Nuh: A troubled district to a communal tinderbox?

A look at why Haryana's Nuh district may become a communal tinderbox which may polarise politics.

The communal violence which started with Muslims pelting stones on a Hindu religious procession in Haryana’s Nuh district on July 31 snowballed soon after into full-fledged riots with mobs of both communities running amok, with the violence spreading to urban parts of neighbouring Gurugram on August 1. Nuh has always been a laggard in the National Capital Region (NCR) and performs badly on most indicators, social, economic, and those that deal with law and order. However, the events which began

Communal violence has gripped Nuh since July 31.

The charts that matter

• 
  Population share of Muslims in Nuh is among the highest in India

  Data from the 2011 Census shows that the share of Muslims in the population in Nuh was 79.2%. In terms of a ranking of the 640 districts in the 2011 Census, this puts Nuh as the district with 14th highest population share of Muslims in India. If one were to exclude 11 districts in the erstwhile state of Jammu & Kashmir – it was the only Muslim-majority state in India – this rank increases to third (Lakshadweep, and Dhubri in Assam being the first and second). The 2011 Census results are broadly in line with the district-wise rankings in terms of estimated population share of Muslims in the 2019-21 National Family and Health Survey (NFHS), which gives Nuh the 16th rank among 707 districts and fourth after Lakshadweep, South Salmara Mancachar (carved out of Dhubri district in 2016) and Dhubri, excluding the districts of erstwhile state of Jammu & Kashmir.
• 
  Nuh is among the poorest and least developed districts in the National Capital Region

  Average wealth score from the 2019-21 National Family Health Survey shows that Nuh is the second poorest district among the 35 districts in the NCR region. The poorest district in this list is Bharatpur in Rajasthan. Nuh’s relative poverty looks even more stark when compared to its adjoining districts. The asset score of Palwal, Rewari, Faridabad, and Gurugram is 9.8 times, 15.2 times, 18.5 times, and 19.3 times that of Nuh. Nuh’s asset poverty also reflects in other socio-economic indicators. According to the 2019-21 NFHS, 3.7% of Nuh’s populace lives in kachcha (temporary or improvised) houses; only 19.8% uses LPG, electricity, or biogas for cooking; and 60.3% drinks either bottled water or water from a piped source in their dwelling or compound, or a tube well. Among NCR districts, this is the second highest share of population living in kachcha houses after Bharatpur; the smallest share of population using clean fuel for cooking; and the second lowest share of population after Bharatpur that does not have easy access to an improved drinking water source. Other human development indicators also show the district lagging behind most of NCR. It had a total fertility rate (TFR) of 3.9 in 2019-21, the highest among all NCR districts and much higher than the 2.57 TFR in Bulandshahr, which ranks second. 51% of women in the 15-49 years age group reported having no education, also the highest and much worse than second ranked Shamli district, where 33.5% women reported not being educated at all.
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  Nuh is the epicentre of crime in NCR but it has not had even one communal riot in the last five years

  That a lot of crime and criminals operating in the NCR have their origins and safe havens in Nuh district is a well-known fact. This newspaper has done multiple reports giving details of crime syndicates operating from Nuh. However, data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) shows that Nuh’s criminals have not strayed into communal rioting even once in the last five years. NCRB’s Crime in India reports from 2017 to 2021 (2021 is the latest period for which data is available) shows that while Nuh (Mewat in 2018 and 2017; the district was carved out after that) reported hundreds of incidents of rioting, not even one was classified as communal in nature. This makes Monday’s rioting a first in the recent history of the district and raises a question whether the state machinery was complacent about such an eventuality – especially given the provocation involved.
• The politics of the recent violence

  Once again, a simple reading of election results will suggest that the violence might be politically inconsequential. The Congress won all three assembly constituencies in Nuh district in the 2019 elections. The BJP could not win even one AC in Nuh district both in 2019 and 2014 even though it has dominated the adjoining districts in both these elections.To be sure, some experts have pointed that social media might have changed the dynamics of link between riots and politics. “If violence in one part of the country can yield electoral benefits (via social media driven narratives) in another part of the country, then there no longer needs to be a local electoral incentive for communal violence, and there no longer needs to be a local trigger for the violence either,” political scientist Neelanjan Sircar wrote in a 2020 essay in the aftermath of the Delhi riots. Haryana itself goes to the polls in late 2024.