Contentious Conversation - )

Social Research, Fall, 1998 by Charles Tilly

Ayodhya, India, long sheltered a sixteenth-century mosque, Babri Masjid, named for the first Mughal emperor, Babur. Ayodhya attracted worldwide attention on December 6, 1992, when Hindu militants destroyed Ayodhya's Muslim shrine, began construction of a Hindu temple on the same site, and launched a nationwide series of struggles that eventually produced some twelve hundred deaths (Tambiah, 1996, p. 251; Bose and Jalal, 1998, p. 228). But the campaign behind that newsworthy event began a decade earlier. During the 1980s, militant Hindu groups started demanding destruction of the mosque and erection of a temple to Ram, epic hero of the Ramayana. Just before the 1989 elections, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) activists transported what they called holy bricks to Ayodhya and ceremoniously laid a foundation for their temple.

The following year, President Lal Advani of the BJP took his chariot caravan on a pilgrimage (rath yatra) across northern India, threatening along the way to start building the Ram temple in Ayodhya. Advani started his pilgrimage in Somnath, fabled site of a great Hindu temple destroyed by Muslim marauders. Advani's followers had fashioned his Toyota van into a simulacrum of legendary, hero Arjuna's chariot, an image familiar from Peter Brook's film Mahabharata. As the BJP caravan passed through towns and villages, Advani's chariot attracted gifts of flower petals, coconut, burning incense, sandalwood paste, and prayer from local women. Authorities arrested Advani before he could begin the last lap of his journey to Ayodhya, but not before many of his followers had preceded him to the city. When some of them broke through police barricades near the offending mosque, police fired on them, killing "scores" of BJP activists (Kakar, 1996, p. 51).

Both sides represented their actions as virtuous violence--one side as defense of public order, the other side as sacrifice for a holy cause. Hindu activists made a great pageant of cremating the victims' bodies on a nearby river bank, then returning martyrs' ashes to their homes in various parts of India. Soon the fatalities at Ayodhya became themes of widespread Hindu-Muslim-police clashes. Those conflicts intersected with higher caste students' public resistance to the national government's revival of an affirmative action program on behalf of Other Backward Classes (Tambiah, 1996, p. 24.9). In Hyderabad, reports Sudhir Kakar,

   more than a thousand miles to the south of Ayodhya, the riots began with
   the killing of Sardar, a Muslim auto-rickshaw driver, by two Hindus.
   Although the murder was later linked to a land dispute between two rival
   gangs, at the time of the killing it was framed in the context of rising
   Hindu-Muslim tensions in the city. Muslims retaliated by stabbing four
   Hindus in different parts of the walled city. Then Majid Khan, an
   influential local leader of Subzimandi who lives and flourishes in the
   shaded space formed by the intersection of crime and politics, was attacked
   with a sword by some BJP workers and the rumor spread that he had died.
   Muslim mobs came out into the alleys and streets of the walled city, to be
   followed by Hindu mobs in their areas of strength, and the 1990 riot was
   on. It was to last for ten weeks, claim more than three hundred lives and
   thousands of wounded (Kakar, 1996, p. 51).

As his remarkable Colors of Violence unfolds, Sudhir Kakar seeks explanations for Hyderabad's 1990 violence by reporting discussions with some of the principals (including Majid Khan, still very much alive), reflecting on the identities involved, and reconstructing the psychological orientations that facilitate lethal violence. He establishes the deep grounding of ostensibly spontaneous intercommunal violence in everyday social relations and in the organization of such groups as the Hindu wrestlers-thugs-activists mobilized by local leaders including Majid Khan.

Kakar does not, however, present his work as popular history or organizational analysis. On the contrary. Kakar, a professional psychoanalyst, deliberately sets his "primordialist" account of Hindu-Muslim conflict against the "instrumentalist" accounts he rightly sees as predominating in current social-scientific explanations of ethnic and religius conflict. "There are many social scientists and political analysts," he declares,

   who would locate the enhancements of ethnicity (cultural identity in my
   terms) in a particular group not in social-psychological processes but in
   the competition between elites for political power and economic resources.
   In fact, this has been the dominant explanation for the occurrence of
   Hindu-Muslim riots.... Cultural identity according to this view is not a
   fixed or given dimension of communities but a variable one which takes form
   in the process of political mobilization by the elite, a mobilization which
   arises from the broader political and economic environment (Kakar, 1996,
   pp. 149-50).

At length and through finely crafted vignettes, Kakar makes his case against such instrumental interpretations of cultural identity and his case for shared forms of consciousness based on common experience, reinforced by hostile interaction, and mediated by deep psychological mechanisms. He commits himself to phenomenological reductionism. That is his version of "primordialism."