics has a pro-minority bias. This in turn has become the staple of a victimhood narrative and is at the core of India’s woke culture. In the past, for example, separatism in the Kashmir Valley was consciously kept out of the Indian Muslim narrative, but of late the abrogation of Article 370 has been included in the victimhood narrative.Electorally astute anti-BJP politicians - Arvind Kejriwal is an example - have tried to steer clear of this approach for fear of triggering a countervailing reaction. Others have been less circumspect, with the result that the anti-CAA stir has become a Muslim upsurge against the Modi government, with liberals, radical students and orphaned Communists providing the garnishing.