Political competition, relative deprivation, and perceived threat: a research note on anti-Christian violence in India

Abstract

A preliminary subnational statistical analysis of violence against Christians in contemporary India, this article suggests that whereas the data provide very little support for simple, demographic explanations of this violence, they do more robustly support theories emphasizing the relative status of ethnic and religious minorities (vis-à-vis majorities) and the perception, among Hindus, that Christians (and other minorities) represent a threat to their numerical, political and economic strength.

Keywords:

• Hindu
• Christian
• ethnic violence
• India
• nationalism

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California and the John Templeton Foundation for a generous grant that supported this research, and Ariel Tyring for help in developing the study database.

Notes

1. We follow Varshney (2002) in using ‘ethnic’ in a broader sense; one that includes within the term any ascriptive grouping (linguistic, religious, tribal, caste, racial, etc.).

2. Given the chronological distance of our census data (2001) from our data on attacks against Christians (2007–8), we examine the correlation between percentage of the population aged seven to seventeen in 2001 and incidents of violence in 2007–8.

3. We initially investigated indicators of BJP political power in addition to measures of NDA political power. These analyses revealed the same pattern of associations with violence against Christians (and they are available upon request to the authors). However, the correlations were stronger and more consistently significant when measures were specific to the NDA.

4. Indian censuses do not directly record data on the numbers or proportions of various castes, so the inverse of the SC population becomes the best possible indicator of the size of the middle- and upper-caste Hindu population.