Explaining collective violence in India: Social cleavages and their consequences

Although the ideal of nonviolence is often identified with the culture of India, it has, in comparison to other countries, high rates of collective violence. This is usually related to the presence of a variety of social cleavages in India. Utilizing a catalog of verified instances of collective violence in India, three issues concerning the linkage between social divisions and collective violence are explored. First, which among the six cleavages results in the most violence: political, economic, religious, ethnic, linguistic, or caste divisions? Second, what are the trends in the various forms of violence over time? Third, the consequences of multiple cleavages in terms of enhancing or diminishing collective violence are considered by examining the locations where such violence occurs. The findings emphasize the primacy of political violence, the relationship over time of all forms of collective violence to the political climate, and how social cleavages (because of their salience and relationship to structured inequality) have generated more collective violence.