THE ONCE AND FUTURE RIOT

Graphic journalist Sacco delivers a searing account of religious conflict.

In several villages in the state of Uttar Pradesh in 2013, a caste called the Jats, presumed to be kin to the Roma, clashed with their Muslim neighbors in a series of riots, and in the end 63 people lay dead. “A good riot needs something on which it can hang its righteous hat,” writes Sacco, “some specific outrage at some specific time and place to serve as the first definitive marker on the road to no return.” Two young Jats, it seems, had killed a young Muslim man and were in turn beaten to death by a vengeful crowd of Muslims. The Jats are Hindu—though, says one depicted here, “very liberal in our social customs”—and the riots called up the specter of the sectarian war that divided India and Pakistan in 1947, in which an estimated 1 million people died. In Sacco’s account, Hindus and Muslims alike recall that the Jat and Muslim communities of Uttar Pradesh were friendly before the initial killing, attending each other’s festivals, but tensions elsewhere in India finally reached the state, whipped up by disinformation (a supposed video of the lynching of Jat boys was actually “years old and from Afghanistan”) and exploited by the Hindu nationalist government of Narendra Modi. Indeed, the multiethnic, multireligious Indian state, said to be the largest democracy in the world, is swiftly declining, Sacco writes, with laws being promulgated to prohibit the consumption of beef and banning conversion or requiring governmental permission for it; meanwhile, a famed mosque in Uttar Pradesh was razed, which “pushed India into its modern era of violent sectarianism,” and a Hindu temple erected in its place.

Graphic in all senses, Sacco’s tale of sectarian hatreds in India is a sobering warning to the world.