India's House Divided: Understanding Communal Violence

India once stood tall in the annals of postcolonial nations. Beset by deep poverty, great inequality, and a vast population, the country still managed to avoid the dictatorships that befell so many of its neighbors. India's democracy, now encompassing a billion people, may have been maddeningly slow to reform, but at least it was resilient. Governments rose and fell, new participants swelled the ranks of the political elite, and the middle class kept expanding. Although the country's many religious, linguistic, and caste groups frequently squabbled -- and sometimes exploded into violence -- they also coexisted.

Whereas other multiethnic countries underwent violent breakups leading to ethnically homogeneous states, India appeared to have pulled off that unlikely feat: maintaining a pluralist administration under a secular government. The country's rulers proved surprisingly responsive to diverse ethnic and minority claims when compared to other developing nations, and even some developed ones. In its first 15 years of independence alone, India created 11 new states based on linguistic and cultural identity and also implemented a broad system of affirmative action to redress traditional discrimination. This record, combined with booming economic growth in the 1990s, led many in the international community -- and indeed, many Indians themselves -- to view the country as a force for stability in a volatile region.

Then came the Hindu-Muslim riots of this spring in the prosperous western Indian state of Gujarat, six weeks of violence that left more than a thousand people dead and a hundred thousand in makeshift shelters. The riots began when a Muslim mob torched a trainload of sloganeering Hindu nationalists, killing 59 of them. A wave of retaliatory rioting rolled over Gujarat; the overwhelming majority of the riots' victims were Muslim. Unlike earlier riots that ended as abruptly as they began, the bloodletting in Gujarat has not ceased. Although reduced in intensity, violence continues to flare up, primarily in the underpoliced Muslim areas of Gujarat's major cities, where there are daily instances of murder, looting, and arson.

The central and state governments, both run by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have been disturbingly slow to curb Hindu retaliation. While India's parliament debated whether the Gujarat government should be dismissed for failing to restore the rule of law, even more disturbing reports emerged that some of the Hindu mob leaders were activist members of the ruling party or its allies in the wider "family" of Hindu nationalist organizations. Is India beginning to suffer the same kind of communal convulsion that has ravaged so many multiethnic countries in recent years?

KEEPING SOCIETY CIVIL

That would be the wrong conclusion to draw, says University of Michigan political scientist Ashutosh Varshney in Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India. In his view, there are two reasons why India is unlikely to succumb to the maelstrom that broke up countries such as Yugoslavia. First, Hindu-Muslim conflict is highly localized, and so any one wave of violence has limited potential to spread across the country. And second, India's complex polity is made up of a range of constituencies with cross-cutting interests in which linguistic or caste affinities, for example, often supersede religious loyalty. Hindu nationalism is therefore unlikely to become the kind of cohesive murderous force that Serb nationalism turned into. Moreover, argues Varshney, the need to cater to these cross-cutting interests forces all political parties to the secular center once in government -- even when that government is, as at present, formed by Hindu nationalists.

Varshney's first argument is more convincing than his second. Using data for a 45-year period from 1950 to 1995 -- that is, covering most of independent India's history -- he shows that the

vast majority of communal riots have been concentrated in 4 of India's 28 states, located in the northern, western, and eastern parts of the country. All four have large Muslim minorities. But so do several of the southern Indian states, yet southern India has remained largely calm over the past 50 years -- even while the country's northern and western areas have been periodically ravaged by Hindu-Muslim violence.

By itself, this is not a surprising finding. It is fairly well known that Hindu-Muslim relations in northern and southern India are poles apart. The real surprise of Varshney's data lies in their revelations of the subregional nature of Hindu-Muslim violence. Even within the four states in which ethnic conflict has been concentrated, most of the riots have been restricted to a handful of cities. In fact, 70 percent of Hindu-Muslim violence takes place in only 30 out of India's more than 400 cities. More startling still, just 8 cities are responsible for almost half of all deaths in Hindu-Muslim riots.

In other words, ancient hatreds have little to do with ethnic conflict in India. Although India is a predominantly agricultural society, violence between Hindus and Muslims is an overwhelmingly urban phenomenon. During the 45-year period that Varshney's data cover, rural violence accounted for just over three percent of all deaths in Hindu-Muslim riots. India's traditional heartland, its villages, has been largely unscathed by the communal killings that have swept its cities.