Book Review: 'Religion, Violence and Political Mobilisation in South Asia'

Book Review
Seminar, 561
by Harsh Mander

RELIGION, VIOLENCE AND POLITICAL MOBILISATION IN SOUTH ASIA edited by Ravinder
Kaur. Sage, Delhi, 2005.

Ravinder Kaur’s edited volume, Religion, Violence and Political Mobilisation in
South Asia, is a useful collection of essays that seeks to map and analyse the
phenomenon of socio-political mobilisation and mass violence around constructed
religious and ethnic identities. Loosely termed ‘communal violence’ in South
Asia, this has been and remains a source of enormous suffering and insecurity
among the people of this part of the globe for more then a century.

Ravinder Kaur herself persuasively rejects simplistic and facile explanations of
such violence as ‘spontaneous outburst of emotions’, the handywork of a few
‘anti-social elements’ or as proof of regrettable mutual hatred that
periodically recurs in South Asia. She also argues against the assumption that
frequent incidents of violence occur like a disease in the society and leave
everything unaltered, only to return to ‘normal’ once the disease has lapsed.
Instead, she sees these episodes of collective violence against a community as
part of a process of ongoing social control exercised by the dominant groups.

Most popular and scholarly analyses of communal riots neglect the aftermath of
the violence when survivors frequently seek ‘safety in numbers’, that is,
migrate to areas considered safe because of the numerical strength of their
group. Another neglected trend is of ‘economic boycott’ by the majority group
that ensures further loss of economic and social power of the minority group.
Kaur importantly sees significance in the lasting psychological, social,
economic and political impact of the physical violence in terms of the violent
rupture in people’s personal lives, loss of faith in government agencies, and a
deep sense of subjugation and alienation from the ‘mainstream’. She aptly sees
these trends as part of a project to reduce the victim community to ‘second
class citizens’ – deprived of protection, fundamental rights, and basic human
dignity.

This framework is particularly useful in understanding the Gujarat pogrom of
2002. Most analyses dwell on the grisly events of slaughter and rape and not on
the lasting impact of ghettoisation, social and economic boycott and cultural
suppression. She points out that conventional studies of communal violence view
‘hatred’ from the ‘other’ community in an almost ahistorical and
de-contextualized mode, mainly in terms of actions and reactions, usually a
response to provocation by minorities. She rightly observes that this obscures
the central role of religious mobilization on the one hand, and of various arms
of the state on the other.

Bjorn Hettne makes a useful classification of forms of political violence that
occur in South Asia. These range from assassination of political leaders
(usually inspired by ethno-racial conflict); riots between communities usually
sparked off by a provocative religious ritual or neighbourhood conflict but
deriving from struggles for power and resources; sectarian violence within the
same religion; inter-ethnic violence between ‘sons of the soil’ and poor
immigrants; upper caste violence against Dalits; ethno-racial political
violence aimed at political independence or autonomy; pogroms; and ethnically
organised gang wars.

In the post 9/11 context, Hettne finds that the highly contested term
‘terrorism’, usually prefixed with ‘international’, has penetrated the
discourse mainly to justify greater tolerance for repression. It usually
induces elements of fear, surprise, civilian victims and political objectives,
but mainly old internal conflicts increasingly described as ‘terrorist’. In
India after 9/11, Indian Muslims are increasingly seen as participating or at
least sympathetic to terrorism. The paradox is observed that while India is
evolving in a fundamentalist direction, explosive and chronically violent
Pakistan under Musharraf is trying to break with fundamentalist forms of Islam.
In Sri Lanka, the conflict between Tamils and Sinhalese which resulted in 65,000
deaths has come closer to a solution, in that the international war against
terrorism has been reduced to the freedom of movement for the Tamil Tigers,
branded as a terrorist organization by several countries, including India. In
Nepal, Maoists are no longer simply dubbed ‘terrorists’ and are seen as more
akin to the Indian Naxalite uprising.

Among the other significant papers in the volume is Jan Breman’s analysis of
Gujarat 2002. An outstanding scholarly observer of the state over decades, he
notes that the state apparatus – both the leading political party and
government agencies – condoned or even facilitated the pogrom, rather than stop
it. Moreover, the trade union movement which used to be the main platform for
collective action has withered away. What he describes as the ‘paralysis’ of
social movements, could not have been better illustrated than by the decision
of the board of the Sabarmati Asharam to close its gates when the violence
spread through the city. He observes that the front organizations of Sangh
Parivar were able to mobilize mercenaries of subaltern castes to assist in
operation of killing, burning and looting.

Paul Brass is another perceptive foreign scholar who focuses on the discourse of
Hindu-Muslim communalism that has corrupted history, penetrated memory, and
contributes in the present to the production and perpetuation of communal
violence. He notes that the ‘memory’ of Indian history has been kept vivid also
by the militant Hindutva demand to recapture and restore temples allegedly
destroyed by the Muslim conquerors and replace these by mosques. He evocatively
maps how Hindu and Muslim bodies are both the location and the metaphor in the
production of communal violence.

This slim volume of essays is both brilliant and disturbing in its flashes of
distilled insights and provocative analyses. The major limitation is that the
essays were collected for a seminar, and inevitably are both uneven and fail to
build a coherent discourse. Yet the flashes of insight into phenomena that
constitute some of the gravest contemporary challenges to our survival as a
secular democracy are enough to make the manuscript worth careful study.

Harsh Mander