Exploring the myths of religion and violence in India

This special edition comes out of a conference held at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, on 17–19 October 2014. The Conference was called ‘Deconstructing the Myth of Violence and Religion in South Asia and Beyond’. It was timed to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the Indian army attack on the Darbar Sahib and the horrific violence of the anti-Sikh pogroms in the aftermath of the assassination of Indira Gandhi. The conference opened with a public event entitled ‘Dystopias of 1984’. This public event began with a reading by Jaspreet Singh from his novel Helium (2013), which was then followed by a discussion with the author. While the novel is fiction, it portrays a powerful depiction of the lasting impact of the horrific violence perpetuated against Sikhs in November, 1984, on the survivors and witnesses of this violence. The novel is also a poignant reminder that the perpetrators and organizers of the pogrom have yet to be held accountable for their crimes. This lack of justice is presented as having a lasting impact on the lives of the characters depicted in the novel. Jaspreet opened his discussion by asking those in the audience which of them had been in Delhi in November 1984. Approximately a quarter of the room raised their hands and the reality of the unresolved issues explored in the novel became a powerful reality as the event continued. I remain grateful to Jaspreet for his participation in the opening of the conference and for his continued participation in my intellectual understanding of the events of 1984 and on in India.

Following Jaspreet’s reading and discussion was a performance of Kultar’s Mime, a play that responds to the anti-Sikh pogroms. The play was followed by a discussion and question and answer session with the audience. As with Jaspreet’s reading and discussion, the play and following discussion brought to life the powerful and unresolved issues of the violence against Sikhs in the 1980s and on that remains a powerful reminder of the need for meaningful justice for the victims and survivors of this carnage. Finally, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the important role played by Tarnjit Kaur (Johal). Tarnjit is a member of the Ottawa Sikh community and she played a central role in helping to organize the conference. Without her role the conference would have never taken place and my eyes would never have been opened to the realities of 1984 and on. I am most grateful to her and the local Ottawa Sikh community for deeply enriching my academic and personal life.

Following the opening night events, the conference began with a series of exceptional papers all on the theme of the myth of religious violence in South Asia. The result of the conference is the current collection of essays. This collection of articles seeks to interrogate the relationships between religion, violence, secularism and nationalism through an investigation of various historical and contemporary case studies from South Asia. Much of the rationale for the proposed volume is based on Cavanaugh’s (2009) work on religion and violence, and a growing number of scholars engaged in critical theory and religion. Scholars such as Asad (1993), King (1999), Masuzawa (2005), McCutcheon (1997) and Fitzgerald (2000), to name a few, question some of the basic assumptions behind the idea of religion and violence such as the religion-secular binary. Building on the work of such scholars, Cavanaugh argues that a myth of religious violence has emerged where the nation-state monopolizes violence by presenting its violence as rational, secular and required. These state-based legitimations of violence are often constructed through the presentation of violent religious others. Such religious others are described as irrational, fanatical and illegitimately violent, and the state is required to employ its legitimate coercive force to correct such threats to its power and the supposed integrity of the nation. The claim is not that religious actors cannot be violent, but rather that ideas of religion, secularism, the nation-state and violence are employed to fulfill certain political and social ends that require further analysis. Hence, what some of the case studies in the current volume investigate are the differing configurations of power that help to construct such categories as religion, secularism and nationalism, and the means through which these constructions become linked to violence.

In the process, this collection of essays questions commonly held assumptions about the supposed relationship between violence and religion, the role of the state in controlling religious violence and the place of religion and secularism in modern political and social thought. These essays problematize many of the assumptions associated with the category of violence and religion through specific examples of state-sponsored violence and propaganda directed at specific religious and cultural minorities in India. The essays also expose other tropes related to religion and violence in South Asia particularly in relation to how such tropes are employed as justifications for state-sponsored violence in India.

The collection of essays opens with my own essay, ‘Media framing and the myth of religious violence: the othering of Sikhs in The Times of India’. This article questions the approach of the media to issues of religion and violence and uses the theories of Cavanaugh to argue that the representation of Sikhs and violence in India by The Times of India and particularly by its former editor, Girilal Jain, are attempts to legitimate the violence of the Indian state against Sikhs. How myths of religion and violence are perpetuated by media and the state are reoccurring themes in many of the essays in this volume. Simply put, a reoccurring stereotype of a fanatical religious figure who is a threat to the integrity of the Indian state is employed by the Indian state and media to justify the horrific violence of the state against Sikhs. As I argue in this essay, the danger of such stereotypes and media framing of events is that they prevent the dissemination of accurate accounts of events, issues and individuals and instead become tools of the state to mask their own violence against minority groups. A reoccurring theme in many of these articles is that the state enacts violence, but uses various means to disguise its involvement in violence or to justify its violence by generating the image of a fanatical religious threat to the nation that can only be contained with state-based violence. Such notions are often mediated to the public through the press, with disastrous results in this case.

The second article is ‘Mapping the Contours of Communal Violence in India: A Critical Engagement with Existing Scholarship and Emerging Trends’ by Anshu Saluja. An important theme in Saluja’s article is the role of the state in helping to perpetuate communal violence often for electoral gains. Indeed, the media framing discussed in the first article is related to just such a point; the government of Indira Gandhi used the media to frame Sikhs and the crisis in Punjab largely for electoral gains rather than some pursuit of justice or safety. Saluja demonstrates that communal violence requires planning and involves attempts to make the violence appear legitimate and attempts to cover up the state’s role in either permitting such violence or directly engaging in such violence. Drawing on evidence from 1984, to riots over the Babri Masjid in 1992, to anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in 2002 Saluja helps us to understand the pervasive role of the state in either actualizing violence or permitting violence. Another reoccurring theme that emerges in Saluja’s essay is the construction of the category ‘religion’ and the impact this colonial insertion into Indian thought and political life has had in constructing communal violence and its use as a political tool. Finally, as in keeping with much of the subtext of Cavanaugh’s work, communalism and the myth of religious violence have much to do with majority–minority relations and attempts by majority populations to enforce cultural assimilation through the construction of an ideal Hindu citizen who is then presented as threatened by stereotyped minority groups who are presented as a violent threat. Hence, the line between that which is secular and religious is largely an invention of the state to justify its violence against others often to gain the support of the majority.

The third article is Pashaura Singh’s ‘Deconstructing the Punjab Crisis of 1984: Deer, Hawks and Siqdārs’. Similar to the first two articles, the issue of how ideas are framed and presented is an important element of how the state attempts to justify violence against religious groups and Sikhs in particular. As with many of the themes found in Cavanaugh and other theorists who question the idea that religions create divisions and violence and that a secular state is the answer to such religious violence, Singh skillfully questions the supposed division between that which is labeled as secular and that which is labeled as religious. Such a separation is presented as both a modern and colonial division that ignores various realities. Singh also points to the complexity of issues that help to generate conflict such as economic change, conflicts within political parties and the political events such as the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi as helping to ferment violence and resistance. While media and other sources often present a single cause: irrational religious fundamentalism, Singh helps us to understand the myriad number of issues that generated the conflict in Punjab and that for many within the Sikh tradition the desire to help the suffering of innocent people be it from ‘secular’ or ‘religious’ causes is simply part of the tradition’s view on justice and the need to prevent such suffering. Hence, for many within the tradition, one’s involvement in matters of justice easily cross the imagined line between the secular and the sacred. Singh also uses Gurū Nānak’s Malār hymn to demonstrate how the state used its agents and the media to frame Sikhs as violent and against the state. In doing so, Singh provides a vivid example of the ease with which the lines between the secular and the religious can be blurred.

The fourth article is Birinder Pal Singh’s ‘Sikh Militants’ Terms of Discourse: Religion, Khalistan/Nation, and Violence’. As with the other articles in this edition, Singh skillfully demonstrates that perspective and voice are central to understanding how Sikhs framed themselves and their cause in the buildup to and aftermath of 1984. As opposed to the frames generated by the state and media in India related to religion and violence during the crisis in Punjab, the frames and discourse of Sikhs and Sikh organizations presents a very different narrative and understanding of the cause of Sikh groups and what motivated their actions. As with other articles in this collection, the distinction drawn by the nation-state between that which is religious and that which is secular is questioned by such groups as is the nature of the state they hoped to generate. Singh demonstrates that many of these Sikh groups espoused a state based on the Guru Granth Sahib that would result in a welcoming and open state that protected the poor and would employ violence only against tyranny. Such a view of Sikh groups and their vision of Khalistan is largely absent from media and state accounts of Khalistan and the importance of finding alternate voices to question the representation of Sikhs and violence that comes from Sikhs themselves is an important aspect of Singh’s work.

The fifth essay is Radhika Chopra’s ‘Seeing off the Dead: Post mortem photographs in the Darbar Sahib’. As with Singh’s article just discussed, Chopra’s essay helps us to understand that perspective and understanding the voices of Sikhs is a key element to understanding the crisis in Punjab and its enduring impact on the community. The ritual role of photographs of the dead and how they are presented differs between state photographs of captured and killed Sikhs as exhibitions of the state’s power, and Sikh photographs that present the fallen as martyrs. As with Birinder Pal Singh’s essay, context and perspective frame the events and their aftermath in very different ways in relation to state power and the impact that power has on how Sikhs are presented and viewed. As with Anshu Saluja’s article, we are reminded that the impact of the violence of the state and the way that violence is presented continues to have a lasting impact on the Sikh community.

The Sixth essay is Nissim Mannathukkaren’s ‘Communalism sans Violence: A Keralan Exceptionalism?’ Key, I think, to Mannathukkaren’s case study in Kerala is that understanding context and that in India that context can differ dramatically from one region to another is important to grasping the nature of communal violence and ultimately the role played by government forces in fermenting or dissipating the causes of supposed religious violence and communalism. While Mannathukkaren demonstrates that there is always a variety of issues that need to be addressed and political change at the national level such as Hindu nationalism do have an impact on the regional level, he also demonstrates that governments do have the capacity to limit and reduce the impact of violence through effective use of state-machinery without engaging in excessive violence against minority groups. An important element in the Kerala case is that minority groups like Muslims have meaningful representation in government without ghettoization. While communalism does exist in the state, it has not resulted in the violence found in other states in the history of India, not, I would suggest, because Keralans are somehow more tolerant than other Indians, but because often the root causes of religious violence are not religious peer say, but political tools designed to increase the vote share of a ruling party. The example Mannathukkaren illustrates is a reminder that the state engineers violence against religious groups for its own ends, but such violence need not happen in a well-run state that has the well-being of its citizens at heart.

The seventh and final essay is Rajalakshmi Nadadur Kannan’s ‘Gendered Violence and Displacement of Devadasis in the Early 20^th Century South India’. Nadadur Kannan’s article helps us to understand that state-based violence is often subtle and not easily recognized until one examines the facts and the impact of state policies designed to marginalize a group based on a discourse of national identity. Again, in this essay, we see the role of the state in perpetuating violence by employing colonial inspired distinctions between secular and religious practices and groups without an appreciation for the arbitrary nature of such distinctions or their impact on the lived traditions of many South Asians. As with many of the other articles presented in this special edition, the nature of the violence generated against Devadasis is primarily a product of state views on a homogenized citizenry based on a discourse of national identity that owes much to colonial discourses, which failed to understand or acknowledge the perspectives of practices of many Indian groups and minorities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.