Communal Riots in India: A Never-Ending Story?


Not much seems to have changed in India since the days of bloody outbursts of violence, retaliation after retaliation, in the very early days of Independent India, in the late 1940s. Today the streets of Guajarat are filled with violence; hundreds of people are massacred for their religious believes. Throughout the history of modern India such riots occurred on a regular basis, involving, Hindis, Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians. What reasons lay underneath the seemingly never-ending story of violence, killings between members of different religious communities in India? Will India turn into a second Middle East?

Is India already a conglomeration of dozens of Palestines (about 12 percent of the population in India are Muslims), with Kashmir and Punjab in the northwest, Assam in the East, Tamil Nadu in the Southeast and plenty of other "hot pockets," each of which is adding up to a couple of times the size of Palestine? What is the future of India? Will there be a time when communal riots became a thing of the past, and when?

The key for the understanding of the apparently endless succession of religious clashes in India and the political development of India ever since the British granted India its independence (India became independent on August 15, 1947). Before the arrival of the British, the north and central regions of India were part of the Mughal Empires set up by Muslims who conquered the Indian heartland coming from the Central Asian region.

The long-standing Hindi culture and religion that can refer to a 5000-year old history and tradition came heavily under pressure: suddenly the religious monopoly of Hinduism has fallen and—probably the worst of a—l-the very old tradition of strictly dividing society into numerous different castes has been question by the new arrival, Islam, which promised every poor and every outcast an equal citizenship among its religious community, no matter what economic activity one pursues and no matter what social status one has inherited at birth.

But the constellation of competing religious communities seemed to have had no pending major repercussions that would have harmed social peace in the long run, if it were not for the British. On the contrary to exerting a uniting societal function, colonial British rule in India did everything to divide and further the existing gap between Muslims and Hindus in its mammoth colony, which built the cornerstone of the British Empire with its vast resources-that includes masses of cheap soldiers, cheap agricultural commodities, and a vast export market for the industrializing British economy. The British rulers of India started to positively discriminate Muslims against the Hindu majority, by heaving a great number of them into important government positions, which for the first time provoked the rise of Hindi nationalism, as a political countermovement to Muslim dominance now supported by the British.

Not only led the British experience to the rise of Hindi communalism, but also to the rise of the Punjabi military tradition, which later on led to the establishment of Pakistan under the authoritarian rule of the military in cooperation with great landlords who formerly supported the drafting of sons of Punjabi peasants into the British army. The Indo-Pakistan war of 1965 worsened Hindu-Muslim relations. In 1971, the rise of Pakistani authoritarianism led to the bloody partition of Pakistan, in which the powerful Pakistani military (which was predominantly stocked with personnel coming from Western Punjab) fought against the social alliance of the middle class and small peasants that called for the introduction of democracy in Bangladesh; India fought on the side of Eastern Pakistan (Bangladesh) defeating Western Pakistan.

Thus, the relationship between India's Muslims and Hindus needs to be seen from the viewpoint of relationship between Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India as well. In short, India never was a peaceful country with regard to rivaling religious communities, but the situation has been significantly worsened by the practiced "divide-and-rule" formula of the British colonial government; the partition of India into Muslim dominated Pakistan and the rest of India; and the painful experience of massacres of civilians against civilians ever since independence, which caught India unprepared-with a series of massacres and killings (with e.g. 865 incidents in the years 1968 and 1969 alone); including state-sponsored terror, especially between 1975 and 1977 (after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared emergency), and between 1980 and 1984 (with Sikh extremists' terrorism and the government's counter terrorism), not to mention the virtually daily terror of extremists in Kashmir, Jammu, Assam, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, and, recently, also Guajarat.

The immediate occasion for today's slaughtering of civilians on the trains, in the houses, and on the streets in Western India's federal state of Guajarat is the building of a new Hindi temple on the site of an ancient Muslim temple-one of the most significant Muslim temple that symbolizes the heroic times of uncontested Muslim rule in Northern India-hundreds of miles away in central Uttar Pradesh. As Prakash Chandra has pointed out, "the marginalization of the Muslim ruling class and the rise of a new Hindu national assertiveness are wide accepted as a basic explanation for the emergence of communal conflict between the two communities" (1999: 9).

Conclusively, as long as marginalization of Muslims in Indian society and politics prevails, and as long as Hindu nationalism and the Kashmir conflict continue to fuel anger and distrust in India's long-standing divided society, we may expect riots, terrorism of all kinds, including massacres, to reoccur well into the future. The rise of conflict in the Middle East may well push Muslims in India, a country with one of the world's largest Muslim population, to further their sentiments of Muslims being suppressed by Non-Muslims.

Certainly, the newest episode in the violent history of modern India, today's killing in Guajarat will trigger more hate and anger, not only in Guajarat, but most like also in other parts of India, most notably Northern and Central India, either in Allahabad, the political center of Uttar Pradesh, which is near the sight of the contested Muslim temple, or Hyderabad, or anywhere else in India. The tensions created over long periods of time-that is, hundreds of years-certainly will not disappear or calm down; the contrary is much more likely.

By Christian Aspalter (The University of Hong Kong/Chaoyang University of Technolgy, Taiwan)


Suggested Readings:

Ahmed, Ishtiaq (1996), State, Nation, and Ethnicity in Contemporary South Asia, Pinter: London.

Basu, Sajal (2000), Communalism, Ethnicity and State Politics, Rawat Publications: Jaipur, India.

Chandra, Prakash (1999), Changing Dimensions of the Communal Politics in India, Dominant Publishers: New Dehli.

Das, Hari Hara (1991), India: Democratic Government and Politics, Himalaya Publishing House, Mumbai, India.

Gopal, Ram (1986), India under Indira, Citerion Publications: New Dehli.

Kohli, Atul (1991), Democracy and Discontent, India's Growing Crisis of Governability, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK.

Malhotra, Inder (1989), Indira Gandhi, A Personal and Political Biography, Hodder and Stoughton: London.

Narang, S.N. (1996), Indian Government and Politics, Gitanjali Publishing: New Dehli.

Phukon, Girin and Dutta, N.L. (1997), Politics of Identity and Nation Building in Northeast India, South Asian Publishers, New Dehli.

SarDesai, D.R. and Mohan, Anand (1992), The Legacy of Nehru, A Centennial Assessment, Promilla: New Dehli.

Murti, Ramana (1970), Gandhi, Essential Writings, Gandhi Peace Foundation: New Dehli.

Malik, Yogendra K. and Vajpeyi, Dhirendra K. (eds) (1988), India: The Years of Indira Gandhi, E.J. Brill: Leiden, The Netherlands.

Singh, Gurharpal (2000), Ethnic Conflict in India, A Case Study of Punjab, St. Martins Press: London.

Vasudev, Uma (1977), The Two Faces of Indira Gandhi, Vikas Publishing: New Dehli.