An everyday communalism has settled down. The sense of impunity was reinforced by Yogi Adityanath’s decision to withdraw all the complaints that the state had filed against him and his associates since the 1990s.
Patterns of communal violence are changing in Uttar Pradesh. As Sudha Pai and Sajjan Kumar had shown in Everyday Communalism: Riots in Contemporary Uttar Pradesh (OUP, 2018) after the 2004 BJP defeat, which former prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, partly attributed to the 2002 Gujarat riots, the Hindutva forces have opted for a new modus operandi. Rather than instigating major and violent state-wide riots as in the past, the BJP-RSS have attempted to create and sustain constant, low-key communal tension together with frequent, small, low-intensity incidents out of petty everyday issues that institutionalise communalism at the grass roots, to keep the pot boiling. Vigilante groups such as the Bajrang Dal and the Hindu Yuva Vahini (HYV) of Yogi Adityanath have been instrumental in implementing this technique of polarisation.
