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Religion, Violence & Political Mobilization in South Asia SOUTH Asia has almost always been in the vortex of tumultuous change propelled largely by its rather complex and competitive networks of ethnic and religious social configurations. Post 9/11, however, the region has emerged as a critical landscape with serious global security implications in the background of US-led war against terror.
This edited volume by sociologist Ravinder Kaur grew out of a workshop on the theme ‘religious mobilisation and organisation of violence’ in the aftermath of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom. The volume attempts to debunk some of the myths about crowd-violence and its much articulated understanding as an episodic ‘spontaneous outbursts of emotions’ executed by some unorganised hoodlums in their momentary loss of collective wisdom. In her introductory essay Kaur challenges these simplistic understandings in the light of what happened in Gujarat in the year 2002 and else where. The essay brings forth the macabre design behind such communal mobilisations and its pre-meditated nature in which the majority community, especially its intolerant and unapologetic middle class, indulges in violence to terrorise the minority in to accepting their secondary status and the state machinery becomes not just a facilitator but a party in such an attempt. The anthology draws from varied ethnographic locations such as Karachi, Aligarh, Amritsar and Ahmedabad to underscore the comparative local complexities to provide a broader understanding of the phenomenon of religion-based communal violence. Paul Brass, for example, locating his study of Hindu-Muslim violence in Aligarh, a site of historical baggage as the seat of Muslim separatism and hence referred by the Hindu communal forces as ‘mini Pakistan’ builds on his early work to highlight the institutional and organised nature of violence as reflected through riots and to show how historical consciousness and teleology of Hindu nationalism maps out the contemporary discourse on Hindu-Muslim violence. Jan Breman’s essay focuses on the theme of communal violence as a Darwinian process of social selection. Based on his years of engagement with the textile mills industry in Gujarat he tracks the journey of the rise and the fall of the industry in Ahmedabad leading to erosion of inter-communal networks and the polarisation of labour force on religious lines and the subsequent role of Hindutava movement in stoking the communal fire. Dipankar Gupta, on the other hand, in his essay makes a distinction between the communal and ethnic conflict in the backdrop of his ethnographic work with the Shiv Sena and the militancy in Punjab suggesting that the use of ‘communal’ as a prefix to Hindu-Muslim riots is inappropriate as it is essentially ethnic in nature for it involves the element of allegiance to the nation state. Thomas Blom Hansen underlines the pathologies arising out of fractured sovereignty as produced in post colonial India. Essays by Ian Talbot and Oskar Verkaaik provide insights in to how Pakistan as another crucial part of south Asia has been the victim of a similar set of conditions where the historical ambivalence of the Pakistani state with regard to its secular vs. secular credentials has led to violent and worsening inter-ethnic strife. The book provides an in-depth understanding of the dynamics of religio-ethnic political mobilisation in South Asia and its larger implications and connectivity with the global security. It’s a must reading to unravel the multi-layered intricacies of the violent events unfolding around us in our own backyard and in our neighbouring societies like Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and of course Afghanistan.
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The incident of 9/11
actually changed the very lexicon of domestic and international
security agencies with the US finally waking up to the reality of,
what one may refer to as, the phenomenon of ‘globalisation of terror’.
That is, what happens in Gujarat or Karachi has a bearing not just on
the region and its fragile immediate geopolitical environments but its
reverberations could be felt across the world creating newer fissures
and fault lines and delineating new lines of axes of alignment or the
review of the existing one. This is perhaps the reason why the issue
of ethnic and communal violence in countries like India and its
neighbours becomes a matter of greater international concern as it
grows beyond its domestic boundaries in its implications.