The Time of Kali: Violence between Religious Groups in India

Social Research, Fall, 2000 by Sudhir Kakar

ON the afternoon of December 11, 1990, a Muslim auto-rickshaw driver named Sardar was stabbed outside a coal depot in the old part of the city of Hyderabad in the south of India. The assailants were two Hindu youths. Muslims retaliated by stabbing four Hindus in different sections of the old, walled city. The violence that followed lasted for ten weeks, claimed more than three hundred lives and left thousands wounded.

When I began the study of this "riot"--as violent altercations between Hindus and Muslims are usually called--in the following year, interviewing not only the survivors but also agents of this violence, I was struck by the consensus within and between the communities on the events preceding the riot. The murder of Sardar was the trigger of the violence; the gun was the rising tension between Hindus and Muslims in the country since the beginning of October, when L.K. Advani, the present Home Minister of India and the then President of the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) began a rath yatra from the temple of Somnath on the west coast to Ayodhya in the Hindi heartland of the north. The yatra was to take Advani through a large part of the country, over ten thousand kilometers, in thirty days. Its purpose was to mobilize support for the construction of the Rama temple, at the legendary birth site of the god, where an unused mosque constructed in the sixteenth century in honor of the founder of the Mughal dynasty stood. The yatra aroused intense fervor among the Hindus. Crowds thronged the roads all over the country, showering flower petals on the cavalcade as it passed through their villages and towns. In a more somber aftermath, there was violence between Hindus and Muslims in many places in the wake of the rath yatra.

Advani's cavalcade came to a halt when he was arrested on October 23 in Bihar before he could start on the last lap of his journey to Ayodhya, where the BJP had promised to start the construction of the temple on November 9th. On that day, scores were killed when the police opened fire on volunteers intent on demolishing the Babri mosque as a prelude to building the temple. Soon, Hindu-Muslim riots erupted in many parts of the country.

The Context of Religious Violence

The consensus on the immediate events leading to the 1990 violence in Hyderabad disappears when we come to the more distal causes. The wider context of the Hindu-Muslim violence shows large variations within and across social science disciplines. It is as if different parts of the background in a large canvas that foregrounds dead bodies lying in the alleys and burnt houses in Hyderabad in December 1990 has been painted in a variety of distinct styles by painters belonging to different schools, their palettes sometimes complementary and at others clashing.

In the school which accords primacy to the economic factor, the conflict between the two communities that leads to violent clashes is believed to have less to do with religion than with "communalism". Communalism is a specifically Indian concept that signifies a strong identification with a community of believers. Communalism not only has religious affiliation but also social, political, and especially economic interests in common which conflict with the corresponding interests of another community of believers--the enemy, who shares the same geographic space. In the economic vision, the "real" cause of violence generally embraces some version of a class struggle between the poor and the rich. This, it is claimed, is as true of the anti-Semitic pogroms in Spain in the fourteenth century (Wolff, 1971), of sixteenth century Catholic-Protestant violence in France (Estebe, 1968; Davis, 1987), of anti-Catholic riots in nineteenth century London (Rude, 1964), as of contemporary Hindu-Muslim riots in India (Engineer, 1984; Arslam and Rajan, 1994). In the more contemporary formulation of rational-choice theory, the conflict between groups is a consequence of competition for resources, in which individuals believe they can benefit if their group gains at the expense of the other group (Hardin, 1995).

Another school emphasizes the wider political context of such conflicts, especially the ending of colonial rule (Horowitz, 1985). If Hindu-Muslim relations were better in the past, with much less overt violence, it was also the kind of polity in which the two peoples lived. This polity was that of the empire, specifically the Mughal empire followed by the British one. An empire, political scientist Michael Walzer (1982) observes, is characterized by a mixture of repression for any strivings for independence, tolerance for different cultures, religions and ways of life and insistence that things remain peaceful. It is only with the end of the empire that the political questions, "Who among us shall have power here, in these villages, these towns?", "Which group will dominate, what will be the new ranking order?" that lead to a heightened awareness of religious-cultural differences, and establish the potential for violent conflict. The rise of fundamentalist groups and the politicization of religious differences in many parts of the world at the end of colonialism has been amply documented (Marty and Appleby, 1991, 1993). In one branch of the political school that emphasizes more local than international relations, riots between Hindus and Muslims occur in towns and cities where formal professional and trade associations which include members of both communities are weak or non-existent (Varshney and Wilkinson, 1996).