Locale of Hindu-Muslim violence
Combined together Arabia and India have been the birthplace of the world’s greatest religions which among other higher human ideals have preached and promoted peace among their adherents. These great religions transformed the lives of millions for better over the past many centuries yet peace and harmony among their followers have remained an elusive dream. The drylands of Arabia are wet with blood through the courtesy of the ‘Arab Spring’ for some years now, and though India was at peace with herself, having seen the worst communal bloodshed at the time of partition, there is a worrying resurgence of Hindu-Muslim violence since the Hindu nationalists have assumed power.
Lately, Bombay hit the headlines as the centerpiece of Hindu-Muslim violence. This raised several interesting questions: Has Bombay been a traditionally violent city? Bombay is a big city so an associated question can be: are the big Indian cities more violent than the rest of India? An allied enquiry can be: is the nature of this violence persistent and intensive in the violence –prone areas or is it sporadic in occurrence? Before partition, the Indian nationalists (and they were and are different from the Hindu nationalists) explained away all types of Hindu-Muslim violence as an outcome of the devilish British policy of ‘divide and rule’; however, it is over six decades now, that India got independence yet the communal violence between the Hindus and Muslims has continued. Scholars and writers have generally restricted their enquiries either to a particular communally violent area or to a certain ‘bout of violence’ but Ashutosh Varshney’s research seems to be the most comprehensive as it takes into account almost half a century of Hindu-Muslim conflict in India from 1950 to 1995.
Broadly speaking, statistics testify that in the communal violence, more people die in the urban than the rural areas of India. Though some analysts claim that the rural areas were peaceful since the 1950s and the Babri Mosque issue during the Ayodhya Movement from 1986 to 1993 spread the communal violence for the first time to the rural areas but figures reveal that rural India was definitely affected by Hindu-Muslim riots in the 1960s as well.
There is a popular perception that the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) is the worst state in terms of communal deaths but the statistics startle because the state that has the highest per capita communal death rate is the West Indian state of Gujrat to which the incumbent Premier Narendra Modi belongs to. Lumped with this perception is the assumption that northern India is more communal than the rest of India. Even this perception, factually speaking, is not true. Although the rates of communal violence are high in the northern states of UP and Bihar but both the rate of communal deaths as well as the incidence of communal clashes are higher in the western states of Gujrat and Maharashtra.
An added dimension to this complex problem is that some states breed consistent while others witness inconsistent communal violence. Actually, UP, Bihar and Maharashtra have a consistent pattern of Hindu-Muslim violence whereas Gujrat and some other states have produced inconsistent violence. The case of the Gujrat state is quite peculiar in the sense that either it does not have communal violence at all, for example, it had no communal riots for twenty-five years between 1950 and 1995 but when it erupts, it produces a very high level of violence.
Then within these states, some cities are more ‘violence prone’ than others. Popular perceptions are wrong on this count as well. Before the 1993 riots, Bombay was touted as an ‘island of peace’ which is again not true because historically it has been a hotbed of communal frenzy. Similarly, Delhi and Calcutta are perceived to be peaceful cities but figures show that these too have quite a bad communal record. Overall, eight cities of India that constituted just 18% of urban population were responsible for about 45% of urban deaths and 50% of the total Hindu-Muslim deaths in the whole of country. Some cities can be called the ‘killer’ cities because these produced a disproportionately very high rate of communal violence such as Ahmadabad and Baroda that accounted for 75% of deaths in the Gujrat state whereas the city of Hyderabad produced 90% of deaths in the state of Andhra Pradesh while Bombay was responsible for 63% of all riot deaths in the state of Maharashtra.
How can one understand and interpret the incidence of this communal violence? Broadly, two schools of thought emerged among the Indian intellectuals to explain it: the modernists and the antimodernists or anti-secularists. The modernists led by the first Indian Premier Jawaharlal Nehru and the ‘Leftist’ intellectuals swayed the public opinion in the first two decades after independence. They thought that as India would modernise, the manifestations of modernity in the form of urbanisation, science and secularisation would make the Indians, the rational beings, who would stop hating and killing one another in the name of religion and ethnicity. When this did not happen, the modernists amended their stance by arguing that increased literacy among Indians would reduce communal animosities. One of their proponents, the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen quoted the example of the state of Kerala which has the highest literacy rate and the lowest level of communal violence. The argument could not stand the scrutiny of the critics who counter-argued that there was no correlation between high literacy level and low communal violence and referred to the state of Rajasthan which has both a low level of literacy and is at the same time the communally most peaceful.
On the other hand, the antimodernists believed that Indians are generally traditionalists and therefore attach great importance to their religion, ethnicity, culture, etc. and react aggressively against the forces of modernisation which undermine and erode the very traits which they dearly covet in their lives be they the Hindus or the Muslims. There is no clear winner in the ongoing battle between the modernists and the antimodernists. The present global trends indicate a likely increase in both globalisation and urbanisation which are the agencies of modernity and India will be affected by them in future. In the coming decades, more people will be moving to big cities throughout the world including India. This is not good news for the communal relations in India because most of the communal violence has been occurring in her major cities. It seems the communal violence will continue to take place in India till the time she finds a synthesis between tradition and modernity. At the moment, it looks like a distant dream.
