“I’ve been to Ireland twice now and it’s my favourite place in Europe,” the comic book artist and journalist Joe Sacco tells me soon after realising that I’m Irish. Why? “It’s sane,” he adds, in a nod to Ireland’s support for Palestine. He was born in Malta but raised mostly in the United States, and his award-winning comics Palestine (2001) and Footnotes in Gaza (2009) are often credited with having helped contradict the heavily-biased narratives pushed by western political and media establishments.
In the US, shops haven’t been able to keep enough copies of them on their shelves since October 2023. “You guys were colonised, so you get it,” he says. “You’re the least western of all Europeans somehow – in a good way.”
He is speaking from his home in Portland, Oregon, about The Once and Future Riot, his new book charting his attempts at understanding a particularly volatile moment of sectarian violence between Hindu Jats and Muslims in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Though there remains disagreement over the origins of that flare-up, known as the 2013 Muzaffarnagar Riots, most agree that lynchings, rapes, arson attacks and displacements took place – though, as Sacco’s book shows, both sides rarely agreed over who suffered more.
The meaning of the title is that, as democracy further declines, these temporary riots will become increasingly common.
READ MORE
Sacco is no stranger to conflicts. Since beginning his career in earnest in the early 1990s, he has reported on and written books about Palestine, the Bosnian Genocide (2000s Safe Area Goradze and 2004’s The Fixer), Russia’s Chechen wars and the Iraq War. He has built a reputation by complicating simplistic political narratives pushed by warmongering governments by giving a voice to those suffering under bombs or occupation. Many of his books also highlight the plight of the downtrodden and dispossessed, such as 2012’s Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (cowritten with Chris Hedges) about poverty in the US or 2020s Paying the Land, about the indigenous Dene people in Canadian’s Northwest Territories witnessing their way of life being destroyed by developers, addiction, mining and the state-run schools that forcibly removed their children.
Behind his deceptively simple drawing style lies not only a rigorously investigative approach – often meaning spending months with his subjects – but, perhaps most notably, a profound empathy and capacity for understanding suffering. Perhaps it has to do with the fact Sacco’s mother was a child when the Nazis and Italians waged their two-year bombing campaign against Malta. Perhaps his intense awareness of the senselessness of war stems from the fact that, for the rest of her life, his mother, who had witnessed friends, family and neighbours lying dead in the streets, would wonder how she survived it and leave her son with a sense of the dumb luck that means the difference between one family’s death or their survival.
His latest book is not his first look at India. What took him back? “It’s a fascinating place,” he says. “Geopolitically it should be a major player: 1.3 billion people, and also the world’s largest democracy.” After he learned about the Muzaffarnagar Riots, he wanted to investigate. In much of Sacco’s work, he tries to report on events as they become available. For The Once and Future Riot, however, Sacco arrived a year after the riots.
“I thought it would be interesting to find out what people say about what they did in an incident of violence like that, sometime afterwards.” The main idea, he explained, was to try to uncover the narratives people had created for themselves. “Of course, when you get there – when you get to any place like this – other things start to open up. You begin to look at things like: Oh, this is connected to electoral politics. This is also about politicians manipulating certain situations.”
Some believe the riots began with an incident of sexual harassment, others say a traffic incident. Whatever started it, each rumoured act took on a greater significance, as though each act of violence was representative of an entire group’s bad intentions and had to be defined as such. Sacco’s book underlines that the conflicting accounts make it difficult to discern what actually happened during that period. He wanted to focus on single events and get the perspective of both sides – alleged victim and alleged aggressor. People, it seemed, were exaggerating and potentially even lying to either highlight their victimhood or downplay the accusations against them.
“The main example I used was a Jat village called Lasar, where it seemed clear that about 13 people were missing and probably dead,” Sacco says. “But I was told in the village that no one was harmed there, and the stories they’re coming up with about why no Muslims were even in the village at the time were just ludicrous – they really seem made up. So you listen, you record, and then, okay, if you say no Muslims were harmed here, let me see if I can find Muslims who were harmed there. It takes time, but, to me, this was kind of a book of pure journalism – that’s how I thought about it. I’m going to not just listen to what people say, but find out how close to the facts what they’re saying is.”
Muslims were disproportionately affected by the riots, with many forced to flee to relief camps and unable to return to their villages. Hindu Jats make up almost 80 per cent of Uttar Pradesh’s population and are highly represented among the region’s landowners. Muslims, on the other hand, represent just 20 per cent and are mostly landless and over-represented in poorly paid agricultural day labour. Despite this, Jats argue Muslims are a threat to their safety.
The riots fell into a larger pattern of anti-Muslim violence in India. Soon after the riot, Narendra Modi, now India’s prime minister, rose to power partly thanks to rising nationwide anti-Muslim sentiment. Modi’s party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has played a significant role in stoking hatred and often using violent, anti-Muslim rhetoric. A decade earlier, in 2002, when a train carrying Hindu pilgrims went up in flames, killing almost 60 of them, Modi blamed Muslims, helping inflame the Gujarat Riots. Similarly, a disproportionate number of the 1,000 killed and 150,000 displaced were Muslims.
Sacco dedicated The Once and Future Riot to the “hardworking, rural journalists of India”. He relied on many journalists and fixers, Muslim and Hindu, to introduce him to the region’s people. Early on Sacco depicts a scene where he meets Momin, a respected elder Muslim within his community, and a Hindu Jat journalist named Madan. Both men, Sacco writes, abide by their caste’s norms, but “as a journalist”, Madan “has no qualms pointing fingers at both Muslims and his own people”. Madan says that, before recent unrest, there had been a lot of love and co-operation between the communities, adding that “You find lots of liberal people like Momim – Jats and Muslims – with extremes on each end. But if something happens, you will find no one left in the middle.” One of the few things that gave Sacco hope were the several instances of Muslims and Jats helping one another – often hiding people in their homes – from roaming mobs.
Is Sacco, with more than 30 years’ experience reporting, surprised by how quickly the middle ground disappears when something occurs between two communities who live in tension with one another? He pauses for a moment. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised,” he says, “but it still startles me. It always startles me when societal fabric begins to fray.” He has been in close enough proximity to enough conflict to understand how tribalism takes hold when one group feels threatened by another – and he is cynical about politicians, knowing how often they exploit conflicts like this for their political gain.
“The famous Nazi jurist and philosopher Carl Schmitt said politics needs an enemy. I think there’s just less work to be done to get people on your side if you can provide an enemy.
“The reality is someone like Modi or the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party] were able to make a lot of ground based on finding an internal and external enemy. In India’s case, Pakistan is the external, Muslim enemy, and there are at least a couple hundred million Muslims in India that can be cast as an [internal] enemy.” The “future riot” referred to in the book’s title refers to a not-so-distant future in which political polarisation, and its attendant violence, will become a chronic issue, normalised and stoked by leaders with antidemocratic ambitions.
His exasperation with the state of world affairs only heightens when the conversation turns to the US, where he and his parents moved when he was 12. He says it has entered into an “authoritarian moment,” pointing to Trump’s rhetoric and scapegoating as well as his tendency to exploit anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment.
Americans, he believes, are “looking for someone to blame for the loss of jobs, for the way there’s been basically almost societal collapse in the United States. I look around me and I see homelessness and drug use and all that, and, instead of talking about what are the economic reasons for this or what are the policies that have been instituted that have made this manifest, instead of looking at those things – it’s like, well, this group’s to blame, and the drugs are coming from here, and let’s do this and let’s do that.”
Were the Troubles something he ever considered covering? By the time he felt professionally equipped to handle a conflict such as that, he says, the Belfast Agreement was within sight. Ireland, though, remains a subject of fascination for him, particularly its early colonial history.
“I’ve always thought if I was to do something about Ireland, it would be more about Cromwell and what happened in the 1600s,” he says. “Irish history is really interesting to me. It would be interesting to do something about how a country in Europe was colonised by another country in Europe.”
At 60, he has put in more than his fair share of time covering politics and violence. He has been working on a book about The Rolling Stones for more than a decade now, and it’s shaping up to be a very different type of work. The Once and Future Riot was supposed to be his last avowedly journalistic work. Then October 7th happened. He and Hedges travelled to Egypt to interview Palestinians who escaped. He has already written one book about the genocide, 2024’s War on Gaza – his most polemical yet. It is both tragic and ironic that he is returning, 30 years later, at the end of this part of his career, to the conflict that he began it with.
“I would rather be drawing other things, but Gaza calls.”
The Once and Future Riot is published by Jonathan Cape
