Ethnic conflict and civic life
Ashutosh Varshney
Yale University Press, ?35
A curious thing happened in India earlier this year. While the city of Ahmedabad and other places in the state of Gujarat were undergoing a gruesome orgy of "communal" violence, the rest of India was not.
It might sound callous to attach significance to the fact that the killings did not spread on any scale to other parts of India. After all, more than 700 Indian Muslims were slaughtered in the course of five days by Hindu gangs, following the massacre by a suspected Islamist group of 59 mostly Hindu train passengers.
Many of those killed in the attacks were children, methodically incinerated after being doused in kerosene. Crowds gathered to cheer on a series of such burnings, sometimes with the police acting as cheerleaders-hardly, perhaps, a moment to talk about sectarian restraint in India. And yet, this is one of the themes of Ashutosh Varshney's original new book-Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India. Its findings challenge the standard international commentary on the Gujarat massacres: India (or it might be Bosnia or some other ethnic flashpoint) is a land of dark hatreds that spill over into medieval-style slaughter, so there is no need for context. Communal killing is just what happens.
The truth is more contingent. What happened in Gujarat earlier this year might occur again, possibly on a larger scale. But it need not. In an overwhelming majority of the areas in which Muslims and Hindus live side-by-side in India, communal killings have never occurred, far less the type of pogrom witnessed in Ahmedabad.
In a painstaking ten-year study of communal violence in post-colonial India, Varshney produces some startling findings. Perhaps most striking is the fact that 96 per cent of all deaths resulting from Hindu-Muslim violence in India took place in cities. More than two-thirds of India lives in villages. Yet rural India is practically a stranger to sectarian violence. And even the urban violence is restricted to surprisingly few areas. India has more than 100 cities, yet just eight account for about half of all of Hindu-Muslim deaths from sectarian rioting.
Why-considering that both have large populations of 12m or more and a roughly proportionate share of Muslims-has Calcutta experienced 63 deaths from Hindu-Muslim rioting since independence while Bombay has had 1,163?
Finally, India has suffered about 10,000 deaths from Hindu-Muslim violence since 1950-statistically minuscule compared with the proportions killed in more intensive communal conflicts elsewhere. With a population of 1.5m, compared to India's one billion, Northern Ireland has suffered more than 3,000 deaths in a much shorter time. Since 1969, a citizen of Northern Ireland has been over 200 times more likely to die from sectarian violence than a citizen of India.
Varshney sets the rich texture of Hindu-Muslim civic life in some cities against its absence in others. So, the intermingling of Muslims and Hindus in the Keralan town of Calicut innoculates them against calls-to-arms at the national level. In contrast, the segregation of Hindus and Muslims in Ahmedabad (which, not uncoincidentally, is governed by the Hindu nationalist BJP) makes it responsive to triggers pulled on the other side of India. It is easy to demonise people with whom you do not interact.
Most sectarian riots in India are planned by politicians who hire organised criminal gangs to execute their strategy in mixed communities. Those places with Hindu-Muslim business organisations, inter-communal schools, non- religious cricket teams and so on can withstand such intrusions. But why do some towns have thriving Hindu-Muslim civic associations and others not? Varshney suggests that the answer is particular to each locale. Take Ahmedabad. Home to Mahatma Gandhi's most cherished ashram, the old Gujarat capital used to be one of the more progressive cities in India. But the ties that bound Ahmedabad's Hindus and Muslims were weakened by rapid economic change, the collapse through in-fighting of the local branch of the secular Congress party and the campaigning of outside communalist activists. What was once a model of inter-religious amity has been transformed into a laboratory for right-wing Hindu revivalism.
Notwithstanding Varshney's argument that civil society is the key defence against communalism, the state also bears heavy responsibility for what happened in Gujarat, where at times it appeared to be openly abetting the massacres. Narendra Modi, who as chief minister of Gujarat was in a position to help stop the killing, stated that Hindus were simply following a natural desire for revenge.
Thankfully, other Indian states and cities have different kinds of leader. Once a flashpoint for sectarian rioting, the town of Bhiwandi has remained calm for over a decade, due to the work of one police officer. Through a mixture of cajolement, education, persistence and charisma, Suresh Khapade persuaded Bhiwandi's Muslim and Hindu communities to set up mutual associations to help resist the blandishments of outside agents provocateurs. His achievements have outlasted his tenure, which ended in 1991.
Is there a big picture? Yes, but like India it is a mosaic with dark patches and rays of light. On the bright side, one could point to the almost complete disappearance of communal tension between Sikhs and Hindus. More than 3,000 Sikhs were killed in revenge for the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984. Like the Hindu nationalist movement today, the Sikh separatist movement was militant, organised, and funded largely by expatriates in Britain and North America. But through a combination of the ruthlessness of India's security forces, exhaustion from ceaseless conflict, and the emergence of moderate Hindu and Sikh leaders, the problem is no longer threatening. Earlier this year, Gandhi's Congress Party was elected to office in the largely Sikh state of Punjab for the first time since her assassination.
And then there are dark patches. One cannot ignore the rise of the right-wing BJP and the spread of its sister organisations over the last 15 years. From winning just two parliamentary seats in the 1984 elections, the BJP, which has led a coalition government for the last four years, now has 183 seats out of a total of 545 in New Delhi. Its rise has coincided with a surge in Hindu-Muslim tensions in large pockets of India.
It would be wrong to underestimate the threat that the rise of Hindu identity politics poses to the durability of India's secular and pluralist democracy. And yet, the very diversity of India puts fairly insuperable limits on its continued growth. From gaining roughly a quarter of the national vote in the mid-1990s, the BJP's share has since been falling steadily. The party's northern bias and Hindi-language chauvinism stops it from making serious in-roads in the south.
Perhaps more significantly, the experience of government has given the BJP a taste for power and its inevitable compromises-to the chagrin of the grassroots Hindu revivalists. There is a tendency to distance the party from its hardcore supporters as the price of a broader appeal.
Varshney's book is a reminder that there is nothing inevitable about the emergence of sectarian hatred. Small groups and even individuals can have a decisive influence on whether such feelings convert into bloodshed. The language of communal violence is national and sometimes international. But its battlefields are always local.
