Title - Rough Edges : Monobina Gupta's blog-The Times Of India

The rumours spread as if on wings. The conduit, in this case, was social media - SMSs, video clips, text messages, in addition to the warnings of dark forebodings carried in alleged pamphlets distributed by fringe Hindu and Muslim groups. It didn't take much time for fear to overwhelm people from the North East living in Bangalore. Thousands of women and men flocked to the railway station. Their scramble to exit the city amid the frenzied circulation of rumours came on the back of the Assam riots and the sudden eruption of violence at a demonstration organized by Muslim groups in Mumabi a couple of days before.

The Bangalore City railway station was cramped with people from the North East (mostly from Assam), waiting to get on to the Guwahati Express scheduled to leave the city at midnight. The railways reportedly sold as many as 5,600 tickets for the three unreserved coaches on the train. As the crowd burgeoned at the station, a special train was scheduled to leave an hour after the express. 

The images of a frightened people crowding the station, waiting for the arrival of trains couldn't but bring back haunting spectres of partition. Remember the powerful images of the film Train to Pakistan? The depthless, numbing, all embracing fear? But did Bangalore actually experience such raw violence? A single incident of stabbing of a Tibetan student, mistaken for a North Easterner, had indeed taken place in Mysore. That however didn't touch off the exodus. Rumours did. And this is not the first that time that fear, drummed up through whispers and gossip set off a chain of frightening events; reminding us once again of the fallacy of that hackneyed proverb: history teaches us lessons. It doesn't.

Return to 1947, a site of great trauma and fear. Its chronicle is constructed by both testimonies of witnesses of those times as well as rumours that had played such a crucial role in setting off communal violence. "The importance of rumour in the record of violence is also established, though perhaps more in the form of its making than in that of its evaluation or reconstruction", writes Gyanendra Pandey in his book Remembering Partition. Rumours stand in direct opposition to what is known as testimony of witnesses, victims of any traumatic event. They generalize, make sweeping statements, exaggerate incidents, and even fabricate them. According to Pandey, rumours leverage a language that is "infectious, possible (and almost necessary) to pass on."

The efficacy of such rumour spinning machinery has been documented as far back in history as the French Revolutionary uprisings, peasant insurrections in colonial India, and in the 1984 massacre of Sikhs in Delhi. Like in the case of Bangalore and before that in Mumbai, the government or the state intervened only after rumours have been produced and reproduced at street corners, in drawing rooms, in private and public spaces. With technological revolution fear can be constructed by social media; its message can be passed on from person to person till it assumes a collective shape: paranoia founded in nervous apprehension, but without tangible incidents to back it up.

That is the innate quality of rumours.  According to Pandey, "Rumour is marked not only be indeterminacy, anonymity and contagion, but also by a tendency to excess and 'certainty'…" 

Riding on the back of rumours fear has now spread to other cities like Hyderabad and Chennai. Violence also continues to prevail in Assam. But there's simply no way to stop rumour mils from circulating fear, because we can't be sure where these are originating from. 

The anthropologist Veena Das has argued that in a rumour "the words that are uttered do not belong to anyone in particular." She writes that "it is precisely the failure of the signature that makes the words uttered in secrecy or words emanating from a crowd so utterly lethal."