El disturbio eterno

The Muzaffarnagar riots, a series of communal violence incidents that took place in the state of Uttar Pradesh in 2013, were not much bloodier or larger in scale than similar events in India: several deaths and tens of thousands of people forced to flee their land. It is something that has happened before and will likely happen again: Hindus and Muslims clashing with firearms and swords, fueled by hate speech and a barrage of mutual accusations. When religious slogans abound, truth becomes elusive. In *The Eternal Trouble*, Sacco travels across Uttar Pradesh to speak with government officials, political leaders, local chieftains, and, above all, with the victims, mostly landless peasants. His aim is to understand these riots through the lens of political violence. In the process, he investigates the roots of the clashes and asks some central questions: Can savagery coexist with democracy? Are mobs, not leaders, the ones who decide the course of events? How can such different accounts of what happened coexist? How do the violent actors manage to conceal their involvement in these murderous acts? After delivering several chronicles on the urgent stories that define our world, from the First World War to the Gaza War, Joe Sacco now offers a magnificently illustrated report that, while taking us to a specific corner of India, serves as a mirror to any other multiethnic place where there is a precarious balance between communities.