Journalist and cartoonist Joe Sacco’s The Once and Future Riot unsettled me for a reason other than those Penguin Random House India cited for not distributing his book in the Indian market. The publishing house justified its decision saying that the map of India in Sacco’s book is inaccurate, and that its questions regarding the text went unanswered. To this, Sacco’s riposte was that he’d have gladly amended mistakes, but what was asked of him was to delete phrases such as “Hindutva hegemony has been firing on all cylinders” from the book. He rightly refused to subject himself to censorship.

An admirer of Sacco’s comic journalism, I was prompted by the controversy to read The Once and Future Riot, which avowedly claims to bust myths built around the 2013 riot in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, in which 62 people died and over 60,000 were displaced. Indeed, through remarkably detailed drawings accompanied by pithy captions, Sacco establishes how Jats and Muslims fabricated narratives about the violence, with leaders of each community concealing, exaggerating, or concocting facts to blame the other for resorting to killings.

After reading the book, it seemed to me that the publishing house didn’t want to risk angering Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whom Sacco critiques without equivocation. For instance, he says Modi emerged out of the 2002 Gujarat carnage, in which “hundreds of [Muslim] women and girls were reportedly raped and burned alive,” as a “star of Hindu nationalism”. Sacco also says Modi and his party gained electorally from the 2013 riot.

Yet the book unsettled me because Sacco, ironically, erases from his own narrative a horrific aspect of the Muzaffarnagar riot: the allegation of mass rape of Muslim women. Given that his book was published in France in 2024 and in Great Britain in 2025, even the word allegation feels a tad inappropriate. This is because in one out of seven cases alleging gang rape during the rioting, it was judicially established by a Muzaffarnagar court in May 2023 that sexual violence did indeed occur.

Sacco’s omission of mass rape from his book is glaring because one of the triggers for the rioting was an alleged incident involving a Muslim boy teasing a Jat girl in Kawal village. Sacco analyses the contradictory narratives about the incident, locating it in the frame of “love jihad”, a Hindutva theory which claims Muslims fake love for Hindu girls in order to convert them to Islam. This propaganda, Sacco argues, had already driven a wedge between Jats and Muslims in the months before the riot broke out in Muzaffarnagar and its surrounding districts—Shamli and Baghpat—on September 7 and 8 in 2013.

Simrana’s fight for justice

In this context, Sacco discusses at length the story of B. Simrana, a 16-year-old Muslim girl whom two Jat boys, two months before the riot, had raped, attempted to kill by slitting her throat, and left for dead. She survived. Through striking drawings, Sacco tracks Simrana’s fight for justice, as she courageously resists the pressure to withdraw the case.

Sacco reports yet another incident of sexual violence that occurred weeks before the riot. This time, a gang of Muslim boys had raped a Jat girl, provoking her enraged community into torching shops and vehicles owned by Muslims and gheraoing a police station in Shamli. The police resorted to lathi charge to disperse them. Sacco wonders why women become a “battlefield upon which class and religious antagonists trample”.

Yet his awareness of gender imbricating class and religious conflict doesn’t lead him to explore whether sexual violence occurred during the mayhem in Muzaffarnagar. This is all the more curious because of the timeline of Sacco’s trip to Muzaffarnagar. He says in his book that he went there “more than a year” after the riot broke out in September 2013. By then, the country already knew about the mass rape in Muzaffarnagar through journalist Neha Dixit’s story, “Thread Bared”, published in Outlook magazine in December 2013.

Dixit’s story provides horrific accounts of five women who were raped by multiple men in Lakh Bawdi, a village in Shamli district, about 20 km from Muzaffarnagar town. They told Dixit that songs blared from loudspeakers as they were stripped, bitten, beaten, and repeatedly sexually assaulted. Through her conversations with the five, and others from Lakh Bawdi lodged in “displacement camps”, which mushroomed soon after the riot, Dixit estimated that 19 women were gang-raped.

Dixit’s count of 19 was in addition to the seven cases of women a civil society activist brought to Supreme Court advocate Vrinda Grover, renowned for representing marginalised groups in legal battles. Grover filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court seeking relief for the seven women who had been sexually assaulted in the Muzaffarnagar riot, by men from the dominant community known to them.

In March 2014, the Supreme Court in Mohd. Haroon and others v. Union of India ordered that all the accused in the seven cases should be arrested, that round-the-clock security be provided to the victims, whose statements were to be recorded by a lady magistrate under Section 164 of the Criminal Procedure Code, which has evidentiary value, and gave Rs.5 lakh as compensation to each of them. This was arguably the first time rape victims were compensated even before hearings in their cases began.

The Supreme Court’s order grabbed media headlines, dispelling the possibility of mass rape being hushed up. Weeks before Sacco would have visited Muzaffarnagar, Dixit wrote yet another story for Outlook, “Anyone here been raped and speaks English?”. In it, she wrote that “visits to Ground Zero and conversations in relief camps suggest that…close to 100 women [were] raped.” Dixit’s story profiled the seven Muslim victims who had defied pressure, both from within their own community and from the Jats, to seek justice. Six of the seven victims belonged to Fugana village, a compelling evidence that Lakh Bawdi wasn’t the only site where women were sexually assaulted.

Missing aspects

Yet the scale and spread of the sexual violence go unexamined in Sacco’s endeavour to peel away the layers of false narratives shrouding the Muzaffarnagar violence. His reconstruction, therefore, unfortunately reads as an erasure of a revolting aspect of the memory of the 2013 riot. Tellingly, without Sacco dwelling upon the mass sexual violence against Muslim women, his book ends up depicting the bloody conflict between their community and Jats as an equal battle. His narrative, with the sexual violence incorporated into it, would have certainly conveyed the opposite impression.

The last chapter in Sacco’s book takes a sweeping view of how the politics of communal polarisation has bolstered the BJP since 2014, and the implications of injecting the poison of sectarianism into democracy. Muzaffarnagar is barely mentioned in this codicil. Yet its story continued to unfold at a snail’s pace. For years, Grover drove from Delhi to Muzaffarnagar to represent the seven victim-survivors in the trial court there. Over time, though, one of them died, and five chose to abort their efforts to seek justice.

The seventh woman, referred to as X in court documents, persisted with her battle to seek justice. Grover took recourse to Section 376 (2)(g) of the Indian Penal Code, introduced through a 2013 amendment in the wake of the Nirbhaya rape and murder case. This section classifies rape during communal or sectarian violence in the category of aggravated rape. Under it, once a person deposes before the court that she was raped, the legal presumption of innocence is suspended and the accused has to prove he isn’t guilty. In May 2023, the men accused in X’s case were sentenced to 20 years of imprisonment. This was the first case to be decided under the 2013 amendment.

X’s story isn’t the only story missing from the last chapter of Sacco’s book, for he also fails to mention the reconciliation process between Jats and Muslims undertaken, in the midst of Hindutva ascendancy, because of the farmer movement and its quest to unite peasants. It spotlights the possibility of people’s common economic interests becoming a bulwark against Hindutva’s politics of polarisation. Undoubtedly, The Once and Future Riot is engaging, even to the extent that it can make the reader forget the mass rape of 2013, precisely the opposite effect that the historical reconstruction of the past such as Sacco’s should have.

Ajaz Ashraf is a senior journalist from Delhi and the author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste.

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