Abstract
The book under review is a timely attempt by Palshikar and Pandey to unravel the wider patterns of communalism and its violent manifestation. It is an exercise to explain that the fundamentals of communal riots and its circumstances are very essential to be understood by the academics in order to curtail the frequency of occurrence of such violent incidents in the public life of the nation. This is an exploration of the selective essays of what social scientist had to say on the crucially important subject of communal violence from the late 1960s until about 2015. This is a constructive attempt to recapitulate what social sciences have had to say on Hindu-Muslim conflict in an Independent India. This is an attempt to explore dimensions of communal violence in India from the concerned period through four sections, that is, first section deals with several articles focusing on the theme, that is, ‘general surveys of sectarian violence’; second section deals with ‘conceptual and theoretical orientations’ on communal violence; third section deals with ‘communal politics’ and fourth section deals with ‘accounts and analyses of specific riots’.
It is majorly based on articles of Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), which can be better declared as one the single largest space devoted to communal violence across several decades. EPW also stands as a wider platform of publishing issues and concerns related to communal violence both from academics and journalistic commentary aspects. The creative analytical pieces were systematically filtered on the basis of relative précised demarcations. For instance, from as many as 430 articles, reports or other columns (not counting editorials or letters to the editor) on communal violence and riots published between 1966 and 2015 to choose from, only 38 are discussed in detail. The frequency to which can be understood as only one in 11 in a considerable pattern of more or less subjective. The focus of the work is on the post-independence era and communal violence where issues of partition and electoral politics were analysed properly. Further, in terms of categories of article selection, mainly ‘special articles’ with longer gestation period stands the test of time, therefore, such articles have been the first preference of authors to analyse. Last but not the least, the regional distributions of analysis of issues of communal violence covers Northern India and some parts of South such as Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and so on.
Conceptually, the book tries to understand communalism as a broad category that has definitional variations. It also refers to Gyanenedra Pandey (1990) to understand communalism as a form of colonist knowledge. The concept stands for the ‘puerile and the primitive’…. Communalism, in this perception, is a pathological condition that is the other aspect of secularism, liberalism and nationalism. It is nationalism gone awry. Accordingly, communalism in South Asian region is the result of the region that cannot produce genuine nationalism or cannot be genuinely liberal and secular. Further, there is an addition of primordial religious loyalties and their mutual hostility in the society is a product in automatic mode. To understand further, the book explains ‘riot’ as fuzzy term which entitles violent death and localised destruction of property and terrorisation of neighbours by the mobs. To further conceptualise the term ‘communal riot,’ it unravels it as a recurrent, widespread and far-from-accidental phenomenon which necessarily include growth and nurturing of sectarian animosities in specific contexts and several religious affiliation aspects, that is, Hindus, Muslims, Christians and so on. Deepak Mehta and Roma Chatterjee (2007) explain communal riot as both a practice and a discursive condition, anchored in documentary, pictorial, ethnographic, narrative and judicial account.
Communal Politics section of the book is quite interesting as it plots several causes behind communal riots in India and the multiple patterns in which they are being politicized. It reflects on how partition related violence played a major role in plotting communal politics in the 1950s. Further, it focused on the Jabalpur riots of 1961, which was majorly gender rooted followed up by communal violence in different regions such as Calcutta, Jamshedpur, Rourkela and Ranchi. This section unravels majorly two popular notions related to Hindu Muslim spat or communal riots, that is, first, the animosity is the legacy of British rule (Upadhyay & Robinson, 2012), and second Hindu-Muslim communal conflicts were present from the very beginning in the pre-colonial period as well. In the first notion (that it is due to the policies of Britishers) majorly three elements were determining the conflict, that is, separate electorates from Morley Minto reforms were present, which recognized and legitimized religious identities, encouraged the formation of organization around these identities and incited political rivalry between them; exercise of census for counting and use of religious categories for the purpose; and the colonial historians view of the medieval period in Indian history as a period of Muslim rule marked by religious persecution of the Hindus. In the second notion, Chris Bayly (1958) argued that in the pre-colonial period as well conflicts were marked in terms of communal riots. According to him, many incidents of killing of cows, playing of Hindu religious music in front of mosques and so on were he resemblance of communal conflict in the pre-colonial period to the post-colonial, independent India patterns.
In the last section of the book articles are focused on ‘accounts and analyses of specific riots’. It covers communal riots in specification to Gujarat, Delhi, Khurja riots, Bijnor riots and instances of Hasimpura Killings. In all these riots, a systematic analysis of police as an agent of complete failure is marked and invariably the commonality of characteristics of police goes in line with: incompetence; inaction; participation in looting; indiscriminate action; excess, partisan action; inciting violence; and partisan brutality.
Further, a collective failure of state mechanism, police and other central government agencies are marked through several judicial enquiries which were set up in the post-riot period. The suffering of common people has been the wider outcome of such incidences.
To conclude, Palishikar and Pandey discuss the phenomena of ‘sustainable communalism’, in which the ascendance of right wing politics espousing Hindutva has shaken up the hitherto taken for granted status of older national and social values even as it produces paradoxical effects. According to them, this model of sustainable communalism is developed with the Gujarat riots of 2002 and is exported to other parts of the country including Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka. This is a very timely outcome to understand how the electoral victory of BJP government has placed India in the chapters of unchartered terrains of uninhibited majoritarian communalism backed by the state powers. Further, the present crisis of attacks on premier educational institutions, universities and intellectual resources can obtain its understanding from exactly how authors have tried to draw the correlation between uprising communal violence and India as a nationhood across past, present and future.