India's House Divided: Understanding Communal Violence

If ethnic conflict is limited chiefly to a handful of Indian cities, then why do we fear its destructive potential for the country at large? One reason is that these cities are the power centers of the country. They include India's metropolitan and trading hubs and several of its state capitals. India's three largest and most cosmopolitan cities are among the eight that top Varshney's list of "riot-prone" areas -- the nation's capital, New Delhi, and the influential state capitals Mumbai (Bombay) and Kolkata (Calcutta). Each has a population of over 12 million, and together they are linchpins of India's economy.

Each of the eight cities that top Varshney's list has a large middle class, a high literacy rate, and an old and established Muslim minority. Two of them are in Gujarat, and it is a testimony to the predictive value of Varshney's data that he ranks Ahmedabad, Gujarat's financial capital, as the second most riot-prone city in India. (Mumbai leads the death count.) Ahmedabad saw the worst of the recent killings in Gujarat and continues to burn as of this writing. The city where the riots began, Godhra, also appears in Varshney's data, on the longer list of 30.

CRASHING THE PARTY

Why should these cities, with better standards of living than most of the rest of India, greater economic opportunity, and more power to shape government policy, suffer from a pattern of recurrent Hindu-Muslim violence?

Varshney's answer to this question is deceptively simple. Each of these cities, he says, has suffered a gradual and progressive decline in civic life. Ahmedabad, for example, was largely untouched by the violence between Hindus and Muslims that hit other cities in the early twentieth century and during the partition of colonial India in 1947. Gujarat was Mohandas Gandhi's homeland and a testing ground for his methods of nonviolent resistance, and it also had some of the strongest civil associations in India, built by the Congress Party as well as by Gandhi's disciples in both industry and labor. These associations served to integrate Hindus and Muslims and stepped in to prevent Hindu-Muslim violence during the partition riots of 1947-48. After independence, however, the Congress Party neglected its various programs promoting cooperative credit, women's health and employment, and educational and media outreach. Following the death of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, in 1964, the party leadership started to fragment. Its different factions began to focus on wooing specific voting blocs by cultivating the more chauvinist elements within India's different castes and religious communities.

Ahmedabad's first serious Hindu-Muslim riots occurred in 1969 as a result of a local dispute over a religious procession; they were followed by more violence in several subsequent years. Gujarat was then relatively peaceful from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. But this calm was deceptive, according to Varshney; during that period the Congress Party's civic decline was followed by its political decline. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi did away with Congress' internal elections and limited the powers of the party's local branches. The party's vast apparatus in Gujarat, its one remaining integrative network for Hindus and Muslims, dwindled to a shadow of its former self.

At the same time, there was a parallel decline in Gujarat's largest nonparty organization, the Textile Labor Association. Based in Ahmedabad, the Gandhian trade union was the last significant source of Hindu-Muslim cooperation in the city. When its numbers dwindled as mill production gave way to the rise of the power-loom sector, the vacuum was filled by Hindu nationalist organizations that founded new schools and newspapers and performed a range of social services.

The BJP benefited from the Congress Party's decline in Gujarat. Varshney shows how the state turned to the Hindu right well before the rest of India did. In the 1980s, when the BJP won between 5 and 7 percent of the vote nationally, it polled over 15 percent in Gujarat. In the mid-1990s, when the BJP's share of the national vote rose to 20 percent, it was 42 percent in Gujarat. In 1990-92, Hindu nationalists were able to mobilize hundreds of thousands of the state's citizens for a nationwide agitation to build a temple to the Hindu god Ram -- who is as central to Hinduism as Jesus is to Christianity -- in his purported birthplace, the far-off northern Indian city of Ayodhya. The temple site was also home to a seventeenth-century mosque, which was destroyed in 1992 by a 10,000-strong mob of Hindu nationalists who had gathered from all over the country. Gujarat was one of the largest contributors of volunteers to this mission of destruction; when Hindu-Muslim riots followed, it was Gujarat that saw the largest number of deaths.

The BJP came to power in Gujarat in 1995 and in the central government in 1998 -- but at the national level it is part of a wider coalition including secular regional parties. The BJP leadership in New Delhi said that, out of respect for the coalition, they would put the more contentious issues on their agenda, such as building the Ram temple, on the back burner. The BJP's leaders had already begun to restrain the party's hard-liners after the riots that followed the destruction of the Ayodhya mosque, and India remained relatively calm between 1993 and 2002. Like Varshney, many analysts concluded that India's polity forces all political parties to the secular center once they have to govern.

THE UNCERTAIN CENTER