In The Once and Future Riot, Joe Sacco narrates the story of communal violence between Muslims and the Jats, an upper-caste, landed Hindu community. The riots occurred late in the summer of 2013, in the Muzaffarnagar district of Uttar Pradesh. Through his book, Sacco asks the question: why do such riots happen? In Muzaffarnagar, he concludes, political parties – and specifically the Bharatiya Janata Party, with its Hindu nationalist ideology – stood to gain from murderous violence before an election.

In India, the book was to have been distributed by Penguin Random House. But late last year, Sacco received a five-page document full of objections from the company’s legal team. A few were fact checks. Many of the remarks were driven by the worry that descriptions of politicians connected with violence – including by people Sacco interviewed – could be defamatory. In some instances, the company was concerned that his text would be “construed as inflammatory” or “causing religious offence” – although reporting on a communal riot can hardly avoid citing the offensive language that feeds the blaze. At one point, a rightwing Hindu leader tells Sacco that India’s Muslim population needs to be curbed because “just like pigs they are creating children”. The legal document advises: “remove the word ‘pigs’ just say Muslims are multiplying.”

(A Penguin Random House India executive has said that no one responded to the list of “red flags” in the document. “We are very clear about this: if we know there is an inaccurate map and no changes are forthcoming, we will not do it,” he said. “We have decided there will be no distribution of the book due to these red flags not being attended to.”)

We spoke to Sacco about the nature of electoral violence, his research in Muzaffarnagar and the abrupt cancellation of his book’s release in India.

Samanth Subramanian: What were the events that led up to Penguin Random House pulling the plug on the book in India?

Late last year, my UK publisher sent on to me a five-page list of things that had to be changed, verified, or whatever. And I wasn’t sure where it came from. I thought: “Is this from the Indian government?” I didn’t realise right away that it was Penguin India, which was distributing the book in the country, and which had given the book to its legal team. That's where this five-page list originated.

I looked at the first few things and thought: “I’m not doing this.” They were looking for things that might be actionable; they’d say that the mention of this person or that person could be defamation. And there was also an incredible amount of padding in the list, like: “We need to verify the likenesses of people you talked to.” And there were five of six things they were asking where I thought: “I’m not going to change that word, that’s a direct quote. I am not going to pull it because you think it's going to be inflammatory.” I mean, the situation is already inflamed. And taking out a word like “pigs,” which a public figure said while talking about Muslims breeding “like pigs” – this says something about him, it’s information about the person. I wasn’t going to, for example, shift a caption per the requirements of a legal team.

I know that Penguin India is Prime Minister Modi’s publisher. I don't know exactly why, but my gut feeling is they didn't really want to distribute the book. And anyway, I’d already gone through this long process of fact-checking with my publisher in the US. So I told my agents that I wasn’t going to do this.

Here’s the interesting thing: since the news of all this came out earlier this week, four Indian publishers have approached me. That says something! There’s some part of the population of India that sees through all of this, doesn’t like it, and wants to read the book. I think Indians know what's going on in India.

How did you first come across the Muzaffarnagar riots?

I probably read about it like a small news item in something like the New York Times or the Guardian. I'd done reporting in India before – I did a story about Kushanagar and rural poverty, and the Dalit community there. The guy I’d worked with on that project knew I wanted to come back to India. He mentioned what happened in Muzaffarnagar and asked: “Would you be interested?” My first response was: maybe not. Because this was just a violent episode, and what am I going to do, just outline what happened?

It didn’t strike me in the gut immediately, but the more I thought about it, I thought it would be interesting to see the narratives people tell about what happened. The riots were already finished, so I would have been there late in any case. So I thought I’d go talk to people, see what stories they've constructed about what happened, and then put those stories side-by-side with some version, if I could attain it, of what you might call the truth. What actually happened, as opposed to what stories people tell.

But there’s something more globally relevant to this book too.

When I was there, obviously my mind began to expand what the story was. The narrative part was interesting and remained part of the story, but I began to become more interested in making the connection between electoral politics and violence. And, of course, this pertains not just to India but also to the US and Europe. So I saw a broader implication for this story.

What is your process when you're out in the field? There's one part of you that is a journalist, interviewing people, and there’s another part of you that is the visual artist. You're trying to capture what a scene looks like, what people look like. How are you doing these two things at once? And how long do you need when you visit a place like Muzaffarnagar.

I went to Muzaffarnagar in 2014. I think it would have been October. It was already after the national elections. I was there for three weeks. If you saw me in the field, you'd think I was just a regular scribe. I’m taking notes, I‘m recording people. I’m not sketching very much. I don’t sketch that much in the field. I rely on photos for that sort of thing. So in some ways, there’s no difference between my fact-gathering process and yours.

But it’s very important for me to go, if possible, to the sites of certain things. For example, where there was a mass meeting, where the Jats were ambushed at the Jolly Canal. I want to see that for myself, because I know I’m going to have to draw it. I went to a newspaper office, where they had photographs from the mass meetings, so I took photos of those. And then it’s also looking at TV broadcasts of these mass meetings, even just to draw the buildings correctly, like the mass meeting of Muslims in Muzaffarnagar.

And then, if you’re talking about tractor-trolleys, you actually have to think: what are the makes of these tractor-trolleys? What is the standard motorcycle? There’s a lot of visual research. If you’re doing something visually, there’s another level of verisimilitude. Drawing is a subjective thing, but it’s important for me to make the reader feel like they’re in a place. They’re in a city, and it’s not any city, it’s Muzaffarnagar. Or: this is what traffic looks like on a rural road. I’d want someone who is Indian to recognise it and feel it’s true to their own experience.

What drew you to the story in Muzaffarnagar?

What appealed to me is that the riots took place generally in three districts. It wouldn’t be like looking at the 2002 riots across all of Gujarat. This was a relatively small area. It still took hours to cross it, but I felt like I could see people from all the communities, including the people displaced by the riots. The main difference to me was the openness about people. I found that Jats and Muslims often talked to me very directly about their feelings about the other communities, about anger, hate, whatever it was. And in a strange, journalistic way, you kind of want that. You want the unfiltered version of something. In a place like the US, there might be a lot of racial tension, class tension, people always couch it in a certain way, or they’re very careful about what they say. Well, until recently.

You mentioned how electoral violence feels like it has become more common not just in India but in the US and other places. What kind of diagnosis do you have for the wrong turns that democracies have taken?

Electoral politics can often lead to politicians who know that they can rise to power by polarisation. You can consolidate a group of people around very basic, lizard-brain things. A politician that’s going to talk about how we are all working toward the same thing, what is going to benefit all of us – that sort of talk is very different from: “Okay, you’re dissatisfied with your life? Things aren’t working for you? Well, it’s not about the system, it’s about the illegals coming across the border. That’s where you direct your hostility.” We respond to fear, and then we become angry, and for some reason, this nourishes us in a certain way that’s quite troubling. The Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt – he’s quoted a lot these days – said that politics needs an enemy. I don't think Trump has read Carl Schmitt, but he understands that. Someone like Modi understands that.

How long did it take you to complete the book, after you came back from India?

To be honest, it should have probably taken about two, two-and-a-half years to finish. But about 10-12 pages into it, there was something in me that just sagged, because, quite honestly, I’ve wanted to get away from writing about violence. And here I was drawing the stuff again. : I didn’t particularly enjoy being at the drawing table, and you sort of realise that you’re going to be doing this for a couple of years.

I stopped because I wanted to work on something else. I did a book about Indigenous people in Canada, because I thought: “Oh, this is about the environment, resource extraction and Indigenous people.” It turned out to be about colonialism, about residential schools, and about beating Indigenous children and breaking them from their culture so that they would not have a connection to the land. So I found myself doing another book that had a lot of violence in it.

When I finished it, I thought: I need to return to the India book. You have a responsibility to the people whom you’ve talked to, and particularly the victims of the violence whom you talked to. When people are telling you their stories, there’s some aspect of re-traumatisation going on. If you’ve done that to them, then you owe them something, and what I can do is present their story as best I can. So I thought: man up and just finish this book. I slowed myself down, because I wanted to make this a very good book – because actually I wanted it to be the last book about violence. But it turns out it isn’t. I’ve just finished one about Gaza.

It’s a neat coincidence that you went to India in 2014, because that means you’ve worked on this book for the entirety of the time Modi has been prime minister. How did events in India over that period feed into your writing of the book?

The script I wrote in 2014 was different from how I ended the book. So much had happened. A temple was built on the ruins of the Babri Masjid, and Modi officiated at its opening, it seems to me, in a priestly manner. I’m sure there were others who could have done that, but it was Modi. So of course you have to incorporate this sort of thing into the book. And you have to incorporate some of the new laws [targeting Muslims] that the BJP has put into effect. If you’re a Muslim in India now, you’d feel like your space is being limited – like the government is making you feel as if being a Muslim and being an Indian are two different things.

And I think the sort of violence that you’ve had now over some decades in India opens the way for an acceptance of violence to come. You begin to see that these are possibilities now. The things that couldn’t be said openly without some sense of shame or people just shouting you down, now they can be said. And again, it wasn’t just what was going on in India, it's how the US transformed as I was doing the story. It’s a scary moment. I think it’s a scary moment in India, it’s a scary moment in the United States, and it’s a scary moment in Western Europe.